Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Rail the Wild

Finally, we take a look at the winner of this year’s theme, “Steam” – Viyers’ Rail the Wild expansion.

When we introduced the concept of an optional theme to this year’s Homebrew Jam, we weren’t entirely sure how the community would approach it. We wanted to leave it open to interpretation, so that there wasn’t just one obvious way to tie that theme into Reclaim the Wild‘s Zelda-style gameplay. However, in choosing “Steam” as this year’s theme, we knew for sure that at least one person would take that idea, and run straight to Spirit Tracks with it – and Viyers’ expansion delivers on that like a freight train full of goodies.

His take on the Lokomo is interesting and unique, the first time we’ve seen a race so heavily focused on a personal device. For a race whose representatives are a nearly-forgotten set of plot dumps and key-item giveaways, Viyers has done a heck of a job realizing them as a people that one might want to play as, or whose culture and methods would be fun to explore in a game.

His take on Phantoms is pretty unique, too – a playable version of what has, so far, only been seen in Reclaim as an optional spell presented on this blog some time ago. Inexhaustible, unstoppable, heavily armored, and living a kind of cursed existence, Phantom characters can provide not only combat power, but a powerful sense of ennui for the player willing to plumb those depths.

And finally, he rounds out the package with a full set of rules for introducing trains and tracks into your game world. Imagine founding multiple towns with Rebuild, and then traveling from one town to the next on your own custom steam engine and its many cars! You could build a whole campaign solely around that idea – it’d be like Supertrain, but good.

Speaking with Viyers, he had this to share about how he approached the challenge of introducing so much of Spirit Tracks into Reclaim the Wild:

The goal was to create a complete campaign setting for Spirit Track. While I like a lot of the game’s concepts, I think they are too shallow to be really usable in a RtW campaign. I started with the train system and most iconic races of the settings.

I wanted the train to become somewhat of a moving city, that would provide players with all the facilities they could need at a higher level. I think this should more of a reason to invest so much resources in it. A lot of the train cars are just modified buildings from Rebuild the Wild to reflect that.

The Lokomos were a challenge. We only have very few examples of the race ingame and Byrne is very different from the others, who in turn are all completely identical. So I attempted to give them a stronger identity as a technology-advanced race, drawing inspiration from both the Artificer class from other games and the Mechanic from Starfinder.

I hope I get to finally work on the world map and dungeons in the near future!

If you wanna give your next Reclaim campaign a big dose of steam power, check out Viyers’ Rail the Wild expansion!