The Forgotten Setting of Rogue Trader

As someone with an interest in worldbuilding, there's one interesting thought experiment I've seen going around. I don't know if it's ever been given a name - or, indeed, if anyone else has ever really noticed it being a thing - but for lack of a better term, I'm going to call it selective canon. Essentially, taking an existing series but treating only some installments or iterations of that series as canon, and then exploring how such an approach would impact the setting.

More often than you'd think, this results in a setting quite distinct from canon, due to something TV Tropes calls Early Installment Weirdness. It's rare that fictional universes, especially long-running ones, emerge fully-formed - often, they need to go through a growing phase where authors are still working out the details, which may lead to ideas or plot points coming up that don't fit neatly into the vision that would congeal later. Selective canon, then, asks us to consider how things would be different if these outliers were never brushed aside or retconned to bring them in line with what came later.

One popular example I've seen asks "what if A New Hope was the only Star Wars movie?" This actually changes quite a bit. Most prominently, Darth Vader is a distinct character from Luke's father (not yet named Anakin). We know that Obi-Wan served under Bail Organa in the Clone Wars, but we don't know what or when this is. The Jedi are a religion that few people in the galaxy have ever heard of, and even fewer believe in; there's no indication that they were once a unified order, let alone one that held prominent political power. There's no Padme, no Qui-Gon, and no Yoda. If we bring the official novelization into this, there's also the fact that the Emperor is a powerless figurehead and the real power in the Empire is with his council of scheming advisors. If we ignore the prequels, the Expanded Universe, and even the other two-thirds of the Original Trilogy, what we get is something very different.

Another proposal I've seen is running a campaign set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth that assumes The Hobbit is canon, but The Lord of the Rings and The Simarillon are not. We know Gandalf is a wizard, and we know that he left the party to fight an evil necromancer at some point, but as far as we know, both are simply human magicians; we have no reason to believe that they are immortal angelic beings. Elves are just as antagonistic as goblins are. Gollum, as far as we can tell, is simply a strange creature who lives in a cave and has always lived there, and he owns a magic ring that can turn people invisible. There is no indication that he is a hobbit driven mad by a cursed artifact of immense power.

On my own end, there's The Saga of the Ortegids, which was inspired by these exercises - it asks to take the first three Dragon Quest games, and their Western marketing materials, and ignore everything else relevant about the franchise, reverse-engineering a setting that has more in common with 80s pulp fantasy novels than the pages of Shonen Jump. But another setting I think is just begging for the selective canon treatment is Warhammer 40,000.

I haven't talked much about 40k on this blog, but I'm a long-time fan, first getting into it with its third edition in the early 2000s. However, I'm endlessly fascinated by what came before my time. While I do enjoy the modern 40k universe, I'm equally interested in the setting of the game's first edition all the way back in 1987 - which I would argue should be considered a separate setting, because it's evolved so much over the years as to be nigh-unrecognizable today. And I think that the setting revealed in the first edition rulebook, Rogue Trader: Warhammer 40,000 (yes, that was a subtitle at first), as well as the articles in White Dwarf released around that time, deserves to be examined more closely. It's a compelling and unique setting in its own right, and one arguably more conducive to roleplaying than the modern one (fitting, since Rogue Trader started life as an RPG, and even in its final release is only mostly not one). So, let's take a look at the far future of 1987, when it wasn't quite so grimdark and there were still things that were not war.

• While this article will discuss what the setting of Rogue Trader does have, I think it's just as interesting to pay a close eye to what it doesn't. Many factions that modern 40k players will be familiar with had not yet been established. There are no Tau, no Necrons, no Dark Eldar, no Skitarii, no Grey Knights, no Sisters of Battle (there's a single illustration of a gun-toting woman in power armor and a nun's wimple, but there's nothing to indicate who or what she is), and perhaps most consequentially, no Chaos. There's no daemons, no Chaos Space Marines, no Chaos Cultists, and no Horus Heresy. All that stuff, at this point in time, is strictly exclusive to Warhammer Fantasy. It would very quickly be added with the Realm of Chaos sourcebooks, but when we look at the core rulebook in a vacuum, the second most popular faction of modern 40k is completely absent.
• The aesthetics of the setting resemble a combination of Star Wars, Alien, and 80s glam rock. Bright colors and big hair (especially mohawks) are the order of the day. There is not nearly as much gothic imagery or as many skulls as modern 40k, and things generally look like they came off the pages of Heavy Metal or 2000 AD more than they do from a medieval manuscript.

It took me far too long to realize the graffiti was supposed to say
"MARINES OUT," not "MARINES LOL"

• The main power of the setting is the Imperium of Man, a dystopian aristocracy encompassing somewhere in the vicinity of a million planets. The capital of the Imperium is Earth (not "Holy Terra"). It is governed by the Emperor (not "God-Emperor"). He is extremely old, but mortal, and dependent on a life support device called the Golden Throne to sustain his aging body, which requires the daily sacrifice of a thousand psykers to operate. Although immobile, he is conscious and can talk, and has agents that he directly orders to do his bidding. Overall, he comes across as more of a Baron Harkonnen than a Leto Atreides.
• 
  The other planets of the Imperium are feudal dependencies of Earth, and largely autonomous. The Imperium of Rogue Trader appears to be a much more diverse place than that of modern 40k canon, even if we take Games Workshop at face value when they emphasize that the Imperium is much more culturally heterogenous than what we see in published fiction. There are multiple religions practiced and tolerated in the Imperium, including the Adeptus Mechanicus (who are explicitly based on Earth, not Mars, and do not have their own exclusive units) and the Cult of the Space Pudding. There is no indication that the Emperor is universally worshiped as a god.
• Mutants are a persecuted minority in the Imperium. They are stated to arise from the effects of long histories of pollution and nuclear war on the human genome - remember, no Chaos. There are extensive mutation tables included in Rogue Trader, allowing for the creation of anything ranging from X-Men style humans with superpowers to something more visibly grotesque. Certain strains of mutants, like Astropaths (psychics used to maintain interstellar communications), Navigators (mutants used to guide ships through the Warp), Beastmen, and Squats are defined.
• Although the Imperium is a human polity, there are at least some planets where aliens coexist openly with humans, and trade is maintained with both the Eldar and the Slann.
• Robots are explicitly noted to be a common sight in the Imperium, and are used for both labor and warfare. The Imperium also makes use of artificial intelligence in its vehicles and weapons, allowing them to operate autonomously.
• The main military arm of the Imperium is the Imperial Army (not "Imperial Guard" or "Astra Militarum"). They are supported by genetically-altered special ops commandos called Space Marines. Space Marines are often recruited from criminals and convicts and are given combat stimulants. They are easily identified by their trademark power armor and bascinet-shaped helmets; however, power armor is not exclusive to Space Marines. Both the Imperial Army and Space Marines use the same vehicles, including the Leman Russ tank, Rhino APC, and Dreadnought walker (the latter of which is piloted conventionally and is not exclusively used as a life support system for crippled Space Marines). Traitor Space Marines do exist, but they are portrayed as criminals and mercenaries who mostly serve their own agenda.
• Space Marines operate as autonomous organizations, called Chapters or Legions. Each Chapter has its own colors that it uses to decorate the power armor of its Marines for ceremonial purposes, but Marines are expected to use camoflauge while on field duty. Chapters include the Dark Angels, the Blood Drinkers, the Silver Skulls, the Ultra-Marines, and the Spacewolves (note the formatting on the latter two). In addition, there are specialized positions within a Space Marine Chapter, including Chaplains, Librarians, Medics (not "Apothecaries"), and Field Police, which all have their own designated heraldry.
  

• The founder of a Space Marine Chapter is called a Primarch. Primarchs are normal, mortal Space Marines, if esteemed and decorated ones. The named Primarchs are Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists, Roboute Guilliman of the Ultra-Marines, and Leman Russ of the Spacewolves. The former two are long dead, and their bones are on public display.
• The Imperium also uses Inquisitors and Rogue Traders as agents of their agenda, who have free reign to do what they want with whatever resources they wish, and map quite clearly to traditional RPG adventuring parties. One Inquistior is named Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau.
• The single named character most often referenced in Rogue Trader is a smuggler named Abdul Goldberg, who makes several appearances in the random scenario generator, apparently intended as a recurring rival to the PCs.
• The Squats are a race of offshoot humans with shorter, stockier builds adapted to planets with heavy gravity. They are found throughout the Imperium, but have their own autonomous holdings concentrated in the galactic core.
• The Imperium's most prominent enemies are the Orks. Orks are explicitly noted to be the most populous race in the galaxy. They have changed the least out of any major faction since Rogue Trader, but it is noted that they have planets that they govern permanently, sometimes using human slaves as an underclass.

• The Eldar mostly live in their own post-scarcity societies, but are usually encountered by outsiders as pirates, most commonly because they turned to piracy out of boredom due to their long lifespans. They can interbreed with humans.
• The Slann are a race of humanoid amphibians found on many planets. They were once a highly advanced spacefaring empire, and may have seeded life across multiple worlds, but have degenerated from their prime.
• The Tyranids are a race of hexapodal reptilians who travel in nomadic "Hive Fleets." They utilize organic technology, which is manufactured from biomass obtained from slaves. Tyranids are fully sapient and do not have a hive mind. They primarily rely on slave races to do their bidding, most notably the centauroid Zoats.
• Interstellar travel is accomplished through an alternate dimension known as the Warp. Navigating the Warp is very dangerous and often requires Navigators. There are several entities native to the Warp, including Enslavers, tentacled creatures capable of mind-controlling other organisms, and Vampires, bat-like humanoids that feed on the life force of others. The latter are capable of adopting illusory human forms, and contact between humans and vampires in the past gave rise to traditional vampire folklore.
• One hazard of the Warp is Warp Storms, which can block off routes of travel. One major Warp Storm is the Eye of Terror, which encloses multiple planets, including Logan's World, the capital of which is Helsreach. Because the Imperium cannot easily get there, the planets in the Eye of Terror are wretched hives of scum and villainy, but abide by the traditional laws of physics. The Eye of Terror can only be accessed from the outside galaxy when it "blinks" once every four to ten years, which marks both boom periods of trade and attempts by Imperial authorities to crack down on crime.

• 

  He also has a throne
  shaped like a Velociraptor.

  The Ultra-Marines are a relatively recent Chapter, and their arch-enemies are the Tyranids. The leader of the Ultra-Marines is Commander Marneus Calgar. He was originally a soldier in the Imperial Army, but was inspired to join the Ultra-Marines when they liberated a Tyranid POW camp he was being held in. Another important figure in the Ultra-Marines is the Chief Librarian Illian Nastase, a half-Eldar Astropath who was born on the planet Badab after the Imperium ousted its Tyrant and reclaimed control. He originally served as a member of the Dark Angels before joining the Ultra-Marines. I saved this one for last because it's such a perfect encapsulation of how much the setting has changed - literally every fact I just listed makes no sense in the current canon.
• Also, there is something called the Stegatank. Need I say more?

Friday Encounter: Helpful Monsters That Kill You

This is our first guest submission for my Friday Encounter column. In addition to DMing, I also am a player in one of my friends' campaigns, and last week he threw an encounter at us that I thought was genius. So, with his permission, I'm using it here.

This encounter revolves around Gadabouts, a monster from Spelljammer. I don't have any love for Spelljammer as a setting (that's a post I plan to write some time soon), but for some reason the stats are freely available on D&D Beyond. Gadabouts are essentially organic space suits that grapple a creature and surround its head in a bubble of oxygen. As written, they're supposed to be helpful to the PCs - but this encounter flips that concept on its head, presenting the Gadabouts entirely as they're written in official sources but recontextualizing them to be a threat. I thought it was a really cool idea to explore alternative ways to use monsters that were clearly made with a specific use case in mind (see also: cloakers).

This encounter consists of two parts: a pit of spikes, and an adjacent room containing a lush grassy area with a small pond, around which three Gadabouts hydrate themselves. In the campaign I got this from, this was in a dungeon and the pond room was concealed by an illusory wall, but it could work with a more conventional passageway instead, or even in a wilderness setting.

The pit is 10 feet deep and 5 feet wide. The spikes are coated in aboleth mucus - which can render a creature only able to breathe water if it is ingested or enters the bloodstream. Creatures that land on the spikes take 1d4 piercing damage and must make a DC 16 Constitution saving throw. On a success, they shake off the effects of the poison. On a failure, they initially experience difficulty breathing.

After ten minutes, an affected creature will find they aren't able to breathe air at all any more, and start to experience the effects of suffocating if their heads aren't immersed in water (ie. they can survive for a number of rounds equal to their Constitution modifier, after which they drop to 0 HP, begin making death saves, and can't be healed or stabilized until they can breathe again). The save can be retried every hour.

This might seem bad enough, but complicating matters are the Gadabouts in the adjacent pond. When at rest, they do not move and appear as lush vines with a giant butterfly sitting on top of them. However, if they are startled or a creature falls into the pit, they will fly toward the nearest creature in the pit (ideally one affected by aboleth mucus) and attempt to grapple them. On a successful grapple, the Gadabout attaches to the back of the target and surrounds them with a bubble of oxygen. They will then attempt to carry the grappled creature off; the target will be unable to move under their own volition until the grapple is broken. This means that the rest of the party will need to chase after the Gadabout before their friend suffocates. If the Gadabout is attacked, the damage is split evenly between it and the grappled creature.

The Gadabouts do not harm the creatures they attach to and are just trying to be helpful. They aren't aware of the aboleth mucus coating the spikes in the pit. However, the fact that they produce a bubble of air can prove dangerous if anyone in the pit is affected by aboleth mucus! This way, you can take a creature intended to be helpful and make it dangerous to the PCs without needing to change anything about its statblock - and present the players with a fun moral dilemma. How can they separate their ally from the Gadabout without harming them? And is it right to try and kill something that thinks it's being helpful?

Friday Encounter: The Curse of Seuss

No, I'm not dead. And yes, I'm still doing Friday Encounter posts. I understand that I haven't posted to this blog in months, but things were busy and I didn't have a lot to talk about. Well, today, that changed. I can't guarantee how frequent I'll be with posts going forward, but I did make this blog as a place to share my RPG thoughts, and I still intend to make use of it. And, yes, this is the second time I've made a Seuss-themed Friday Encounter, but sometimes I just get ideas I have to inflict on the rest of you.

This encounter was designed as a setpiece for a funhouse dungeon, but the conceit behind it could work in a number of different contexts - it could be the subject of a quest, or a status inflicted by an eccentric wizard or fey spirit, for instance. Feel free to adapt it as you wish.

While exploring the dungeon, the party comes upon an area that abides by strange rules. Depending on your goals (or how long you think your players are willing to put up with it), this area could be as small as a single room or as big as an entire floor. Either way, it should be obvious that something isn't right when the PCs enter this area. The ceiling is replaced by a stark white sky, and the surroundings are dominated by bizarre features - tall tree trunks that end in pink puffs, staircases leading to nowhere, and narrow pathways high off the ground supported by elaborate arches.

There can be any number of puzzles, traps, and encounters within this area - however, one rule that abides through all of them is that all creatures within this region must communicate in rhyme. Any in-character dialogue spoken aloud must be communicated in the form of rhyming couplets. All creatures entering this region of the dungeon will know this rule upon arriving, but will not know what happens if they fail to speak in rhyme. Optionally, if you want an extra challenge (and you really want your players to hate you), you can mandate that all dialogue out of character must rhyme as well.

It is acceptable to make up words in order to rhyme statements with them (in fact, this is entirely in keeping with the atmosphere), but these words must be communicated in a way that makes them make sense in context, such as by making up a creature that the statement refers to. The words cannot merely be non-sequiturs. For example, "we must discover an exit to this dungeon, before we get eaten by a Glubbulous Fludgeon" is acceptable, but "we must discover an exit to this dungeon, scrumbgeon" is not.

If any creature does not complete a rhyme while under the effects of the curse, they are immediately stricken by a powerful electric shock. The first time a given creature fails to rhyme, the shock causes them 1d4 lightning damage. For every subsequent failure to rhyme, the die of damage goes up by one size - ie. the second failure causes 1d6 damage, the third 1d8, the fourth 1d10, the fifth 1d12, and any subsequent failures 1d20. Players will hopefully learn to be careful with what they say after a few misses.

Players may rhyme their statements with statements made by other players or the DM. If a player fails to make a rhyme, another player can make a save by interjecting with a rhyme for the last thing they said. For example, if Alice ends a statement with "we should all make camp under this arch," Bob can chime in with "That's a great idea, I sure am parched!" before the DM rolls damage. If this happens, neither player takes damage.

This effect ends whenever a creature leaves the area carrying the effect.

Saga of the Ortegids: The Tower of Shampan

When I started blogging about The Saga of the Ortegids last year, I intended to conclude the project with a thesis statement of sorts. I was inspired by how some of my earliest dungeons came from me taking the maps from my Prima strategy guide for Dragon Warrior III and adapting them to D&D, and I wanted to do the same thing from the perspective of an older and more experienced dungeon master, creating a full-fledged dungeon based on one of the ones from the game.

I intended to write this post a lot earlier, but a lot has gotten in my way between then and now. But now that I've had the time to write up the dungeon and run it as a one-shot to simultaneously playtest it and introduce some new players to the game, I think it's finally ready to share with the world. Consider this a culmination of my efforts for Saga, and as my own way of revisiting my roots.

While written for The Saga of the Ortegids, this dungeon can be used in any setting - feel free to change names and details as necessary. I've referenced the very same dungeon in my Lunar Lands setting, which can be found in hex 031.026 of the Golnir hex map, so it would be appropriate to use there as well.

Lastly, my playtest was intended to test both the dungeon itself and my previously-proposed concept of modules in the form of DM screens containing all relevant DM-facing information on the inner surface. Thus, I designed the dungeon to fit on three 8.5x11'' sheets. You can get it in PDF form here. The first two pages are for the player-facing side of the screen; the second page should be printed twice to be placed on either side flap.

Saga of the Ortegids: Appendix N

If you haven't read the
Nintendo Power handbook,
do yourself a favor.

I know the Year of the Barbarian has run on longer than a year at this point, but I haven't had much time with which to sit down and write this post. In any case, I've put together an Appendix N for The Saga of the Ortegids, compiling a list of works that carry the same sort of feel I'm shooting for in my personal vision of the setting, or otherwise are useful as influences. See also this post on the "dials" of the setting - certain influences can be played up or down to convey different feels.

The Sacred Texts

These are to be considered in broad strokes canon to Saga.

• Dragon Warrior (1989), Dragon Warrior II (1990), and Dragon Warrior III (1992) (NES)
• Specifically the NES versions, including art and literature included in game manuals.
• The promotional art of Katsuya Terada (1963-) and Kensuke Suzuki (1964-2018)
• This art is the reason this project exists. If Dragon Quest canon is "Akira Toriyama's Dragon Quest," then The Saga of the Ortegids is "Katsuya Terada's Dragon Warrior."

Artists

• John Buscema (1927-2002)
• Clyde Caldwell (1948-)
• Larry Elmore (1948-)
• Ron Embleton (1930-1988)
• Frank Frazetta (1928-2010)
• Greg (1939-2024) and Tim Hildebrandt (1939-2006)
• John Howe (1957-)
• Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874 - 1925)
• Moebius (1938-2012)
• Earl Norem (1923-2015)
• Boris Vallejo (1941-)

Comics

• 300 (1998)
• Arak: Son of Thunder (1981-1985)
• Beowulf: Dragon Slayer (1975-1976)
• Claw the Unconquered  (1975-1978)
• Marvel's Conan the Barbarian (1970-1993)
• Dragon Quest: The Mark of Erdrick (1991-1997)
• Not canon to Saga, in large part because it wasn't translated until last year, but a good example of how you can expand on the lore of the Erdrick Trilogy while taking it in a grittier direction.
• Red Sonja (1977-1983)
• The Savage Sword of Conan (1974-1995)
• Vinland Saga (2005-2025)

Film and Television

• The 13th Warrior (1999)
• The Beastmaster (1982)
• Captain N: The Game Master (1989-1991) - S1E7 "Three Men and a Dragon" and S2E10 "The Trojan Dragon"
• Thankfully not canon to Saga, but it does at least give you a sense of how Western audiences perceived Dragon Quest when it first came out.
• Cleopatra (1963)
• Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer (1984)
• Deathstalker series (1983-1991)
• Dragonheart (1996)
• Excalibur (1981)
• Fire and Ice (1983)
• Gladiator (2000)
• Hawk the Slayer (1980)
• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1995-1999) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001)
• House of David (2025)
• Ladyhawke (1985)
• Legend (1985)
• The Legend of Zelda (1989)
• Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings (1978)
• The Northman (2022)
• The Odyssey (1997)
• Primal (2019-)
• Red Sonja (1985)
• Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
• Samurai Jack (2001-2004; 2017)
• The Scorpion King (2002)
• The Ten Commandments (1956)
• The Thief of Baghdad (1940)
• Vikings (2013-2021)
• Almost anything by Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013)
• Mostly his sword-and-sandal output, but even something like One Million Years BC could be taking place in the Worldforest.

Literature

• Beowulf
• Lin Carter (1930-1988); various
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Ferdowsi; The Shahnameh
• Gustave Flaubert; Salammbo (1862)
• Homer; The Illiad and The Odyssey
• Robert E. Howard (1906-1936); various
• Elias Lonrott; The Kalevala (1835)
• Fritz Leiber (1910-1992); various
• The Old Testament
• Orlando Furioso
• The Saga of the Volsungs
• Yes, that's where the name came from.
• JRR Tolkien; The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955)
• Valmiki; The Ramayana
• Virgil; The Aeneid
• Vyasa; The Mahabharata
• Wu Cheng'en; Journey to the West (1592)

Video Games

All entries include North American promotional art and manual materials, if applicable.

• Assassin's Creed series (2007-)
• Dragon Warrior I & II (2000) and Dragon Warrior III (2001; Game Boy Color)
• This is after the series started embracing its ties to anime in the international market, but they are in my opinion the best versions of the games, and some content added for these releases found their way into Saga.
• Dragon Warrior IV (1992; NES)
• Faxanadu (1989; NES)
• Final Fantasy (1990; NES)
• The Legend of Zelda (1987) and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988) (NES)

Friday Encounter: The Shrine of Blood

Here's an encounter I used in a recent session. It was originally designed as a dungeon room, but it could easily work as a feature on the road or in the wilderness as well.

I generally hew to the wisdom that magic items that just give flat bonuses to rolls are the most boring kind of magic items there are, and don't feel particularly magical. Case in point, it was only a few years ago that I realized that +1 weapons and armor were actually supposed to be magical, and not just a way to represent superior craftsmanship (maybe video games have spoiled me). If I'm going to use a magic item, I think it should always have special properties, abilities, and limitations that make it more than just a flat bonus. If you can abstract a magic item into the calculations of your attack roll, then you forget that you have the item in the first place, and magic should never be forgettable.

However, I can't deny there is a use for flat bonuses to attacks some times - it just makes for a really underwhelming treasure or quest reward. Here's a way you can make +1 weapons more interesting by giving them unique conditions to attain them, and limitations on their use.

The Shrine of Blood

The PCs should come upon a shrine where the statue of a god of war and battle (Kerne, Estark, Ares, Crom, or whoever fits the role in your setting) is stood with a shallow wide-brimmed bowl at its feet. Engraved in silver along the bowl's rim are the words "My champions shall be anointed in the blood of their enemies." A DC 10 Religion check will identify the god and their nature as a god of war; clerics, paladins, and characters with the Acolyte background or similar will know this automatically. Additionally, a follower of the god who prays in front of the shrine will receive a vision of the statue coming to life and dipping one of its weapons into the bowl.

If anyone fills the bowl with blood from a creature they have slain within the day and then dips a weapon into it, the statue's eyes glow, followed by the weapon glowing for a few seconds. That weapon then becomes a +1 weapon of the appropriate type until the next long rest, at which point it reverts to its original state. The blood is consumed through this ritual, but the bowl can be refilled an unlimited amount of times. The ritual will not work if the blood is not fresh, or if the user did not land the killing blow on the creature the blood came from.

Taloon the Arms Dealer

With the Year of the Barbarian drawing to a close, I can't deny that the biggest project it's seen has been The Saga of the Ortegids - my attempt to construct a tabletop-friendly setting based on the original Dragon Quest trilogy as depicted through the grittier, sword-and-sorcery-flavored art of Katsuya Terada, as used in early Western box covers and manual art, instead of the now-iconic work of Dragon Ball's Akira Toriyama. My original intent was to have a dungeon to show for my work by now, capping off the year by revisiting my roots and adapting one of the games' dungeons to the tabletop. My work schedule has kept me from attending to that as much as I'd like to, so I won't have any of that ready to share until the beginning of next year. However, in the meantime, I did have an idle thought that refused to leave my head, and I'm making that your problem.

In my original post outlining the project, I specified that Saga would only strictly adapt the first three games in the series, which all take place in the same universe; continuity gets a lot more loose after that. That being said, Dragon Quest IV did see a Western release at the tail end of the NES's lifespan, and with similar marketing. Eagle-eyed fans will already know that a couple of references to DQ4 and beyond have slipped into Saga, though not always in their original context. Therefore, I think certain elements are still on the table, and it's one of those I'd like to discuss today.

I would consider Dragon Quest IV to be the first "traditional JRPG" in the way we understand it today. Yes, there were RPGs made in Japan before it, including the first three Dragon Quest games, but those games are almost indistinguishable from western RPGs of the era, with PCs frequently being customizable blank slates and the gameplay focusing more on player-driven open-world exploration. DQ4, meanwhile, emphasized the story first and foremost, with a more linear plot and a predefined set of characters whose struggles were told through scripted cutscenes and personal arcs. Hell, the antagonist is a brooding silver-haired twink in a black coat who wants to destroy the world because he was wronged by society, and this was almost a decade before Sephiroth made it cool.

An entire genre exists
because of this man.

It's interesting, then, that such an influential game would also introduce the character of Torneko (or Taloon if you're a Westerner, or Torneko Taloon if you're a Westerner who got into this after the 90s). Torneko is about as far from a typical playable JRPG character as you could imagine. In a cast that consists mainly of sexy teenagers with emotional baggage, Torneko is a jolly, rotund, middle-aged dad who just wants to raise money to support his family. In spite of this, or more likely because of it, he's probably the single most iconic and beloved character in the entire series. He got his entire spinoff series, which kick-started Japan's own take on the roguelike genre with the mystery dungeon, and he continues to make cameo appearances in later games to this day. If Dragon Quest has a mascot that isn't the Slime, it's Torneko.

With that context out of the way, I'd like to pivot to the much-argued dichotomy of transliteration versus localization. Stay with me, I promise we're going somewhere with this.

In adapting media produced in one language to another language, the eternal debate is this: do you translate the original material directly word-for-word to preserve the original intent, accepting that certain cultural references might not land the same way in a new context, or do you rewrite the source material to be more understandable to a new audience? There's been plenty of ink spilled on the topic of which approach is better, and it's not a subject I intend to get into in this post. I think there's a right and a wrong way to do both.

Pertinently, I'm of the opinion that the modern approach to translating the Dragon Quest games is exactly how you should not do localization - the series' current localization team takes heavy liberties with how they present dialogue and characterization, often painting things in a much more light-hearted and comedic light than what was intended in the original Japanese, to the point where the head translator had to apologize in an interview for writing horse puns into a scene where a child has his father brutally murdered in front of him. Some people like this approach, and that's fine, but it is absolutely not what the series is in Japanese, and I wrote Saga in part as a rebuttal to this very phenomenon.

However, I'd be lying if I said that the Dragon Quest series hadn't suffered from transliteration at times as well. One of my favorite examples of this is how the English NES manual of Dragon Warrior IV describes Taloon as an arms dealer.

See, if you've experienced enough Japanese fantasy media, you can figure out exactly how this happened. In Japanese RPGs, the stores where you would purchase weapons are often referred to as buki-ya, literally "weapon shop." A localization would likely render this as "blacksmith" - while that's a different word in Japanese, anyone playing an RPG would recognize a blacksmith's shop as the obvious place to upgrade your equipment (interestingly, Taloon doesn't actually appear to make the weapons he sells; rather, his operation seems to consist of going dungeon delving to loot weapons and then selling them to other adventurers). However, the NES manual directly translated buki-ya into English, and Taloon was described as an "arms merchant" - something that has a very different connotation in the English-speaking world.

Normally, this is the part where we'd all point and laugh at how ridiculous that makes this character sound. But this is an RPG blog run by a deranged autist who gets inspiration from the weirdest places. And I kind of love it.

In popular media, the stock character of the arms dealer is usually a villainous figure tied to organized crime. Think of Ulysses Klaue from Black Panther, or if you're older, Destro from GI Joe. They're usually depicted as unscrupulous cold-hearted capitalists profiteering off of senseless bloodshed, willing to prop up civil wars and tinpoint dictatorships simply to line their own pockets. With this in mind, an arms dealer turning out to be a wholesome family man is actually a very interesting subversion of expectations.

If The Saga of the Ortegids is intended to be an exploration of the implied setting of, specifically, the Western presentation of Dragon Warrior lore, resisting the urge to add context from the original Japanese, perhaps Taloon really is an arms dealer. Maybe he's not merely supplying adventurers, but covertly running weapons to different sides of an ongoing conflict to make some extra coin. It's quite thought-provoking to contemplate how someone like Taloon could have ended up in this situation. Are times so tough that he's forced to extend his trade to the black market to make ends meet, knowing that he can't fail his beloved wife and son? Is he perhaps attempting to gain favor with multiple warring factions in the hopes that they can be swayed to leave him and his family out of the conflict?

Yes, the Taloon we see in Dragon Warrior IV is very clearly not doing this, but perhaps there's an alternate universe counterpart of him that exists in the universe of The Saga of the Ortegids who is. It wouldn't be the first time a version of him showed up outside of his original context  (not even on this blog), and because the source material for Saga doesn't directly include DQ4, I feel comfortable taking more leeway on how I present him compared to how I present characters from the original trilogy. It'd make for a fun nod for any players who were familiar with the original games, as well as an opportunity to turn their expectations on their head with the true extent of his operations.

More practically, an unwilling arms dealer would also make for an interesting NPC to shake up faction dynamics. If he's supplying an ongoing conflict, does he take sides, or does he try to play both sides against each other for his own ends? The PCs could easily become involved in his schemes, perhaps running weapons for him, or bailing him out of trouble if his smuggling operations attract the wrong attention. Because Taloon's family-oriented motives are sympathetic ones, more morally-inclined PCs might be more willing to back him up than they would a stereotypical arms dealer motivated only by cold hard cash, which could open fun opportunities for faction play to parties that might not ordinarily want to get involved with the criminal underbelly of the setting. At the same time, it presents a moral dilemma - are they willing to perpetuate a bloody conflict if it means a sweet old man gets to come home to his family another night?

So, yes, this is all a very deliberate misinterpretation of a bad translation. But it's a fun one, dammit - and I can't help but feel like dropping this incarnation of Taloon into a campaign set during the Kinslayer Wars, or another conflict in a different setting, would shake things up well.