Introduction
Table of contents
The Legend of Zelda series of video games have been part of the gaming landscape since the beginning of Nintendo’s video gaming consoles. They feature a unique blend of exploration, fantasy, and heroic adventure, which harkens back to the stories of knights and kings battling dragons and demons, rescuing princesses, and saving the world from untimely ends.
While the series has been many things over the years, Breath of the Wild (2017) brought the series back to its roots: it allowed players to venture in any direction they choose, and write their own legend in their own way as they sought to save the realm of Hyrule. Reclaim the Wild aims to capture that feeling as well, inspired by the excellence not only of Breath of the Wild, but of all Zelda titles.
How to Use This Book
To play Reclaim the Wild, you only need:
- One person to be the Game Master
- A group (3-5 people) to be Heroes
- Two six-sided dice per person
- Pencils and paper (or computers)
- And of course, this rulebook!
The Reclaim the Wild Core Rulebook contains all the rules you need to start playing, but how you approach it might depend on your familiarity with Breath of the Wild and with Zelda titles in general.
If you are a Zelda fan and a first-time roleplayer, then don’t worry – you’ll fit right in! Tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons have enabled people to explore fantasy worlds and tell stories for decades. With this book, some six-sided dice, a group of friends, and your imagination, you’ll soon be crafting your own stories and telling your own tales. You’ll discover new lands and worlds, wield ancient weapons and magical tools, and battle against incredible monsters bent on destruction.
If you are new to the world of The Legend of Zelda, you’ll still be able to keep up quite handily. Previous knowledge of the Zelda franchise is certainly helpful, but it is by no means required. Just as every Zelda game is its own unique entity, and does not require knowledge of past games, so too Reclaim the Wild does not require any knowledge of Zelda titles past.
Finally, if you have experience with both Zelda games and tabletop roleplaying, then you’ll find this book relatively straightforward. Much as with any RPG rulebook, the rules are introduced in organized sections throughout the book, enabling you to quickly find the rules you need when you need them. Using these rules as a guide, you’ll soon be crafting your own adventures in Hyrule and beyond.
Zelda Game Coverage
While Reclaim the Wild can be used to emulate the feel of any Zelda game, it is very much a game intended to emulate Breath of the Wild first and foremost. This means that many of the features and gameplay mechanics from Breath of the Wild are included in this game, including weapon durability, a reliance on food and raw materials, and a wide variety of Heroes from a plethora of Races.
That’s not to say that all other Zelda games were ignored. On the contrary, you’ll find races, items, spells, and numerous nods to nearly every other Zelda game ever created (yes, including the CD-I games).
While Reclaim the Wild uses mechanics from Breath of the Wild first and foremost, your journey might take place in Holodrum, you might travel alongside a Twili knight, and you might play the Elegy of Emptiness to solve a puzzle.
What Makes a Zelda Game?
There have been dozens of Zelda video games, as well as cartoons, manga, novels, and more However, there are some things that are found in nearly every Zelda property, binding them together – and making them all feel like a proper Zelda adventure.
Grounded Fantasy
Zelda games feature magic and fantastic creatures, but they remain grounded in reality. For many people, life in Hyrule is much the same as it would be in life on Earth – there are farms to tend to, roads to walk or ride horses on, and tradesmen hand-craft their tools. Their society is on the cusp of a renaissance, with technologies like gunpowder and telescopes available, but not rifles or microscopes. While magic is real, it is also rare, taking significant study or personal talent. There are all the mundane ills and ailments that affect real people, be they physical or personal.
However, those ills and ailments are relatively rare, more often than not a symptom of some growing evil that can be battled and s1lain. This is arguably part of the fantasy of Zelda games – that if Heroes rise up and take arms against a single source of evil (and its minions), the world will be a better place.
Those Who Came Before
The worlds found in Zelda games often make mention of some ancient civilization that came before the present day. They made powerful weapons and spells with which to fight evil, and then built shrines, temples, or dungeons to hide those artifacts until the day they would be needed again.
There were Heroes in the past, as well, who may have wielded those weapons to much the same end that today’s Heroes might.
Perhaps they left their techniques to future generations in the form of scrolls, or today’s Heroes might summon their ghosts to ask for vital information.
In this way, every Zelda game’s world is built on a foundation of a previous, more powerful civilization – that nonetheless, fell and was forgotten by many. No Hero’s journey is complete without traveling into the depths of a forgotten crypt or ancient temple, seeking the secrets left by those who came before.
Humble Beginnings
The typical Zelda game begins with a Hero yet undiscovered. Perhaps they are a simple goat-farmer, or living a quiet life with their uncle; they might be a young forest-boy about to come into adulthood, or the son of a smith, living an unexciting life.
Heroes in Zelda games quickly grow beyond these mundane origins, with every feat of heroism bringing them further and further from the ordinary life they started in.
However, those beginnings keep the Hero grounded and humble: they know what they’re fighting for, and are rarely tempted to use their newfound power and skill to do more harm than good.
Puzzle-Solving Power
While Heroes will grow stronger, smarter, and more skilled as they adventure, Heroes in the Zelda games often find that their power comes not only from the strength of their sword-arm, but also from the plethora of tools that they acquire.
Heroes need these tools and the new abilities they confer for more than just efficiently dispatching monsters. They’ll use them to solve puzzles in ancient shrines and lost temples (though in a tabletop game, their own ingenuity can take them much further than in any video game). They’ll also use these items to deal with foes who might otherwise be unstoppable, using a magical tool to uncover a weak point or to turn a monster’s own powers back upon them.
Video Game Logic
Zelda games, being video games, operate on a kind of video game logic. Temples are built in strange ways that would annoy any common worshipper, but make them fun to explore – once you’ve found the temple’s special item. Monsters have curious or even nonsensical biology, but those same features make them a joy to fight.
While the worlds and the people of Zelda are grounded in a sense of day-to-day reality, when it comes to the fantastical, don’t be afraid to put gameplay first! If it’s more fun, but doesn’t make sense when you think about it later, that is 100% okay.
Ancient, Irredeemable Evil
While bandits, brigands, and bad actors might all plague Heroes in a Zelda universe, the primary source of the truly dangerous foes and the ills that plague the land is almost always an ancient, evil force.
This force might manifest itself as a powerful wizard, a king of thieves, or a malevolent cloud of death in bestial form. It might corrupt the minds of leaders and those who hold positions of power, or turn the hearts of good people against one another.
While there might always have been occasional monsters to threaten the populace, this awakening evil is almost always vastly increasing the number of monsters in the land, making life more dangerous for travelers and villagers alike.
Whatever form this evil takes, though, it is always irredeemable – it cannot be talked out of its plans to ruin all that is good and raise itself to prominence. The most Heroes can do with diplomacy is to delay it, while leaving themselves open to a knife in the back.
Recurring Elements
Of course, there are many more minor elements that continue to pop up in Zelda game after Zelda game: the Master Sword, fairies, elemental arrows, and marriage-seeking Zora princesses, among others.
By using the races, spells, techniques, and items presented in this book, you’ll already be incorporating many of these minor Zelda touchstones in your game. Other recurring elements – tropes, people, and place names in particular – are optional, and vary in their usage from one video game to the next, making them by no means required.
The Basic of Roleplaying
While roleplaying appears ridiculous and daunting at the outset, with special terms and inscrutable acronyms, the truth is that it’s really quite simple. At its heart, roleplaying is simply “playing pretend”, but with rules – and a Game Master – to help adjudicate situations and lead to further fun and adventure.
The Game Master
The Game Master (GM) is the person who creates the adventure. It’s their job to come up with the places, the people, the foes and the challenges that the players will face.
The GM also plays the part of all the NPCs (Non-Player Characters) – this includes the monsters they face, the villagers they speak with, the allies they work with, and the villains they seek to thwart. They describe the world to the players, telling them what their characters see, hear, even smell.
Finally, the Game Master acts as the game’s referee, interpreting the rules and keeping the Heroes’ journey on track and enjoyable.
The Players
Players in Reclaim the Wild each inhabit a Hero, a character of their own design. These Heroes have their own unique histories, traits, and abilities. Their choices determine the direction of the story, having the consequences of their actions – good and bad alike! – described to them by the GM.
Often, players will need to have their Heroes cooperate to overcome the challenges that the Game Master sets before them. They’ll also need to use their tools and skills in clever ways, coming up with unexpected solutions to puzzles and battles.
Playing the Game
Typically, each session of play begins with the GM setting the scene for the characters, and perhaps with the GM and players jointly recapping the previous session’s events to remind everyone what occurred. The players then take the role of their Heroes, and react to the situation – and the GM, in turn, reacts back, as the NPCs or obstacles that the Heroes are dealing with.
When the players attempt to complete a task that has risk or a real possibility of failure, the GM can call for the player(s) to make a Trait Check of an appropriate Trait. The more skilled the Hero is at that Trait, the more likely they are to succeed at the task.
When things come to blows, the GM and players enter combat. The players control their Heroes, while the GM controls all the foes and traps that the Heroes are battling. Combat proceeds turn by turn until one side (usually the Heroes) wins.
Adventures and Campaigns
When you play Reclaim the Wild, as with any tabletop system, there are individual adventures, which are strung together into an overarching campaign.
Adventures are single quests, and typically take only a few sessions of play (or perhaps just one session!) to accomplish from start to finish. These quests should have a clear ‘end’ that the Heroes are striving for: slay the great monster, clear the road of bandits, or deliver a package from the capital city to a small village in the sticks. The Heroes typically have some direct stake in the adventure, or have a reason to see it through. Once complete, the Heroes take their hard-earned rewards, including any Tokens of Heroism they might have earned.
Campaigns are a larger structure, made of multiple adventures. Taken together, those adventures form a longer tale, a chronicle the Heroes’ travails from one quest to the next. While an adventure has a clear beginning, middle, and end, campaigns may move from one adventure to the next, as the Heroes work on their long-term objectives (like dethroning an evil king, rebuilding a town, or saving the world). Those long-term goals might shift or change as new information comes to light, new objectives become clear, or the players get distracted and change their minds.
Most Zelda games feature both adventures, and a full campaign: while the game as a whole would qualify as a campaign, the individual quests or objectives that Link works through would each be an adventure in their own right.