Playing With Power

In my earliest days as a DM, the sourcebook I got the most out of wasn't published by Wizards of the Coast. Or even by TSR. It wasn't made for the current edition of D&D at the time, or any edition for that matter. Nor was it made for any TRPG at all.

The sourcebook I got the most out of as a DM was the Prima strategy guide for Dragon Quest III.

I had the game - technically, it was Dragon Warrior III; the trademark for "Dragon Quest" in the West was taken at the time (by a TRPG, funnily enough) - on my Game Boy Advance back then. I was probably 10, at the oldest. I never finished the game, but when I look back, I'm still honestly amazed at the technical achievement that it took to create it.

With Dragon Quest being a considerably more obscure series here than it is in Japan (where so many people skipped work to wait in line for new releases that the government had to issue a law that new entries in the series had to be released on weekends - yes, really!), I'm not sure how many of my readers have played it or even heard of it. I've seen some people online call III the foundational JRPG that defined the subgenre, but really, it plays much closer to a western RPG, with a party of fully customizable characters, a plot mostly consisting of "your father was killed by an evil wizard, go get revenge" and a vast open world full of unique locations, dungeons, and sidequests that can be explored in any order the player wishes (though some areas require quests to open up). It's basically a top-down Elder Scrolls game with turn-based combat, and yet its world is more detailed and full of things to do than any Bethesda title in recent memory. And my GBA copy was a port. All of this fit on an NES cartridge.

There's a lot I could say about Dragon Quest III. It'll probably get its own post at some point. But this post is not about Dragon Quest III. This post is about the Dragon Quest III strategy guide.

Remember how I said I never beat the game as a kid? Well, this was around the time that video game strategy guides were big, and every book store carried racks upon racks of them. Hoping to figure out how to progress, I picked up the Prima guide from the same Borders my parents got me the D&D 3E starter set from. Maybe that was a stroke of fate, because I used that book for TRPGs much more than I did for a computer RPG.

The strategy guide for DQ3 is one I have fond memories of. It has a full walkthrough of every town, dungeon, and quest in the game, with detailed maps, and I ran my players through plenty of those dungeons and even lifted a few NPCs and quests that stuck with me. It has a list of every single item in the game, from your basic consumables to legendary artifacts and quest items - each of them illustrated! - which gave me plenty of fodder for some of my first homebrew magic items. It has every encounterable monster statted out, summarizing the attacks and strategies of each, and I copied the radar chart format they used to represent the stats of each enemy for many of the crude RPG bestiaries - yes, plural - I made with pens and notebook paper in my youth.

Anyway, as I discovered when looking for images, it turns out the whole thing is on the Internet Archive. Take a look if you want some game material.

If you're looking for inspirational material for TRPG campaigns, I highly recommend getting your hands on video game strategy guides. Even if you have no interest in playing the actual games. I don't know if they're still making them now that GameFAQs took over the internet, but if you can find some at a reasonable price, definitely pick them up. You'll find plenty of dungeon maps you can adapt to your campaigns, and plenty of quests laid out with in-depth information on what paths you can take and where they lead, which are ripe to be adapted into a tabletop adventure. Even if you just want to flip through and look at the concept art they used for filler illustrations - something I'm not ashamed to admit I did plenty of times - you just might find something to inspire you.

Dave Hargrave, creator of the Arduin Grimoire, was a firm believer that his work would benefit DMs even if they didn't use the same system he did, because "the numbers don't matter; only the ideas." Even before I knew anything about Arduin or heard that quote, I agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment. I've used plenty of books for RPG systems I wasn't running just because I liked the ideas they had. And some of those RPGs weren't even made for the tabletop.