16 May

Wild Homebrew Jam Winner: Release the Worthy

Today we will take a look at BucketGod’s entry, Release the Worthy!

At a whopping 61 pages, BucketGod’s adventure is one of the largest entries in this Jam. Starting from a prison basement, this adventure lives up to the theme of “Ever Upwards” by bringing the players up both out of the basement, but also from commoners into heroes!

BucketGod provided quite a bit of thoughts when asked about his work:

When I saw the theme of the jam, “Ever Upwards”, my first thought was a tower of challenges for heroes to face, with each floor being anything from a small room to a simulated world so that they would have a good amount of different types of challenges to overcome: Combat, puzzles, and social challenges, and even one of my favorite features of RtW, the wild survival elements. It was meant to be very in the vein of Infinity Train or a Rogue-like game.

Unfortunately that was a few people’s first thought, so I scrapped it XD.

That’s when I remembered “Funnel Adventures”, one-shots meant to serve as combination character-creation/introductory adventure/Russian roulette for players where they build multiple randomized characters, throw them against the wall, and see who lives. So, I created Release the Worthy!

The first element I worked on was the randomized character creation. In games like Dungeons & Dragons there’s no element of character creation that you can’t resolve with a random number generator and some default rules, but Reclaim the Wild’s character creation is more free-form, so I had to give it some thought.

I had a lot of fun coming up with all of the professions and their gear. I think my favorite is Old Wo/Man though.

The hardest part to randomize though, was the physical descriptors. I was second guessing myself at every turn over what made sense! And of course, the inherent challenge, of trying to only use d6s, as is the spirit of the system. (A challenge I halfway gave up on with traits, as I included the “Sane” roll table that used d8s.)

And then I made the adventure! I won’t speak of it at length, because it’s not meant to be spoiled to prospective players, and because this blurb is becoming novel-esque, but I think every GM will understand me when I say the words “Dear God, why am I doing this?” went through my head during writing.

If you want to try out a funnel adventure to test the heroism of common folk, go check out BucketGod’s Release the Worthy adventure!

15 Dec

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!

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01 Nov

Join the 3rd Annual Wild Homebrew Jam!

Artist: Nintendo

It’s that time of the year, once again !

Two years ago, we organized a fun event to celebrate both the then-newly-available GitHub Wiki, and the growth of the Reclaim the Wild community as a whole : the Wild Homebrew Jam !

For those unaware of what a “Jam” consists of, it’s a celebration of creation and content created by people, as a showlight of their creativity. Our last year’s example is still standing : The Global Game Jam is one of the biggest game design events of the year, dedicated to the creation of games in less than 3 days, around a specific thematic unknown to everyone before the Jam begins. We of course don’t expect people to work that quickly, so our own Jam lasts during all of November, from the 1st, to the 30th.

And as our domain isn’t exactly video games, but tabletop ones, we’re looking for homebrew content of any kind! It can go from new gameplay options (like new Races, Feats, Techniques, or Spells), to new adventures (like modules and encounters), to completely new rules or even systems! We’re open to mostly anything, with the sole conditions that your content must be original, safe for work, and wholly made by you within the month of November!

Last year gave us two sets of rules for trains, multiples techniques, some monsters and races, and even origin feats that changed the way you play!

As with last year, the developers and moderators are offering prizes for a select few high-quality submissions! Your content can get special recognition, be featured on the website, and even earn you a Nintendo eShop gift card!

This year, we’ll continue using a theme to spice up the contest! While it’s completely optional for you to follow it, so people can still submit anything they created with their blossoming creativity, we hope it will give some inspiration boost !

Check out the rules below for more information, including this year’s theme. We hope to see you hang out in our Discord, submitting some new homebrew!!

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14 Aug

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!