Tales of the Lunar Lands: The Saga of the Ortegids

Know, O prince, that between the years of the fall of the Sons of Aliahan, and the years when the moonless sky drank the Great Pit of Giaga, there was an Age undreamed of, where shining kingdoms lay spread across the worlds above and below like blue mantles beneath the stars - Romalia, Samanao, Ashalam and Baharata, Zipangu with its dark-haired women and towers of dragon-haunted mystery, Edina with its chivalry, Isis that bordered on the rich lands of Portoga, Rhone with its shadow-guarded tombs, Moonbrooke whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Alefgard, reigning supreme in the dreaming heartland. Hither came Erdrick, the Aliahanian - black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of Torland under his sandalled feet.

- The Midenhall Chronicles

This is basically my vision,
summarized in one image.

I don't think I need to introduce that I'm a fan of the Dragon Quest games. I've posted about them many a time, and I maintain to this day that were it not for me playing the third game on the Game Boy Advance as a kid, I would never have become the DM I am now. Not only was that game my first real introduction to an interactive, open-ended game world with player-driven exploration, the excellent Prima strategy guide was a major source of inspiration for my campaigns and homebrew creations. I borrowed a lot of quests, dungeons, items, and locations from that game in my early days.

Now, I would like to explore taking things a step further - creating a full-fledged campaign setting out of the world of Dragon Quest.

I'm not the first person to suggest such a thing. On the subreddit for the series, I've seen a number of players ask for advice on how to take the Dragon Quest games and adapt them to the tabletop. Usually, the advice I see focuses on making D&D play more like a console JRPG, or using a system specifically designed to mimic one.

I get where this line of thinking comes from. In Japan, Dragon Quest is a much bigger phenomenon than it is here, and defined the popular perception of the fantasy genre in the way The Lord of the Rings did in the west. As such, a lot of Japanese fantasy pastiches heavily ape the games, not only in aesthetics but also in its tropes and mechanics. I'd like to do a post on this phenomenon somewhere down the line, but you'll notice, for example, that in a lot of modern fantasy anime like Konosuba, you'll see such things as "heroes" and "monsters" being defined and recognized metaphysical classes of beings ontologically different than regular people or animals, and sometimes even people having recognized "levels." That can all be traced to Dragon Quest - for much of Japan, part of the fantasy genre, at least a very popular subgenre thereof, is things acting like they're in a video game.

I, instead, would like to go in the opposite direction.

Lately, I've been constructing a setting I'm calling The Saga of the Ortegids around this conceit - what happens to the setting of Dragon Quest when anything "video gamey" about it is treated as indeed a construct of game mechanics, rather than a diegetic in-universe truth? Take the maps, the characters, the plots, but strip back the video game artifacts to bring the setting back in line with its roots in classical Western fantasy and TRPGs.

There's more precedent here than you might think. Let's take a trip back in time. Today, in the west, the series is known primarily for its designs courtesy of the famed manga artist Akira Toriyama, better known as the creator of Dragon Ball. In fact, it's so associated with Toriyama that most people don't even know about its other two co-creators, Yuji Horii and Koichi Sugiyama (and if they know the latter, it's mostly as "that guy who said some homophobic things"), despite the fact that in Japan, all three were established as big names by the time the first game came out. Since the original Dragon Quest came out shortly after Dragon Ball started its run, Toriyama was already a household name, and his involvement was a major boost for sales, coupled with advertisements in Shonen Jump, the magazine that Dragon Ball ran in.

However, when the first game was released in the West in 1989 as Dragon Warrior (due to trademark issues with TSR), no one knew who Toriyama was. The game's main selling point in Japan was useless. Instead, the marketing heavily stressed the game's inspiration in tabletop RPGs and classical fantasy, with art inspired by the likes of Larry Elmore. I've seen some people blame the series never catching on stateside on this, but that overlooks the historical context involved. And I do think that the western art is beautiful and evocative in its own right. Consider that these games started coming out on the NES, with limited resources and often highly abstracted 8-bit graphics. For many, art like this was required for players to visualize what was going on. I don't doubt that what American gamers had in their heads back in the late 80s looked much more like Elmore than Toriyama.

My intent, with The Saga of the Ortegids, is to reverse-engineer the world that western players imagined all those years ago in the original Dragon Quest games, and to explore it as a setting for tabletop campaigns. If we prod a bit at the implications underpinning it, it's actually quite a compelling setting, with strong undertones of Norse mythology mixed with Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age and the occasional dash of gonzo pulp, as I'll be elaborating on over the next few posts.

I'd like to set myself some ground rules here:

The primary focus here will be on the original three NES titles - the so-called Erdrick Trilogy. This is for a number of reasons. For one, they all take place in the same continuity, whereas the later games are mostly stand-alone affairs. The overarching narrative of the trilogy is also surprisingly akin to a Norse saga, which is something I want to play up. They also were all released for the NES under the Dragon Warrior name (IV was as well, but that one won't fit as nicely), while later titles were not released in the west until much later, and under Toriyama's original art. While I may reference elements from later in the series, they will be used sparingly, with a strong preference toward cosmic entities like gods or demons that could conceivably cross universes. I recognize this disqualifies Dragon Quest V, easily the most sword-and-sorcery-flavored entry in the series (I am of the opinion that 1982's Conan the Barbarian is a better DQ5 movie than the actual DQ5 movie, Your Story), but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
The conceit here is that the events of the games are mostly canon, but not necessarily in the way they are portrayed in games. As stated above, game mechanics will be treated as just that, game mechanics; it will be assumed that the way the story actually played out in-universe was more realistic. For instance, "monsters" are not a discrete class of beings as portrayed in later games, but instead refers to a variety of unrelated creatures that might be encountered, as is the case in D&D.
Maybe not like a poorly-drawn
Keanu Reeves, though.
Similar to the above, in-game graphics are taken to be a representation, not a literal image of how the world looks. Western art, from manuals, box art, posters, and the like, will be treated as being closer to a literal depiction of the setting. Ergo, Erdrick existed, but he did not resemble Gohan (and probably looked quite a bit like John Buscema's Conan, as a matter of fact - there's more to this than the ramblings of a madman, as you'll see).
The official English releases of the Dragon Quest series were handled by a different studio from Dragon Quest VIII onward. In my personal opinion, this marked a major decline in quality of the translations, as the studio decided to heavily play up the comedic aspects of the franchise over translating the Japanese script faithfully, adding in jokes in previously dramatic scenes, and renamed most characters and locations. I will be using the English terminology used in the NES and GBC releases wherever possible, both out of personal preference and because these were the versions western audiences would have had access to when the series was marketed using Elmore-style art. You may have noticed that my riff on Howard at the start of this article used a few of the newer names - this is because I feel like some of them work better as names for countries as opposed to cities, but I will still be using the original English names for capitals.
On the same lines, there will be a strong preference for using material present in the original NES releases of the original trilogy over that added in later remakes. Only NES content will be treated as guaranteed canon; material from later releases may or may not be used as I see fit.