Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Heroes Beyond the Cosmos
Today, we’ll take a look at Karma Kawsmos’ winning entry, Heroes Beyond the Cosmos.
Karma’s colossal collection of cool character components was a considerable clutch of content to contribute to the contest. Not only does it include Feats for every Race in the Core Rulebook, but it introduces a whole new kind of Feat – the Origin Feat. It’s an idea so good, I wish I’d thought of it back when first designing Reclaim the Wild. It definitely caught the eye of our community, as well!
With how much they added to the game with their expansion, it’s no surprise that Karma had a lot to say about the Feats they made, and the design process they went through. I’ll let them take it from here:
I’d been thinking of making an expansion like this for a while, so when I saw the homebrew jam I thought it would be a good motivation to finally sit down and write down the ideas I had. When it comes to inspiration… I can’t really name anything specifically in particular as an inspiration, although I’m sure I probably subconsciously remembered and ripped some ideas from one thing or another, since there’s so many in the expansion.
When it came to the expansion itself, there were a few guidelines in my head for coming up with new Feats. “It should introduce a new playstyle, or expand an existing one”, “it should give players more options, either in or out of battle”, and lastly and what I think was most important to me and probably the big drive for making this entire expansion to begin with, “it should help make each player feel like they’re more unique”. One thing, though, that was less a guideline and more a “creative direction”, I wanted to have Feats be tied to a big variety of Traits. Once I began really filling out and thinking of Feats I was thinking “What Traits have I not used yet and aren’t used much in the base Feat list”? That drove me to come up with Feats that would sound appropriate for having that Trait was a requirement. From my experience, new players tended to gravitate towards the obvious big important stats and MAYBE some crafting or scavenging or “flavor” traits, so having more stuff that might make them consider not “dumping” them was a goal of mine.
I’d like to think the “General Feats” section of the expansion falls into 2 categories, either giving a player a sort of “battle style”, gimmick, or benefit for playing in a certain way, and then Feats that provide a passive bonus to the hero as a reward for raising a Trait that wouldn’t typically be used in battle or every session.
When it comes to the Racial Feats (as an aside, personally some of my favorite Feats from the expansion are in there), the goal was to try to have a player’s race selection matter a bit more and give each Race their own cool gimmicks and unique toys that a player can grab if they want to. I didn’t want the Feats themselves to make players think that race would be “locked” to a specific playstyle, though, so I avoided forcing people to play a specific way with that Race and also made the costs pretty cheap investment wise. Strong, unique, but general enough that a player could use them in a variety of playstyles, or would enhance what was already available to that Race. A difficult guideline but I think I made it work. I’m really proud of even coming up with Feats for the “Secondary” races, too.
Origin Feats. The big new feature of the expansion. Honestly, I had way more ideas for possible origins. If I wanted to I probably could have just made the whole expansion focused on them. I wanted to have general/racial feats though, and Origin Feats were harder to really figure out. It’s one thing to come up with an “Origin” but coming up with an interesting ability or change to the character to fit that Origin is a big brainstorm that I ended up running out of time for! But yes, the idea was to tie a hero’s background further into their playstyle. And I mean really intertwine it so it would always be a part of their character, further than just their starting stats. They might be the only Feats that have direct “drawbacks”, to balance out how most of them have pretty notable changes to how a normal hero interacts with the rules of the game, while being very cheap.
Realistically I don’t know how many people will actually use my expansion, but in the end my goal was to give more options, and I think I succeeded (almost 70 Feats!), so I hope these options are fun enough to give people more ideas for more heroes for this game.
If you’d like to power up your Heroes with a huge collection of custom Feats, check out Karma Kawsmos’ Heroes Beyond the Cosmos!