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!