Monthly Archives: May 2023

30 May

Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Fight and Flight

Today we will look at Clapforthunder’s entry, Fight and Flight!

Clapforthunder combines both the theme of this year’s Homebrew Jam with the joy of battle. This homebrew provides new ways of flying, as well as new rules for holding fights up in the sky and feats, spells, and techniques that can improve fights in the sky, or just about anywhere.

Here are Clapforthunder’s thoughts:

When I was first looking at this system years ago one thing that initially struck me was how it balances flying. Seeing the difference in flying capabilities between Rito and Fairies, for example, made so much sense to me! Then once I saw the theme “Ever Upwards” I knew that I had to do something to incorporate it. What about putting together a set of rules that gave all players a chance to fly and resolve encounters in the sky?

It was fun to put together the various tools for flight. I wanted to have a good option for a variety of character builds and encourage this kind of tactical raising and lowering of altitude via updrafts and gliding during combat. Definitely my favorite option has to be the Cucco. Fond memories of their use in Ocarina of Time make me really want to let a tank character use one and go crazy with their passive distraction bonus. I started working on the Stance Master content during that same month so I thought why not throw it into the mix? It’s based off of one of my characters, a Twili/Gerudo named Alo, and I really enjoyed trying to express the forms of fighting that I envision him eventually mastering.

All in all, my first Homebrew Jam was an awesome experience. I want to express my appreciation to everyone who works hard on maintaining this awesome system, it’s really special.

If you want to try out these new rules and options, check out Clapforthunder’s Fight and Flight!

22 May

Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Races of the Sky Era

Today we will take a look at JimiboyGM’s entry, Races of the Sky Era!

JimiboyGM’s entry is a fairly simple, but useful one, providing 4 new races for players and GMs to use, from Skyward Sword!

Here are JimiboyGM’s thoughts:

When I saw that the theme was “Ever Upwards” my mind immediately went to Skyward Sword, and since the rules already had a template for making custom races I thought I’d throw together the stats for the Kikwi, Mogma, Parella, and the Ancient Robot. I’m honestly suprised it hadn’t been done before!

I did have a little more trouble than expected though. Since these races had only appeared in one game, it was a bit of a struggle to give them abilities that fit them. I also struggled to fill the lore section with something that wasn’t a copy-paste of the zelda wiki, or personal headcanon stuff.

If I ever get a second pass at these, (which I may do when I figure out how to add to the wiki), I’d give them all a bit of a buff in the form of a fourth ability, and I’d get round to finishing the lore section.

If you want to try out these four races, go check out JimiboyGM’s Races of the Sky Era!

16 May

Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Release the Worthy

Today we will take a look at BucketGod’s entry, Release the Worthy!

At a whopping 61 pages, BucketGod’s adventure is one of the largest entries in this Jam. Starting from a prison basement, this adventure lives up to the theme of “Ever Upwards” by bringing the players up both out of the basement, but also from commoners into heroes!

BucketGod provided quite a bit of thoughts when asked about his work:

When I saw the theme of the jam, “Ever Upwards”, my first thought was a tower of challenges for heroes to face, with each floor being anything from a small room to a simulated world so that they would have a good amount of different types of challenges to overcome: Combat, puzzles, and social challenges, and even one of my favorite features of RtW, the wild survival elements. It was meant to be very in the vein of Infinity Train or a Rogue-like game.

Unfortunately that was a few people’s first thought, so I scrapped it XD.

That’s when I remembered “Funnel Adventures”, one-shots meant to serve as combination character-creation/introductory adventure/Russian roulette for players where they build multiple randomized characters, throw them against the wall, and see who lives. So, I created Release the Worthy!

The first element I worked on was the randomized character creation. In games like Dungeons & Dragons there’s no element of character creation that you can’t resolve with a random number generator and some default rules, but Reclaim the Wild’s character creation is more free-form, so I had to give it some thought.

I had a lot of fun coming up with all of the professions and their gear. I think my favorite is Old Wo/Man though.

The hardest part to randomize though, was the physical descriptors. I was second guessing myself at every turn over what made sense! And of course, the inherent challenge, of trying to only use d6s, as is the spirit of the system. (A challenge I halfway gave up on with traits, as I included the “Sane” roll table that used d8s.)

And then I made the adventure! I won’t speak of it at length, because it’s not meant to be spoiled to prospective players, and because this blurb is becoming novel-esque, but I think every GM will understand me when I say the words “Dear God, why am I doing this?” went through my head during writing.

If you want to try out a funnel adventure to test the heroism of common folk, go check out BucketGod’s Release the Worthy adventure!