Category Archives: Homebrew Jam

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!

Finally, we take a look at the winner of this year’s theme, “Steam” – Viyers’ Rail the Wild expansion.

When we introduced the concept of an optional theme to this year’s Homebrew Jam, we weren’t entirely sure how the community would approach it. We wanted to leave it open to interpretation, so that there wasn’t just one obvious way to tie that theme into Reclaim the Wild‘s Zelda-style gameplay. However, in choosing “Steam” as this year’s theme, we knew for sure that at least one person would take that idea, and run straight to Spirit Tracks with it – and Viyers’ expansion delivers on that like a freight train full of goodies.

His take on the Lokomo is interesting and unique, the first time we’ve seen a race so heavily focused on a personal device. For a race whose representatives are a nearly-forgotten set of plot dumps and key-item giveaways, Viyers has done a heck of a job realizing them as a people that one might want to play as, or whose culture and methods would be fun to explore in a game.

His take on Phantoms is pretty unique, too – a playable version of what has, so far, only been seen in Reclaim as an optional spell presented on this blog some time ago. Inexhaustible, unstoppable, heavily armored, and living a kind of cursed existence, Phantom characters can provide not only combat power, but a powerful sense of ennui for the player willing to plumb those depths.

And finally, he rounds out the package with a full set of rules for introducing trains and tracks into your game world. Imagine founding multiple towns with Rebuild, and then traveling from one town to the next on your own custom steam engine and its many cars! You could build a whole campaign solely around that idea – it’d be like Supertrain, but good.

Speaking with Viyers, he had this to share about how he approached the challenge of introducing so much of Spirit Tracks into Reclaim the Wild:

The goal was to create a complete campaign setting for Spirit Track. While I like a lot of the game’s concepts, I think they are too shallow to be really usable in a RtW campaign. I started with the train system and most iconic races of the settings.

I wanted the train to become somewhat of a moving city, that would provide players with all the facilities they could need at a higher level. I think this should more of a reason to invest so much resources in it. A lot of the train cars are just modified buildings from Rebuild the Wild to reflect that.

The Lokomos were a challenge. We only have very few examples of the race ingame and Byrne is very different from the others, who in turn are all completely identical. So I attempted to give them a stronger identity as a technology-advanced race, drawing inspiration from both the Artificer class from other games and the Mechanic from Starfinder.

I hope I get to finally work on the world map and dungeons in the near future!

If you wanna give your next Reclaim campaign a big dose of steam power, check out Viyers’ Rail the Wild expansion!

Today, we’ll take a look at Karma Kawsmos’ winning entry, Heroes Beyond the Cosmos.

Karma’s colossal collection of cool character components was a considerable clutch of content to contribute to the contest. Not only does it include Feats for every Race in the Core Rulebook, but it introduces a whole new kind of Feat – the Origin Feat. It’s an idea so good, I wish I’d thought of it back when first designing Reclaim the Wild. It definitely caught the eye of our community, as well!

With how much they added to the game with their expansion, it’s no surprise that Karma had a lot to say about the Feats they made, and the design process they went through. I’ll let them take it from here:

I’d been thinking of making an expansion like this for a while, so when I saw the homebrew jam I thought it would be a good motivation to finally sit down and write down the ideas I had. When it comes to inspiration… I can’t really name anything specifically in particular as an inspiration, although I’m sure I probably subconsciously remembered and ripped some ideas from one thing or another, since there’s so many in the expansion.

When it came to the expansion itself, there were a few guidelines in my head for coming up with new Feats. “It should introduce a new playstyle, or expand an existing one”, “it should give players more options, either in or out of battle”, and lastly and what I think was most important to me and probably the big drive for making this entire expansion to begin with, “it should help make each player feel like they’re more unique”. One thing, though, that was less a guideline and more a “creative direction”, I wanted to have Feats be tied to a big variety of Traits. Once I began really filling out and thinking of Feats I was thinking “What Traits have I not used yet and aren’t used much in the base Feat list”? That drove me to come up with Feats that would sound appropriate for having that Trait was a requirement. From my experience, new players tended to gravitate towards the obvious big important stats and MAYBE some crafting or scavenging or “flavor” traits, so having more stuff that might make them consider not “dumping” them was a goal of mine.

I’d like to think the “General Feats” section of the expansion falls into 2 categories, either giving a player a sort of “battle style”, gimmick, or benefit for playing in a certain way, and then Feats that provide a passive bonus to the hero as a reward for raising a Trait that wouldn’t typically be used in battle or every session. 

When it comes to the Racial Feats (as an aside, personally some of my favorite Feats from the expansion are in there), the goal was to try to have a player’s race selection matter a bit more and give each Race their own cool gimmicks and unique toys that a player can grab if they want to. I didn’t want the Feats themselves to make players think that race would be “locked” to a specific playstyle, though, so I avoided forcing people to play a specific way with that Race and also made the costs pretty cheap investment wise. Strong, unique, but general enough that a player could use them in a variety of playstyles, or would enhance what was already available to that Race. A difficult guideline but I think I made it work. I’m really proud of even coming up with Feats for the “Secondary” races, too.

Origin Feats. The big new feature of the expansion. Honestly, I had way more ideas for possible origins. If I wanted to I probably could have just made the whole expansion focused on them. I wanted to have general/racial feats though, and Origin Feats were harder to really figure out. It’s one thing to come up with an “Origin” but coming up with an interesting ability or change to the character to fit that Origin is a big brainstorm that I ended up running out of time for! But yes, the idea was to tie a hero’s background further into their playstyle. And I mean really intertwine it so it would always be a part of their character, further than just their starting stats. They might be the only Feats that have direct “drawbacks”, to balance out how most of them have pretty notable changes to how a normal hero interacts with the rules of the game, while being very cheap.

Realistically I don’t know how many people will actually use my expansion, but in the end my goal was to give more options, and I think I succeeded (almost 70 Feats!), so I hope these options are fun enough to give people more ideas for more heroes for this game.

If you’d like to power up your Heroes with a huge collection of custom Feats, check out Karma Kawsmos’ Heroes Beyond the Cosmos!