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| Art by Ted Nasmith |
Of all heroes of the Ortegid dynasty, their progenitor, Ortega, is the one we know the least about. What little overarching plot Dragon Quest III has is driven by him - he's a legendary warrior of Aliahan and the father of the protagonist, who in turn would become known as the legendary hero Erdrick. Ortega feared that the sorcerer-king Baramos would pose a threat to his family, and set out to kill him shortly after the birth of his child, but was never heard from again.
Your motivation in DQ3 mostly boils down to avenging your father and/or living up to his legacy, and he's mentioned at a few points throughout the game, even if his in-person screen time is minimal. We know a few places he went and a few characters he encountered, but much of his adventures are shrouded in mystery. The recent HD release added new cutscenes detailing more of Ortega's adventures, which I personally feel was a mistake - he had a lot more mystique when you only heard of him from NPCs' accounts and had to put the pieces together yourself. But the broad strokes we get could provide a good basis for a campaign.
In this campaign, the PCs would take the roles of companions of Ortega on his journey to the Southlands. Of all of these, this is the era that would probably have the most appeal to players already familiar with the Dragon Quest series, since it's grounded in events directly discussed in the games and would involve locations visited there. However, there's enough empty space in what we know to allow for DMs to add new quests and locations. The main drawback is that the presence of Ortega shackles things to canon events somewhat, which could lead to railroading and remove the sense of danger if players know he has to reach his canonical fate. Furthermore, you'd need to figure out how Ortega himself would be handled. While I personally don't have an issue with DMPCs, it's all too easy for them to turn into invincible plot devices that take all the glory from the actual PCs if run poorly. One way to get around this would be for Ortega to be run by a player, or for a PC to take his role in the story instead.
Early on in DQ3, after returning his stolen crown, the King of Romaly offers to hand the throne over to you. You can accept the offer and play out a short scene of being the king and surveying your domain, but ultimately, you have to leave the position behind if you want to continue with the game. It's definitely a fun and memorable segment, though - and since a big part of Saga of the Ortegids is reframing the mechanics of the Dragon Quest games in a more realistic light, I think this could be made into a part of the setting's history.
Perhaps Erdrick did accept the crown of Romaly, but instead of abdicating right away, he sat on the throne for some years afterward before ultimately deciding to return to a life of adventure. If that's the case, we now have a few years' gap in our timeline that a campaign could take place in. Since there aren't any major changes to the world's status quo before and after this quest, we can assume that Erdrick's rule was a fairly peaceful one - but who knows what could have been happening behind the scenes?
This option would probably work best for a campaign taking place entirely or predominately in Romaly, with PCs being Romalian citizens during the reign of King Erdrick the Aliahanian. There are a number of directions it could be taken - it could simply be a backdrop for whatever adventures the PCs concern themselves with, but there are opportunities for storytelling if the DM does want to involve the royal court, too. After all, this would see a weak but familiar (and no doubt easily controlled) King cede the throne to a foreign barbarian, with no ties to the existing power players and no way of predicting his actions - and there would surely be factions with different opinions on the matter that PCs could get tied up in, if noble intrigue is on the menu.
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| Art by John Howe |
3. After Baramos
After Erdrick's party departs for the Pit of Giaga and enters Torland, we don't hear from Erdland again. But it's a pretty expansive setting with many interesting areas and cultures, as I've blogged about extensively, and it would be a shame to let it go to waste. What was going on on the surface while Erdrick was saving Alefgard? This campaign would address that question.
This campaign would deal with the repercussions of a few major shakeups in the setting. Baramos has just been slain, and that leaves Gondo - a pretty major kingdom, and a strategically important one - without a ruler. This could lead to a power vacuum with multiple factions seeking to take control. Consider how it's implied that Baramos himself overthrew the previous rulership. There could be loyal subjects of the sorcerer-king hoping to continue his legacy going up against the downtrodden natives looking to finally liberate themselves from tyrannical rule, mixed in with other kingdoms hoping to swoop in and take some of the land for themselves, or install a ruler they can trust to serve their interests. At the center of all this is a pit known for spawning monsters, from which an ascendant dark god has just issued a threat to take over. Some factions would likely want to make sure this threat is controlled as soon as possible, and see themselves as the best ones to do it, while to others, it would be an obstacle to their ambitions that they would need dealt with before they enact their plans.
There are other potential plot hooks here, too. For one, Gondo wouldn't be the only nation in crisis - consider also that Zipangu has had its own draconic ruler killed, and that she was able to keep the populace controlled through fear and fanatic devotion. What happens when that centralizing force is taken away? Additionally, upon hearing Zoma's challenge, the King of Aliahan falls into a deep sense of malaise and hopelessness. This could itself provide issues to the kingdom if the ruler is no longer interested in ruling, and some factions both abroad and from within might well see their chance to strike when he is at his weakest.
When we leave the protagonist of Dragon Quest I, he has set off to establish a new kingdom of his own in a distant land - and when we pick up in the sequel, the continent-spanning empire he founded has been split into three kingdoms ruled by his heirs. That gives us a lot of ground to cover, and it's one that would be a perfect fit for certain campaign models.
In this campaign, PCs would be Alefgarder settlers who followed Aleph Wyrmbeorn to Lorasia, then an unsettled and disjointed wilderness, in the early days of his kingdom, and would play a role in shaping its fate. This would be an exploration-focused campaign - PCs might be tasked with surveying the land, establishing new trade routes, and dealing with locals, who may or may not be friendly. In other words, it'd work very well for a sandbox campaign, perhaps something like West Marches.
There would also be room for domain-level play - an empire of the size of Aleph's would surely need regional power centers in order to project power effectively, and PCs could take the roles of dukes, counts, and barons carving out their own feudal demesne in the new kingdom. This in turn provides a good prospect for PCs to advance their place in society - they might start as peasants dreaming of a better life or landless second sons of nobles back home, but through service to the new King could be rewarded with domains of their own.
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| Art by Chris Achilleos |
However, as great of an empire as Aleph's was, we know that it didn't last long after his death. The three Ortegid kingdoms of DQ2 are all descended from those that the empire was split into after the land was divided among Aleph's three sons. We have little in the way of details as to what happened between then and the present day of 2, but any student of history can tell you it probably wasn't a time of peace. The division of a great empire has often led to civil war, with disparate factions competing to reunify the bygone kingdom and take back territory from their neighbors. Alliances would constantly be made and broken, and the map could drastically change even from month to month.
A campaign set in the heat of such a period could have many opportunities. PCs might be in the service of one of the three kingdoms, taking part in battles against its rivals or conducting more clandestine operations in service of their goals. Alternatively, the chaos of the war could serve as a backdrop for their adventures - and there's plenty of ways a party could take advantage of the instability of the situation and the diverted attention of the authorities to their own benefit. Battles between the warring states could form obstacles the party would have to navigate around, so as to get from one point to the other without being caught up in the crossfire.
One way to really make this campaign fun would be to run it as a direct sequel to a campaign set in the previous era, with the same group. First, players would be involved in the establishment of the Ortegid Empire, carving out their own sphere of influence within it. Then, you jump forward a few decades to take a look at those domains ravaged by civil war! The PCs from the previous campaigns could become NPCs, while the strongholds they built could be revisited. This would be a great way to build more attachment to the setting if the players had a role in shaping it, as well as making for a living, dynamic game world where the choices players made in one setting impact the next.
So here's a bit of trivia for you.
The ending for Dragon Quest II is a pretty conventional one. The evil is defeated, and everyone goes home and celebrates, roll credits. This was a time before storytelling was really a priority in video games. But in an interview, Yuji Horii described the ending we were going to get, had his original plan been implemented.
In it, there's a key difference to the final game - in order to defeat Malroth, the Prince of Samartoria (or Cannock - I'm aware that he's never actually been called that in English, and I'm stretching the rules I set for myself a bit in using the Japanese name for the country rather than the city, but I want to be consistent) must sacrifice his life. This has some interesting parallels with how Malroth was summoned through a willing human sacrifice, and it fits in pretty well if you are to interpret this as the Spell of Embodiment being dispelled through the same process. Anyway, in this version, the Prince's sister is told of his fate when the Prince of Lorasia travels to Cannock to celebrate their victory. Mad with grief, she blames the Prince of Lorasia for her brother's fate, and stabs him to death when he retires to his room.
This was scrapped because they didn't have enough disk space for such a cutscene, and they decided in retrospect it would make for a really unsatisfying ending. And I suppose, from the perspective of a video game, it would. Plenty of gamers would be frustrated to sink many hours into a game only for their character to be assassinated just before the credits. However, it's also something straight out of a Greek myth or a Norse saga. And, me being me, that alone is enough to make me prefer it over the ending we got - especially when this project draws heavily on myths and oral tradition for inspiration.
A potential campaign could be set immediately after the events of DQ2 - but using this ending instead. Such an act would have plenty of interesting consequences. Lorasia would surely want to take action if their crown prince was murdered at the neighboring kingdom's capital, and if we presume that Lorasia and Samartoria fought a war in the past, this could ignite old tensions between them. At the same time, both kingdoms just days ago were fighting a war against Rhone, and they might be in a precarious position, their forces exhausted and morale strained. Furthermore, you have Moonbrooke in the middle - surely they were hoping to rebuild their destroyed capital and get things back to normal following the defeat of Rhone, only for things to get even worse. And Rhone itself would be dealing with the immediate fallout of the death of Hargon, leaving them with a succession crisis of their own.
The PCs would be caught in the middle of all of this, as the celebrations that one war is over quickly turn to dread over the new war just beginning. They could ally themselves with any number of factions springing up in the aftermath, or try to get by in the middle of a rapidly combusting powder keg. In addition to the many potential leads to pursue, this is a campaign that would offer fanservice for players familiar with the series, taking place in the direct fallout of one of the games and with opportunities for recognizable characters, locations, and items to make an appearance, but there's still room for the PCs to be important. Any campaign set in an existing universe risks having the PCs be overshadowed by canon characters, but if two of the three heroes of DQ2 are dead and the Princess of Moonbrooke is busy trying to hold the remnants of her people together, they aren't going to get in the way.