Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Rotate the Wrench

Next, let’s take a look at Ramos’ entry, Rotate the Wrench!

Ramos’ entry was,, it needs to be said, huge. Almost 30 pages of stuff! A way to introduce trains and tracks into your game, a new Magical Song, a new Enchantment, and even rules for fighting on (and with) trains!

True to form, when asked for their thoughts, Ramos had a lot to contribute. So rather than gush about their entry (which was amazing, and you should go read it), I’m just gonna let them take it from here:

Steam was a very convenient theme for me because two of my players wanted to play smart, mechanics oriented characters. With my setting already involving the start of an industrial revolution in Hyrule, trains becoming a common form of transportation, and guardians running about, it made a lot of sense. And really, what could be cooler than having your own car? So I started making a car and then thought, you know the single most underused but coolest item in all of Zelda is? The Spinner. But then I realize, this is a train setting, I should probably also include a train for when that invariably comes up in the campaign. Then I thought, yeah, but boats are common too. And it came to mind, well, there are a few flying constructs in the Zelda series.

I drew the line at flying machines, mostly due to the one month time limit. Given infinite time, my projects have a tendency to bloat and spiral out of control, so I’m grateful that this at least let me focus down to something reasonable, even if four different vehicles was a bit much.

I started with the Master Cycle from the book as a base and decided that just having a vehicle wasn’t particularly cool. Vehicles are essentially just horses you can park and the cool thing about horses in Reclaim the Wild is that they are companions that grow, gain stats, and even pick up techniques, spells, or feats. Naturally, this meant vehicles had to be able to grow as well. It makes sense, if you’re engineering yourself a car, you would probably be interested in refining it. And how best to do that? The single coolest way to present upgrades ever devised in video games: trees.

Upgrade trees are essentially a series of upgrades required by other upgrades. It gives you this cool feeling of building towards something rather than just steadily getting better. Reclaim the Wild also has trees, sort of, though they aren’t visually presented as such. For example, the Spin Attack is a requirement for Great Spin, which is a requirement for Hurricane Spin. That’s more of a single branch than a tree, but it gives the same idea where you are working towards a pinnacle, which is really cool. Super cool.

So here’s my one issue I ran into: Making things cool doesn’t necessarily mean it meshes well with the rest of the system. Making things into trees forces me to presume a lot about how a campaign will develop and a lot of the vehicles don’t really get going until rank 3, which for a lot of people, might be where the game ends. My group is looking to be going for quite a while but Reclaim the Wild benefits from steady, linear developments. Not to mention, some of the vehicles ended up complicated for the sake of it. My suggestion, if you want to use my submission, is to use it if you plan on going to rank 5. That gives sufficient time for the vehicles to really shine.

If I were to tackle this idea again, I would probably start with a weaker Master Cycle and then tie materials into upping very basic stats directly like durability and movement. From there, a laundry list of upgrades that look a lot like player feats could be implemented and everything could be limited by a player’s Mechanics attribute. That might still sound a lot like the trees I made but the difference is that it lets a vehicle expand more naturally to fit the needs of the party and also be a lot easier for other people to homebrew further rather than messing around with finicky trees. Basically, my advice is, cool is cool but nothing overrides simplicity when it comes to implementing new ideas into a tabletop setting.

If you wanna get on track to include epic train battles in your campaign, go check out Ramos’ Rotate the Wrench supplement!