October, 2025 - The Legend of Zelda: Reclaim the Wild

Join the 6th Annual Wild Homebrew Jam!

Robbie, with Paper Mario's head pasted over it - signaling the start of a Homebrew Jam. — *Artist: Nintendo* */ Meï*

It’s time for the sixth annual Wild Homebrew Jam! This year, we- wait, something doesn’t seem quite right…

This Year’s Partner

This year, we’re doing something different: we’re partnering with another video game-based, fan-made TTRPG! Specifically, we’re working with Paper Story, a TTRPG based all around the Paper Mario series. They’ll be doing a Homebrew Jam of their own, too – based on Zelda!

In the spirit of collaboration, we encourage our community to check out Paper Story for inspiration and ideas. We also encourage you to check out their community via their Discord; maybe you can talk about the finer points of your homebrew idea with some folks who are more knowledgeable and experienced in the ways of the plumber, and help them out with the finer (or more ridiculous) points of Zelda lore.

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!

Homebrew Jam Winner: Defend the Tower

BucketGod’s entry is an ambitious one, adding in a subsystem based on the tower defense genre of video games. It builds upon some of the groundwork laid by Rebuild the Wild, with an expansion of well-thought out mechanics that allow ordinary people to take the spotlight while the Heroes are away.

Here are BucketGod’s thoughts:

So this year was kind of rough for me, which makes me that much more bewildered and excited that I won first place!

‘Defend the Tower’ was very much the result of my own experiences GMing this game. My group had a great deal of fondness for the NPCs I made, but with only so many Companions to carry around – and only so much Companions can do – there just wasn’t that much screentime to let NPCs that weren’t critical in the moment shine. (And it definitely doesn’t help that I lost some track of how many people they had with them at some points…)

Similarly, when they got to using Rebuild rules to make a little base for themselves, I tried my best to be lenient with space and time to let the process feel good, but there just wasn’t that much checking in done. It was all clerical.

So from trying to meet those needs, was the idea that eventually became Defend the Tower formed!

I didn’t get to put in as much fluff as I had wanted, but I hope this gives some table out there that loves to pick up stray characters off the street as much as mine did some cool moments for their off-sessions.

If you want to try out this new system, go check out BucketGod’s Defend the Tower!