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Art by Lindsey Crummet |
Tales of the Lunar Lands
Musings on Tabletop RPGs, Pop Culture, Perytons, and Other Nonsense
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
The Spell of Embodiment
Monday, June 23, 2025
Erdland Maps
We've come to the end of our journey of analyzing every major location in the overworld of Dragon Quest III for tabletop purposes. Things aren't over yet for The Saga of the Ortegids - we still have two more games to go through - but we now have a picture of Erdland, a historical mashup world grounded equally in history, fantasy, and sword-and-sorcery pulp. To cap this investigation off, I've made a map overlaying the areas in the game with the borders of the different cultural regions I've decided on through my last few posts.
Stay tuned for our look into Torland!
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Click here to enlarge |
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Click here to enlarge |
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Hanguo
I think it's reasonable to assume that there would in fact be a civilization there, perhaps even a large and powerful empire. We just don't visit any of its settlements in the game because none of them had anything important enough to Erdrick's adventures to warrant a stop. For the purposes of The Saga of the Ortegids, I'm going to invent a new empire here, one I'm calling Hanguo.
Monday, June 16, 2025
The Kingdom of Dragons
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Art by Tommy McDaniel |
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Art by Monica Coleman |
Friday, June 13, 2025
Friday Encounter: A Witch's Broom
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
The Southlands
First of these is actually named in-game as Gondo, and appears to comprise much of the eastern half of the continent. Gondo seems to be a rather inhospitable region, and NPCs warn you of its dangers. They're probably referring to the high-level enemies there, but even looking at the map, we can see that it'd be a place of great danger even if we leave game mechanics out of the equation. It's enclosed by high mountains and contains numerous volcanoes and caves, including the Pit of Giaga, which connects Erdland and Torland. However, what's most notable is that Gondo's castle is the residence of Baramos, the principle villain of the first two thirds of the game.
Clearly, then, we're dealing with the local equivalent of Mordor - a place of death and desolation, with craggy peaks, searing lava floes, and vast poisonous swamps, all ruled over by a malevolent overlord. However, it seems that Gondo wasn't always this way. There are guards stationed at the Pit of Giaga, and the castle has a second throne room where a skeleton is seated on the throne, evidently the original occupant. It seems, then, that Gondo was once a human kingdom, but was overthrown and conquered by Baramos.
This might seem incongruous with the terrain, but there's actually solid reasons to believe humans could thrive here. Volcanic soil is very fertile, and there's enough forests in the area to suggest that it isn't all a barren wasteland. As any Tolkien fanboy could tell you, the wastes we're familiar with are limited to the Plateau of Gorgoroth, and other regions of Mordor are quite fertile and capable of growing crops. Gondo is likely similar. Considering that the Pit of Giaga is noted as a place that monsters crawl from, it makes sense that the inhabitants would want to establish a garrison against any dangers, and this may have informed state-building in the name of assuring order. The people of Gondo were likely a grim and militaristic sort, tasked with constant vigilance in ensuring the beasts of Torland did not threaten them or the outside world.
A further note on Baramos, he's described by some NPCs as a "demon lord." This is a recurring theme in Japanese fantasy settings - often times you'll see a "demon king" that threatens the civilized world, dwelling on the physical plane, and sometimes commanding all monsters in the world as his foot soldiers. They're usually responsible for all misfortune that faces humankind. This is a stock character that seems to be directly based on the final bosses of the Dragon Quest games. Their armies consist of disparate monsters to cover the various enemy types you'd face in a video game, and they're the source of all conflict because once you've defeated them, the game is over. Most Dragon Quest-inspired stories take these tropes and run with them. I've seen more than one in which this idea was portrayed as a metaphysically mandated cyclical system, with demon kings rising to prominence and being stricken down every era as a means to keep the forces of good and evil in a constant balance.
However, The Saga of the Ortegids does not shackle its worldbuilding to game mechanics - and for what it's worth, Baramos doesn't really come across as an existential threat. Most NPCs seem more concerned about their more immediate problems, and the king in Aliahan even notes that most people aren't even aware that he exists. In my personal experience, your quest to defeat him always seemed more like it was grounded in vengeance - your father previously set out to stop him, but never returned. Maybe it was just me coming at this from a mindset of D&D, but as a kid, I never got the impression that every single monster you fight was directly affiliated with Baramos. They feel more like random encounters that come across you by chance; NPCs certainly don't act like they're an invading force. From what I understand, the idea that every enemy is working for Baramos is made more explicit in lore that was only published in Japan. But this project is specifically based on early western marketing of the series, and if western players had no access to this information, it doesn't apply for our purposes.
Thus, I'm interpreting Baramos as a Drokkar sorcerer-king who conquered Gondo and now rules over it. He's undoubtedly a powerful one, and may well have his eyes set on further conquests, but his domain doesn't extend beyond the Southlands. There are monsters elsewhere in the world, and some are powerful indeed, but they are not all the same class of being, and only those in his castle can be assumed to be his servants.
Anyway, all that aside, the western half of the Southlands doesn't seem to be under Baramos's sway. There's one village, Tedanki, located in the southern hills. The village is ruined and lifeless during the day, but is inhabited by ghosts at night, who don't seem to realize that they're dead and laugh the prospect off. They claim to be suffering attacks by monsters, but believe the town's guard has them handled. Aside from that, there's a temple further up the western coast that was established for the benefit of sailors, but has lost contact with Tedanki.
We don't see any castles or kings in this region, but the people of Tedanki must have been well-traveled and with access to sophisticated infrastructure if they were known at the temple up the coast. I feel it's likely that there are other kingdoms in the western Southlands, but we never visit their capitals. Most likely, these are smaller petty kingdoms if Tedanki could be wiped out without support or retaliation.
I might sound like I'm contradicting myself, but the fact that Tedanki sits on the edge of Gondo makes me suspect that it was in fact wiped out by Baramos's forces. Perhaps the sorcerer-king is exerting his authority and demanding fealty from the surrounding kingdoms, and Tedanki was destroyed as a warning when it did not comply with his demands. Baramos clearly isn't a pressing enough threat for the temple to be worried about him, but he might be more concerned with his direct borders. In any case, the history of the various African kingdoms during the Middle Ages is an interesting and underappreciated one, and would be ripe for inspiration here. Some of them even have mythologized histories involving evil sorceror-kings!
Monday, June 9, 2025
Leiamland
Leiamland doesn't give us a lot to work with, but I think there's definitely something there for The Saga of the Ortegids. Most of the island is covered by ice, with the one feature being a temple taking the form of a giant tower, at the top of which is kept the God-Bird's egg. The only inhabitants of Leiamland seem to be two priestesses who stand as guardians and tend to the egg, and the island seems too inhospitable to support any major settlements.
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Art by Alayna Danner |
I think it's more likely that the priestesses are themselves immortal god-like beings - handmaidens of the God-Bird, and tasked with safeguarding her cycle of death and rebirth in the mortal world. We do see earthbound but divine beings elsewhere in the same game, like Aurhea, who appears to be the spirit of a particular lake. It would explain why the priestesses can survive in such an isolated, inhospitable environment, and why they would have such a close connection to a god incarnate, something that goes even beyond what we see at other temples, where the gods are more distant and metaphysical.
The orb ritual is not the only time we see gods being summoned into the physical world in the Erdrick Trilogy, and I think that's quite relevant. It seems that this is a setting that has particular rules about how gods work - even if they do not ordinarily exist on the same plane as mortals, there are rituals that can give them physical bodies that can be directly interacted with. This is pretty consistent throughout the first three games of the series, and for my purposes with the project, the similarities between the numerous instances we see will not be treated as a coincidence.The existence of Leiamland presents some interesting implications for worldbuilding - through it, we can posit that there is a class of lesser gods native to the mortal realm, and another class of divine beings that must be summoned. But I think there's other things such a location could add to a campaign, too. Certainly one could lift the questline from DQ3 wholesale and have the PCs collect artifacts needed for the ritual because they need to ride the God-Bird to an otherwise inaccessible destination.
But it could be just as compelling to have the party tasked with stealing Ramia's egg. It'd make for an interesting heist scenario - they'd have to prepare for a journey to the remote island, braving the elements just to reach the temple in the first place, and then find a way to get past the immortal guardians tirelessly watching over the egg. It's entirely possible that the temple is located in Leiamland because the icy wastes would deter anyone seeking to claim the sacred egg for their own purposes.Going off this idea, you could expand the temple into a dungeon if you wanted to. There's precedent for this - the Game Boy version of DQ3 added a post-game dungeon underneath Leiamland, inhabited by a sleeping golden dragon guarding a holy sword that can call lightning. The first floor of this dungeon is even shaped like the phoenix icon used to represent Ramia, so it seems like the place is connected to her cult. It's one of the largest in the game (and features some of the best spritework on the Game Boy Color), and could well be used as the basis for a megadungeon.