The Sheikah Slate is a versatile tool in Breath of the Wild, providing all sorts of benefits: from taking photos to providing a map, casting spells to teleporting across Hyrule, it’s almost too good to be true! And in many ways, it was. But now, so long after the debut of Reclaim the Wild, we can provide a (somewhat) balanced way of having Sheikah Slates in tabletop!
Read MoreA common trope in fantasy gaming is that of the “demi”. Be it a half-elf, a half-orc, a half-dragon, or even a half-god, there have been heroes of curious parentage since time immemorial. (In fact, the very first hero of a fantasy story, Gilgamesh, is one-third human, and two-thirds god!)
While this trope doesn’t seem to occur in Zelda games, that doesn’t prevent players from wanting their Heroes to hail from more than just one race. If anything, the franchise’s wide variety of strange and wondrous people encourages such thought.
But how do you square that with the total lack of examples from any of the games? In addition, how do you prevent a player from developing a knotted, convoluted family tree, just for the sake of min-maxing?
Below, we offer a ruleset for creating Heroes of Curious Parentage, and some advice on preventing those abuses of one’s ancestry.
Read MoreFinally, we present the first-place winner of the Wild Homebrew Jam! This is Vader’s “New Race: Guardian Scout“!
With Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity fresh in everyone’s minds, Vader came out of nowhere with a write-up for a playable Guardian Scout race – and grabbed the hearts (and votes!) of the community, much as the adorable egg-shaped Guardian did in the game’s trailers.
More than ‘just a robot’, as one might be able to make with a suite of Talking Animal features, this Guardian Scout race allows a Hero to feel like they’re truly made from the same stuff as the Guardians that terrorized Link throughout the original Breath of the Wild – not only the Scouts and their anxiety-inducing lasers, but the Blights that infest the Divine Beasts, as well.
Speaking with Vader, he shared this about his thought process:
So I had a couple things I kept in mind when making my contest entry. One of them was having good presentation, which I won’t get into too much since that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual homebrew content itself, it just makes it more easily digestible and appealing to look at. This is mostly relevant when you’re giving it to other people to use, or when you’re trying to garner support in a contest setting.
Regarding the Guardian race itself, for me it was very important that I make something with a ‘mechanical draw’. That is, a mechanic that is unique to this race and makes you want to play it over other races. And this is easy enough to do if you’re just looking at the bestiary entry and translating that over to a player race (which I did with a couple of the Scout’s techs and spells), or you just think about it long enough for something not represented in the bestiary.
But just translating a bestiary entry is kind-of boring. I wanted to go above and beyond that to make something truly unique (and to serve as my ace-in-the-hole for the contest). So, I thought more deeply about what constitutes a Guardian and realized that the Scourges are basically Guardians themselves, and I could base a series of feats, techniques, and spells off of them. It was an inspired choice, and one that I feel adds a lot of flavor, mechanical depth, and even replayability to what would otherwise be a one-note race entry. I can imagine someone reading my homebrew and thinking “huh, I hadn’t thought about that before, but that makes sense,” and having their own imagination sparked, for both the character and mechanical possibilities.
If you’d like to see a Guardian Scout Hero in your next Reclaim the Wild game, be sure to check out the race here.
Next in our series featuring the winners of the Wild Homebrew Jam is Maddie’s total conversion mod, “Reclaim the Bounty“!
I’ve been told multiple times that Reclaim the Wild could be used to run a tabletop RPG in “any Nintendo franchise”. I usually demurred, saying that each franchise had enough quirks and gameplay differences that you’d be better off making a whole-new RPG from scratch.
So of course Maddie had to go and prove me wrong with her Reclaim the Bounty homebrew! These races, items, and rules allow you to play a Metroid game using Reclaim the Wild. Races from all over the galaxy, classic Metroid items, even the notion of “rolling into a ball to maneuver through tight spaces”, it’s all here.
I spoke with Maddie at length about this project; the full interview is below.
Read MoreNext 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!