Elemental Knight - The Legend of Zelda: Reclaim the Wild

31 Oct

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!

Join the 4th Annual Wild Homebrew Jam!

It’s been a crazy, busy year, hasn’t it? Hard to believe it’s almost over. But, wait. That means…

Yes, once again, it’s now time for our fourth 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!

Announcing the Winners of the 3rd Annual Homebrew Jam!

We’ve counted the votes. We’ve read all the entries. And now, it’s time to reveal the winners!

Milly and I had a blast reading them all. It warms my heart to see how much people enjoy working in this system’s framework, expanding its systems and bringing in new challenges, adventures, and rewards. We had more entries this year than in any other year previously, a record twenty entries! And a whole lot of them were built to match this year’s theme, Ever Upwards.

Catch the final tallies down below!

Announcing a Spanish Translation / Anunciando una traducción al español

¡Hola y bienvenidos, héroes españoles!

The Reclaim the Wild community has people from all walks of life, and from many corners of the world. Every so often, we get asked if we’d be okay with volunteers translating the system into their native language, and we almost always say “yes” – we’d love to see the game be picked up and played by people all over the world! We even have channels in the Discord server set aside for some of these translation efforts.

Today, we’re glad to announce the first completely translated rulebook – a Spanish version of the Core Rulebook! This is thanks to Milena and their gaming group, with some advice from longtime community member BurningAdri.

Please note that this is a beta translation. If you find anything difficult to understand – particularly if you’re a native Spanish speaker, and not previously familiar with TTRPGs! – please jump into out Discord channel, and share your concerns and feedback. Also, as this is a volunteer effort, note that further updates may take a while, particularly after any new version of the Core Rulebook comes out.

This beta Spanish version of the Core Rulebook has been uploaded to the same folder with the existing English version. However, you can also download them directly from here or here.

21 Apr

Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Pacci’s Flipbook

Due to a messaging snafu, I ended up totally skipping over the article celebrating idkwhatever’s winning Homebrew Jam contest entry! So let’s take a moment to celebrate it now – and as befits a topsy-turvy mixup, their “Developer’s Choice”-award-winning entry is all about playing around with the ideas and ideals of that ever-enjoyable Spell, Pacci’s Flip!

We selected these spells for our Developer’s Choice award for two big reasons: they’re fun, they’re well-designed, and they’re focused. idk was able to really explore the design space that the original Pacci’s Flip spell provided, and the spells are more than just funny jokes – they’re potent, useful additions to any mage’s arsenal, while also not overshadowing existing Spells and Techniques.

This unit came from two thoughts that come very naturally to those inclined to DMing, I feel: the urge to overthink things and to make serious moments out of dumb jokes. After days of considering how to make trains as I originally planned and getting discouraged, a conversation over a potential future April Fools article grew into this – what if there was an expansion, and thus additional uses, to the Pacci’s Flip spell? Work at referencing the canon books to ensure balance, and bouncing plenty of ideas off of friends, and here we have the humble little trio of spells before you.

I always love creative use of abilities, and it’s one of my favourite parts of tabletop gaming in general. I’ve mentioned several times of when I managed to use Calm Emotions as a finishing blow on an enemy berserker in Pathfinder, or a ton of great mileage out of Prestidigitation. Introducing and encouraging spells with creative uses feels right to me, and this felt like a fantastic place to start.

In terms of specific inspirations, I have to admit that the moves are lifted a fair bit from a webcomic where a character later gains a very similar ability to flip objects (vagueness entirely intentional to avoid spoilers). It gets a similar treatment as a useless power as I allude to in the fluff, and it becomes far more useful once she learns to use it creatively. Add in the “hole-to-trampoline” from Minish Cap that was absent from the official version, and we have our power set.

Hopefully this can introduce some interesting options into your games, and have fun with a good cathartic flip-out~

If you’d like to flip the script and add idkwhatever’s parcel of Pacci procurements to your game, you can check them out here!