Elemental Knight - The Legend of Zelda: Reclaim the Wild

21 Jan

Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Reclaim Hyrule

Next in our series featuring the winners of the Wild Homebrew Jam is SirAston the Goron Bard’s new ruleset, “Reclaim Hyrule“!

While many Zelda games are focused around individual Heroes dueling monsters in forgotten dungeons, that isn’t always the case. Some games, like Hyrule Warriors, feature Heroes battling amidst massive armies; other games feature large army-vs.-army bouts in their backstories, or as a dramatic backdrop for important events.

To help your group incorporate that kind of experience into their game, SirAston created the Reclaim Hyrule ruleset. These rules serve to put Heroes into the fray of massive battles, where Commanders and their lesser lieutenants help direct their armies against one another. Such battles are won or lost by more than just the dint of any one Hero’s sword-arm – the Commander’s own tactical acumen and knowledge are what really stand between success or surrender.

Speaking with SirAston, he was able to share the source of his inspiration for this set of large-scale combat rules.

For gameplay inspiration, I mainly looked at the 4th Edition of Legend of the Five Rings and Monsterpunk. However, my true inspiration would probably be from a very unlikely source: The first edition of West End Games’ Star Wars RPG. It was a gift from my brother at an early age, and pretty much my introduction to the world of tabletop RPGs even though I didn’t realize it at the time, I haven’t really heard of both D&D and The Dark Eye at that time (note: TDE was and still is one of the most well-known systems in Germany, comparable to D&D’s popularity in the USA).

While I remember few things about Star Wars RPG, something always stuck with me since then: The advice to treat large-scale battles as a backdrop for the player characters, giving them opportunities to shine. That philosophy permeates through all of Reclaim Hyrule, letting player characters have a tangible effect via Acts of Heroism while supported by allies whose Ally Abilities will help, but not steal the spotlight.

I hope that Reclaim Hyrule will find use in some groups and that it will enrich their experience. If that happens, then my work has fully paid off.

To start including large-scale conflicts in your Reclaim the Wild game, check out SirAston’s rules here!

14 Jan

Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Growing Vines Dungeon

Next in our series featuring the winners of the Wild Homebrew Jam is Dethnite007’s “Growing Vines Dungeon“!

As mentioned in the previous winner’s article, we always wanted Reclaim the Wild to have some easily-accessible homebrew modules. Dethnite007’s module looks to serve that purpose by giving us a “puzzle-box” dungeon – that is, a dungeon much like one might find in a typical Zelda title.

Dethnite’s module is unique in that it reimagines a location we know from the original game, back in the time following the first Calamity. As a proper Zelda Dungeon, it offers puzzles both subtle (growing and burning vines to access new areas of the dungeon) and obvious (such as a classic sliding block puzzle). The variety of puzzles involved is solid, and should appeal to different types of problem-solving players – though of course, as this is a tabletop game, don’t be surprised if your players come up with some truly ‘out of the box’ solutions!

Speaking with Dethnite, they had this to share:

Honestly I just did this to see how hard it actually is to make a Zelda style puzzle box. I guess the process was just a lot of trial and error to make the player pathing connect properly while there still being a reason to shift the dungeon layout.

If there’s anything I learned from this, it’s that a lot of time goes into making the dungeons we play in Legend of Zelda games and having more than one Link in the dungeon really does break the whole thing, as my players have taught me. Of course, now that I’ve built a rudimentary version of one, I’m gonna have to go bigger and better for my players next time.

And they relayed this, from the adventure’s artist, StarNightGazer:

It was fun imagining a big baddie for players to go against at the end of their trial. Zelda bosses are memorable and I wanted to create one just like them and bring it to life as best as I could and keep a theme to its respective dungeon.

If you’d like to put your players’ wits to the test, remember to check out the Growing Vines dungeon here.

07 Jan

Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Adventure: Horon Disaster

First in our feature of the Wild Homebrew Jam winners is Viyer’s “Adventure: Horon Disaster“!

From the beginning, we wanted Reclaim the Wild to have a proper adventure module. Being able to grab a quest and just run it is a huge boon for a system, and can help newcomers (both GM and player alike) better understand how to properly play and have fun.

So imagine our surprise and delight when we saw adventure modules being submitted for the Wild Homebrew Jam! Viyer’s Adventure: Horon Disaster is a breezy read, and is a suitable adventure for Heroes just beginning on their journey, featuring foes and obstacles that novice players and their novice Heroes.

Part of what makes this adventure so easy to read through is the artwork by Dormin, giving the module’s foes a lovely artistic spotlight. Between that, and the maps that Viyers created, the module has a beautiful, professional look to it.

Speaking with Viyers, they had this to say: I just wanted to try and make a starting adventure than any group could pick and play to discover the system, with a little bit of all the aspects I consider most important to the hobby. A bit of roleplay, a bit of combat and a tiny pseudo dungeon so they would get a general taste of how Reclaim the Wild function.

So if you’d like to take that taste and jump right into playing, remember to check out the module here!

01 Jan

Another Year Later

Reclaim the Wild has now been out for two years! Holy cow. And with a new year dawning, it’s a good time to look back and reflect on what’s happened in the past year.

This year, we dramatically scaled back our update pace, but increased the sheer number of changes per update. While 2019 saw more than half a dozen revisions of the core rulebook, 2020 saw only two. However, that included the truly massive Version 2.00, and the still-surprisingly-huge 2.01. Each of those updates saw the rules get tweaked and refined in a wide variety of ways, with changes ranging from small typos to significant reworkings. There were so many changes, we had to worry about how many we could list on a single page of the Core Rulebook!

With fewer new versions of the rulebooks, you’d think our download numbers would decline. That hasn’t really been the case, though! It’s been good to see that the PDFs of the rules have been downloaded at least another 10,000 or so times – again, not including people sending the books to one another privately, or downloads from the GDocs mirror.

Last year at this time, I had said that we might not publish as many articles as we’d done in 2019. We did cut back some, but not as much as I had thought we would’ve. On average, we were still able to put out almost two articles a month! Perhaps 2021 will see us slow down some more… or perhaps not. (After all, I was wrong about that last year.)

A lot of the new Homebrew Additions were driven by Milly, who really stepped up to the task of keeping the game’s development moving forward. He collated the feedback and questions people had, and his encouragement helped keep me engaged and working on improving the system. Sometimes that meant batting an idea back and forth with him over many hours; sometimes it just meant one of us having a good idea, and the other nodding in agreement. It’s thanks to him, and to everyone’s feedback, that we have a proper Version 2 of the system.

I also have the pleasure of seeing him interact with the community in the Discord chat, answering rules questions alongside other long-time community members. The Discord has grown even stronger and more vibrant than before, as highlighted by our recent Wild Homebrew Jam. It really is a treat to see y’all in there, talking about the game, sharing stories about your campaigns, posting memes, and enjoying each other’s company.

Speaking of the Homebrew Jam, it was incredible to see how many people participated, and it was a joy to read through all the submitted homebrew. Maybe we’ll do it again this year? Let us know what you think of us holding another Jam, or if there are other community events you might like to see occur.

2020 has truly been the longest and craziest year we’ve ever faced. I sincerely hope 2021 treats everyone better. But I can rest easy, knowing that this little corner of the internet is a welcoming place for people who love The Legend of Zelda, and want to have their own adventures in that world.

15 Dec

Announcing the Winners of the Wild Homebrew Jam!

The votes have been tabulated, and the community has spoken. We have our winners!

Before we get to that, though, I want to thank the community as a whole. You treated the task of reading and voting on the homebrew submissions as a job with great responsibility, and we were all glad to see that it wasn’t simply a contest of “whichever entry is shiniest”.

I also want to thank the community members who submitted homebrew for the Wild Homebrew Jam. Speaking personally, it was a pleasure to read through them all – to see what this game has inspired you to make, and how excited you all were to participate.

There were 17 entries in total – when I was worried we might not get enough to give out all of the prizes!

To see who won, and to get links to all of the homebrew entries, check out below!