Hanguo

By this point, we've covered every notable location from the overworld of Dragon Quest III. This does not mean we've covered every location in the game - if cramming an expansive open world into an NES carttridge wasn't impressive enough, they crammed two in there. Apparently, the original Japanese release used every single megabyte of storage space on the cartridge, and it shows. But we'll get to that later.

For now, we've explored the implications of the setting and its potential for the tabletop, extrapolating on throwaway pieces of NPC dialogue to construct what is in my opinion a pretty compelling sword and sorcery setting, well suited for hexcrawling - really, DQ3 is in itself a good example of what a hexcrawl campaign could look like. We've in particular highlighted the History's Greatest Hits nature of Erdland, detailing how the setting freely mashes up counterparts of real-world cultures from a variety of different eras to create an effect not dissimilar to the works of Robert E. Howard. It's a world where ancient Rome, medieval Britain, Vedic India, and even the American colonies can coexist at the same time, as though blending together all the parts of history conducive to fantastic swashbuckling adventure.

One culture that's notably absent, however, is China. If you look at the world map, the area between Dharma Abbey and Zipangu is largely wilderness. You can make out the vague approximations of the coastline, but there are no cities or dungeons in that region. There's an inn around where Korea would be, but that's about it. Obviously, if we are to look at the map with the conceit that it is only a representation of the setting necessarily limited by game mechanics rather than a exact diagetic recreation, it would be silly to assume this region truly is uninhabited wilderness. Humans have a habit of settling in places, and the area has open plains and a large central river that could easily support agriculture, perhaps even on the level of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. And those patrons at the inn had to get there from somewhere.

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.

I have a few factors motivating my train of thought here. For one, I'll admit to finding Chinese history and mythology a deeply fascinating subject that I wish more fantasy would draw from. The wuxia genre alone has some very compelling ideas, tropes, and motifs that go virtually ignored outside the country of origin. But it would also give an explanation for an otherwise incongruous part of the setting.

One aspect of the settings of the Dragon Quest games that I find particularly interesting is the role of martial arts. In DQ3, one of the playable classes is the fighter. In D&D terms, they're actually what would be called a monk - D&D fighters are instead called warriors. They deal more damage than any other class when unarmed and have the best critical hits, but they can only use a minimal selection of weapons and armor. In exchange, some weapon types, like katars, are exclusive to them. In the concept and promotional artwork for 3, they're always drawn in Chinese attire - even in the Western NES manual, they're basically drawn in the same outfits they're wearing in the Japanese art. In later games, there are other characters belonging to this class, with similar abilities, including Alena from Dragon Quest IV, my personal favorite character in the entire series; in addition, martial arts tournaments make appearances here and there. Despite this, these characters and events are more often than not placed in the same medieval European setting as everyone else, and no one seems to find it strange. It's just another fact of the setting that Chinese-influenced martial arts show up right alongside knights and wizards.

I always found the inclusion of monks as a default D&D class strange. To me, the class is so grounded in orientalism that they more often than not seem out of place in a typical medieval European setting. But I've never really minded it in Dragon Quest, probably because it blends into the general mashup of historical and cultural influences, and it instead becomes a charming quirk of the setting - a reminder that this isn't the Middle Ages we're used to. We can make it make more sense in The Saga of the Ortegids if we presume that these martial traditions, and their associated trappings, originated from Hanguo and spread from there.

I don't think martial arts and martial artists would be limited to Hanguo, though. On the contrary, I'd lean into it and have martial arts schools as far west as Portoga. If you can recruit martial artists in Aliahan, either they or their traditions must be well-traveled. Furthermore, there's a grave in the Romalian city of Kazave noted as the resting place of a man who killed a bear with his bare hands - and if you visit at night, his ghost admits that he actually used a set of iron katars, which can be purchased at the town's armory and equipped by fighters. Since we aren't holding ourselves to how things work in the game, this doesn't necessarily mean this man was a martial artist, but I feel like that would be an interesting angle. As I've stated before, one thing I find interesting about the world of DQ3 is that despite the disparate cultural influences of the various regions, everyone seems well-connected to everywhere else, and they're equals in terms of technology and socio-political influence, causing everything to become somewhat of a melange. Having kung fu practitioners in the equivalent of Europe is certainly consistent with this.

Thus, I would imagine that Hanguo's cultural sphere extends well beyond China's did in the real Middle Ages. I'd posit that most of its power would come from trade - geographically, it's set up to be a wealthy country, with the river giving access to the sea, and it's close to Baharata, which is noted as an important trade center itself. It might maintain something like the Silk Road, stretching far into the west and allowing dissemination of goods and ideas. This could easily be the setting for the PCs being tasked with playing caravan guards. It could even be the framework for an entire campaign, visiting stops along the way on the journey between the east and west.

It's likely that Hanguo, like Romaly and Manoza, would be a successor state to the bygone Aliahanian Empire. The aforementioned inn is linked via portal to a temple in the Southlands, suggesting to me that both are built on Aliahanian ruins and make use of the portal network that linked their various colonies. In addition to giving license for ruins and relics in the area, it would explain their well-connected nature - and potentially establish a rivalry between the three powers over who is the true successor to ld Aliahan.