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!