Join the 5th Annual Wild Homebrew Jam!

Another year has come, and almost gone.

And now it’s time for the fifth annual Wild Homebrew Jam!

Tell Me More!

Every year in November, we hold a month-long Homebrew Jam. We invite our whole community to come up with new additions for the system, and then the community votes on their favorites. In the past, we’ve seen a wide array of clever new content: equipment, monsters, systems, adventures, and dozens more besides. You can check out last year’s entrants and winners here, if you’d like to see some great examples.

To keep things fair and interesting, we limit the Jam to just the month of November. Whatever it is you come up with, you must have done all the work, from start to finish, in November. We also offer an optional theme up, to help inspire our community.

We also request that your Homebrew must be Safe for Work, wholly original, and entirely made by you (or you and your partners).

And of course, as per tradition, our community will then vote on their favorite entries. The winners of this vote will have their homebrew featured in articles on the website, and will see their homebrew specially flagged on the wiki for posterity! (They’ll also receive a Nintendo eShop gift card, as a little token of our appreciation.)

See below the cut for the full rules and details, and more information about this year’s theme!

Rules

Submitting Homebrew

Submissions are open from November 1st to November 30th. We’ll announce the winners no later than December 15th on the main Reclaim the Wild website.

Submissions are made in the #jam-submissions channel of the Reclaim the Wild Discord server. The homebrewed content can be provided in any medium, be it a Discord Message, a GitHub Wiki submission, a Google Drive file, or even a YouTube video if you’re crazy enough. The only rule related to your submission is that you must have begun working on it in November. (The idea can be something you had before, but as a an agreement between ladies, gentlemen, and scholars of all stripes, please don’t use homebrew content you had begun work on before the jam. Check the Fine Print section for exceptions.)

Theme

This year, we’ll continue using an optional theme. It’s our hope that providing this theme will help kickstart your creativity and provide some inspiration.

This year’s optional theme is… PARALOGUE.

“Paralogue” technically just means “a story that happens alongside the main story” – like how a prologue is before the story, or an epilogue is after the story.

In game terms you’d most likely know it from Fire Emblem, which uses the term for optional missions that don’t directly impact the main plot. Effectively, you can think of them as a broader container for side-content: side quests, slice of life excursions, semi-canonical adventures that aren’t ever mentioned again, and even full on “gaiden” adventures would all fall under that umbrella.

Reclaim the Wild offers lots of opportunities for paralogues, such as…

When the heroes decide to go hunting for materials, and stumble into a short sidequest that helps them accomplish that goal above and beyond just doing surveying and harvesting rolls.
Exploring a town and getting involved in the local culinary scene, discovering new recipes or even whole new traits for dishes.
Deciding to chase after a shooting star, putting their journey on hold while they try to nab the star fragment before it disappears.

All of the above would qualify as fitting the theme of “PARALOGUE”.

Remember, the theme is optional. Your Homebrew entry is not required to fit this theme at all. However, all Homebrew entries that fit the theme will be eligible for an additional prize this year – the “Best Filler Episode of the Anime” award!

Feedback & Collaboration

An important part of making homebrewed content is getting feedback on it, and collaborating on it with other community members. And we want to encourage that in the Wild Homebrew Jam! However, we also want it to be fair, and not impact the judging of submitted homebrew.

We encourage you to request feedback and iteration on your homebrew content, in our #resource-revue and #resource-discussion Discord channels. It’s a good way to make your homebrew stronger! As part of that, you may also obtain feedback from Developers and Moderators. We’ll do our best to provide good feedback, but Developers and Moderators won’t be collaborating with you, or doing significant work on your homebrew. Their feedback is available to everyone as a resource.

When submitting, please confirm if you decided to use the theme or not.

You can submit content as a team or group, but please keep in mind that the prizes won’t be multiplied by the number of individuals who worked on the submission.

Voting

Voting will take place from December 1st through December 10th.

During the voting phase, every homebrew will be added (by moderators or developers) to the new Homebrew Wiki, in their own “Homebrew Jam Submissions” category, and each of them will be linked in a #jam-votes channel on the Discord server. Members of the Discord server will be able to vote for their favorite Homebrews through a special “upvote” emote added for the occasion. Users can vote for as many homebrews as they want.

(Please do not use sock puppet accounts, vote-brigading from other servers, or other unscrupulous activities to manipulate the votes – the moderators and developers reserve the right to remove submissions from prize consideration and/or from the wiki if we detect these behaviors, or other negative behavior, at our sole discretion.)

You’re welcome to make multiple submissions throughout the month, but any individual community member will only win a single prize. If you would win multiple prizes, we’ll gladly celebrate your accomplishments, but whatever other prizes you would’ve won will instead go to those next in line.

Prizes

We’ll be providing the following prizes for some of the most impressive, coolest, and most fun homebrew content submitted during the Wild Homebrew Jam!

First, every homebrew will receive a “Homebrew Jam” tag for their entry on the Wiki, and every homebrewer will receive a “Homebrew Jam Participant” role on our Discord.
The top three homebrew (as measured by Discord vote count) will receive a $20 Nintendo eShop gift card code. They will also receive a “Homebrew Jam Winner” label on the Wiki.
The top-rated new adventure will be labeled as a “Wild Adventure” on the wiki, and receive a $20 Nintendo eShop gift card code as well.
One homebrew (that was not one of the top three voted) will be labeled “Developer’s Choice,” as chosen by Elemental Knight, Meï, and Milly. This Developer’s Choice homebrew will receive a $20 Nintendo eShop gift card code, and a “Developer’s Choice” label on the Wiki.
Last, but not least, we will also reward the “Best Filler Episode of the Anime” entry! It might not have been a community favorite, it might not even be strictly speaking the ‘best’ themed homebrew submitted, but it sure was the most thematic! This Homebrew, too, will receive a $20 Nintendo eShop gift card code, and a “Best Filler” label on the Wiki.

Finally, the winning homebrew entries will be featured on the main website at some point after the announcement of the winners.

The Fine Print

In the event that an entry is eligible for multiple awards – for instance, if a new adventure is also the top-rated entry – then the developers will choose one award to give the lucky entry, at their discretion, and the other award(s) will be given to the next-most-eligible entry.

In the event of a tie vote, the developers may or may not decide to provide any or all of the tied entrants equal prizes, at their discretion.

Winners may instead opt for a different gift card, e.g. Amazon, Sony, XBox, etc.; or we can donate the money to a recognized charity of your choice, e.g. the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, etc.. Values provided are USD.

As writing up the highlight articles requires significant additional work on the part of the developers – including interviewing the winners, when possible! – we cannot guarantee exactly when these articles will go live. If we find it difficult or impossible to complete a highlight article (IE if the author disappears and cannot be interviewed) then that article may be delayed indefinitely.

The Developers of Reclaim the Wild and its Discord community Moderators are not eligible for these prizes, excepting the “Homebrew Jam” tag for their homebrew entries on the Wiki.

You can use non-jam materials in your jam entries if you have permission from and credit the original creator (if it is not you) and the non-jam materials are suitably transformed from their original states.

As an example, if you created a homebrew Zonai race before the Jam started, you can’t just make a list of races (and other character options) and include the Zonai in the list… not even if you substantially changed the Zonai’s racial traits from the first drafts, nor if you added in Zonai-only feats, techniques, or spells in addition to the Zonai race entry. However, if you create a Zonai sample Hero, NPC, or a Monster (enemy), that would be acceptable. Doubly so if the Hero/NPC/Monster were to be used in an adventure!

In addition, you all are free to use anything from the books, as well as any articles written by the developers (such as EK and myself) without needing to ask for permission. Just include a link to the relevant article (if any), and make sure to suitably transform the materials:

create new weapon styles using keywords;
stat up NPCs with iconic gear and new spells and techniques;
have shopkeepers sell new bomb types and personalized tools;
create an adventure with inklings, achemen, bob-ombs, ARMS fighters, loftwings, etc.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the Discord.

Finally, this Jam starts at the earliest time it is November 1 in the world (UTC+14), and will end when it is December 1 everywhere in the world (UTC-12).