The Romalian Empire

It does not feel this massive when you're walking around.

After leaving Aliahan, the first place you go in Dragon Quest III is the city of Romaly. Or Romaria, depending on which version you're playing. For the purposes of The Saga of the Ortegids, I'm going with Romaly being the city, and positioning it as the capital of a much larger Romalian Empire. The comparisons with the Roman Empire are obvious given the city's name and location, but aside from the superficial stuff, it's also the first city you go to that has an arena where you can wager money on the outcomes of battles, much like the Colosseum. The king is a greedy, feeble-minded man with no real desire to rule, to the point of insisting on passing his title to the first people who can help him with his problems as an excuse to abdicate and spend his wealth gambling. This makes for quite a memorable NPC, despite him having little importance beyond that, and it certainly brings to mind some of the more corrupt and decadent Roman emperors. In the game, you have to decline the offer if you want to progress (accepting means you get to walk around as the NPCs salute you, but you can't leave the city). However, if you want to incorporate domain-level play into your campaign, having a king so eager to offer the throne to the PCs could be a useful way to introduce players to this side of the game.

Romaly was likely founded as an ancient Aliahanian colony, given that there is a portal in a shrine in Aliahan that dumps you out pretty close to the capital. After the old Aliahanian Empire fell, Romaly was likely a center of power that was able to exert considerable control over its surroundings once communication with Aliahan was lost. It stands to reason that the region would have been settled fairly extensively by Old Aliahanians, and there would surely be many such ruins in the area. It's also not hard to imagine Romalia styling itself as a successor to Aliahan as the great empire of the world, and may have taken on some of its traditions, at least in the past - compare the Byzantine Empire's relationship to Rome. Or the Holy Roman, or the Ottoman, or the Russian, or...you get the idea.

There are two human villages located to the north of Romaly, Kazave and Noaniels, as well as Elvenham, a secluded kingdom of xenophobic elves living in the woods. Neither Kazave nor Noaniels has a king; additionally, villagers in the inn at Kazave mention happenings in Noaniels, which suggests there's some level of contact between the two - at least enough for rumors to spread. Based on this, I'm inclined to run both villages as subjects of the Romalian Empire, which would set its boundaries as running from the impassible mountains on the border with Portoga in the west to the Inland Sea (every sword and sorcery setting needs one of those!) in the east - I've marked this with red lines on the map. This would make Romalia by far the largest nation in Erdland, again fitting the Roman parallels. This is an empire in its prime - one of great wealth, luxury, and power. However, the Imperial forces might be stretched rather thin, considering no one has done anything about the curse in Noaniels. Noaniels is thus most likely a frontier territory of little concern to the imperial core. Thus, Romalia offers the sweet spot of being centralized enough for courtly drama to take place, but still feudal enough for there to be untouched opportunities for exploration and adventure where civilization hasn't smoothed things over. There's certainly enough territory, and room to place adventure sites, that one could run an entire campaign that never leaves the boundaries of the Empire.

Art by Samuel Sandelin

This is particularly of note when one looks at the western region of the Empire, which is cut off from the capital region by high mountains and is only accessible through a pass in the north, west of Kazave. I would, personally, add more passes closer to Romaly for the sake of player convenience, even if that route is the most accessible. Despite the geographic separation, the area consists largely of plains, which would appear quite habitable even though there's no settlements in that area in the game. I would hypothesize that this region is also Romalian territory, but a rough borderland where the law is at its weakest since it's cut off from the rest of the Empire - it is, after all, the location of Shampan Tower, the redoubt of a powerful bandit warlord, and it's mentioned that the place has been a hideout for criminals for generations. If one wanted to murderhobo their way across Romalia, they would face the fewest repercussions here. Of course, if one wanted a wilder, points-of-light style setting, it could just as easily be ran as unsettled wilderness yet to be fully explored.