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!

Next, let’s take a look at Ramos’ entry, Rotate the Wrench!

Ramos’ entry was,, it needs to be said, huge. Almost 30 pages of stuff! A way to introduce trains and tracks into your game, a new Magical Song, a new Enchantment, and even rules for fighting on (and with) trains!

True to form, when asked for their thoughts, Ramos had a lot to contribute. So rather than gush about their entry (which was amazing, and you should go read it), I’m just gonna let them take it from here:

Steam was a very convenient theme for me because two of my players wanted to play smart, mechanics oriented characters. With my setting already involving the start of an industrial revolution in Hyrule, trains becoming a common form of transportation, and guardians running about, it made a lot of sense. And really, what could be cooler than having your own car? So I started making a car and then thought, you know the single most underused but coolest item in all of Zelda is? The Spinner. But then I realize, this is a train setting, I should probably also include a train for when that invariably comes up in the campaign. Then I thought, yeah, but boats are common too. And it came to mind, well, there are a few flying constructs in the Zelda series.

I drew the line at flying machines, mostly due to the one month time limit. Given infinite time, my projects have a tendency to bloat and spiral out of control, so I’m grateful that this at least let me focus down to something reasonable, even if four different vehicles was a bit much.

I started with the Master Cycle from the book as a base and decided that just having a vehicle wasn’t particularly cool. Vehicles are essentially just horses you can park and the cool thing about horses in Reclaim the Wild is that they are companions that grow, gain stats, and even pick up techniques, spells, or feats. Naturally, this meant vehicles had to be able to grow as well. It makes sense, if you’re engineering yourself a car, you would probably be interested in refining it. And how best to do that? The single coolest way to present upgrades ever devised in video games: trees.

Upgrade trees are essentially a series of upgrades required by other upgrades. It gives you this cool feeling of building towards something rather than just steadily getting better. Reclaim the Wild also has trees, sort of, though they aren’t visually presented as such. For example, the Spin Attack is a requirement for Great Spin, which is a requirement for Hurricane Spin. That’s more of a single branch than a tree, but it gives the same idea where you are working towards a pinnacle, which is really cool. Super cool.

So here’s my one issue I ran into: Making things cool doesn’t necessarily mean it meshes well with the rest of the system. Making things into trees forces me to presume a lot about how a campaign will develop and a lot of the vehicles don’t really get going until rank 3, which for a lot of people, might be where the game ends. My group is looking to be going for quite a while but Reclaim the Wild benefits from steady, linear developments. Not to mention, some of the vehicles ended up complicated for the sake of it. My suggestion, if you want to use my submission, is to use it if you plan on going to rank 5. That gives sufficient time for the vehicles to really shine.

If I were to tackle this idea again, I would probably start with a weaker Master Cycle and then tie materials into upping very basic stats directly like durability and movement. From there, a laundry list of upgrades that look a lot like player feats could be implemented and everything could be limited by a player’s Mechanics attribute. That might still sound a lot like the trees I made but the difference is that it lets a vehicle expand more naturally to fit the needs of the party and also be a lot easier for other people to homebrew further rather than messing around with finicky trees. Basically, my advice is, cool is cool but nothing overrides simplicity when it comes to implementing new ideas into a tabletop setting.

If you wanna get on track to include epic train battles in your campaign, go check out Ramos’ Rotate the Wrench supplement!

First among our Homebrew Jam winners to be highlighted is Shines, with their new spells, Zelda’s Refuge and Zant’s Curse.

Some homebrew projects are vast projects, with tons of new additions. Some, though, are subtler – filling in niches that were previously unexplored, or only barely touched upon. So it is with Shines’ two spells here.

The first spell, Zelda’s Refuge, helps fill in the niche of a ‘master of disguise’ with an upgraded version of Impa’s Disguise. It’s more resistant to casual interference, allowing you to better navigate a crowded street or a close dance. It also allows for a more thorough transformation, including your size, which might help a Hylian present as a Gerudo – or as a Deku. All in all, it’s the kind of spell I wish I’d thought of, way back when we were first creating Reclaim the Wild.

The second spell, Zant’s Curse, serves double duty. On the one hand, it allows a player to provide this transformative magic to their friends, which can allow a whole party of Heroes to, say, enter a Gerudo town, infiltrate a cult, or hide their identity when pursued by the town guards. On the other, it works well as a spell primarily for villains, with its capability to force changes upon a foe. (Though in that capacity, I would encourage you to talk with your players before you use it directly upon them.)

Speaking with Shines, they were able to give us some insight into why they wanted to explore these spells as options for players and foes alike.

I’m a big fan of shapeshifting and transformation in stories and games, and I wanted to give those as options for both players and Game Masters. I was inspired by the changes seen in Zelda transforming into Sheik, as well as a number of terrible fates seen in the Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask games. Hopefully this enables you to play a true master of disguise or shapeshifter, or offers another way for a Game Master to have a truly memorable villain encounter.

If you or your players would like to include Shines’ new spells in your game, check ’em out here!

We’ve counted the votes, and we’ve looked through the submissions to choose our favorites. Now it’s time to reveal the winners!

Milly and I had a blast reading all the entries! They were all entertaining and well-thought-out submissions, worthy of your time to read them – and of being included in any Reclaim the Wild campaign. I was also glad to see a few submissions dive into this year’s optional theme, ‘Steam’; I had worried that we might not get anyone to attempt that challenge.

This year, there were nine entries in all. Below, you’ll find links to them all, as well as the announced winners!

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