The Pirates of Thangobad

At the southern tip of the Eastern Continent, in a clearing on the coast, is fortress used by a band of pirates. Dragon Quest III doesn't really do a whole lot with the concept, but it's definitely something I'd like to expand on for The Saga of the Ortegids. In the game, the pirates mainly seem to be there to make use of the game's day-night cycle for a puzzle. They're out at sea during the day, so you can only speak to them at night. They don't actually give you any trouble, as they've heard of your exploits and respect you for them. But their existence does give some worldbuilding implications.

Obviously, the Eastern Continent must be a fairly lawless place for pirates to operate so openly. This makes sense given the only centralized kingdom we see there is Manoza, and the fortress is well out of its way. If one wanted to expand on this, you could easily imagine the southernmost region of the Eastern Continent as a lawless coast somewhat akin to the Carribean during the Golden Age of Piracy - a wretched hive of scum and villainy, well removed from civilized authority. If pirates can flourish in this area, there might be any number of mercenaries, gamblers, smugglers, and other rough types congregating here too. I'd put a number of free ports along the coast - the kinds of cities where crime abounds, where you should always keep watch over your shoulder, and where the guards are useless at best and corrupt at worst.

We might not see one in the game, but I think the area is begging for a big seedy pirate city to serve as a hub of black market trade and a place to find under-the-table work. I'll call it Thangobad - not really based on anything in particular, but it's got a good sword-and-sorcery feel to it. Much like Ashalam, a lawless city like this would make for a good home base for a more roguish party, and could generate a lot of adventure opportunities. As a port - especially one where someone could fly under the radar - it'd likely get traffic from all over, so it'd be a great place to get rumors from far-off lands, and the means to get there if the party desires. Plus, having so many unfettered ruffians in town could well lead to enough chaos and faction play to make the city itself an adventure site. Green Ronin's Freeport books might be of use here, but I've already used that for another setting, and Freeport is a bit calmer than what I have in mind here.

Interestingly, one of the pirates claim that they only steal from "scoundrels." I might be reading too much into this - it might just be an explanation for why they don't attack you - but we could use this as a justification for making the fortress belong to a band of privateers, who are hired by some power or another to keep raids in the area under control. Maybe Aliahan - one of them describes it as "a nice place." That, or they just have a code of honor - or are lying to avoid scrutiny. You could go with any of these options; if you expand the region, you could well have enough pirate crews operating to use multiple in the same campaign.

The crew in-game is led by a woman, who acknowledges that this is unusual for pirates. She respects valorous deeds, and if you return to the fort later in the game, she invites you for a drink to celebrate your victories. There are a number of potential effects here based on your character's gender and what dialogue options you choose, but one possibility, if you're playing as a male, seems to involve you seducing her. Given how I'm basing the Eastern Continent on sword-and-sorcery tropes and references, I think it's very feasible to reinterpret this character as a local equivalent of Belit from Queen of the Black Coast, the most famous of Conan's pirate adventures. If you need inspiration for how to play a fearless pirate queen who commands authority over an all-male crew and is easily swayed by strong men, there's plenty of literary precedent to fall back on.

Freeport By Way of Mexico City

While I intend to focus on in-universe material for the Year of the Gazetteer, I wanted to give a closer look into the thought process behind Valossa, because in the development of my setting, I find its story one of the more interesting ones - and one that opens up some new avenues into how we think about worldbuilding.

As some of you may have recognized, Valossa and its capital Porto Libre are adapted from Green Ronin's excellent Freeport: City of Adventure line. When locking down details of my setting, the idea of a setting-neutral city with plenty of locations, NPCs, and adventure hooks to drop down into an existing campaign world appealed to me, and it was something I decided was worth tracking down. I'm pretty happy with the results. There's easily enough in the Pirate's Guide to Freeport alone to fill multiple campaigns, and that's not even the most recent version of the book; it's just the one I have.

There's one problem, though.

See that? That is Freeport, Maine. My home town.

It's not like it's a particularly obscure place as far as Maine goes, even. We get tons of tourists every summer. It's where LL Bean was founded, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time just hanging out at their flagship store in my youth (they have a fish tank). The point is, the images evoked by the name "Freeport" in my mind are hilariously mundane, and not at all what the fine folks at Green Ronin were going for.

Also, there's not really an English-influenced culture in my setting anyway, so I don't use direct English names often.

So obviously, if I was going to use it, the name had to go. And my first thought was to translate it into another language. I started thinking about other places that produced a lot of pirates, and my mind went to the Spanish Main. Porto Libre it was, then. Less Caribbean, more Gulf. Less rain-soaked streets and powdered wigs, more tiled roofs and sunny balconies.

An aside: Yes, before anyone asks, I know it should be Puerto Libre. I didn't catch that mistake until it was too late, and it stuck.

Naturally, this led me to place the city and its island environs off the coast of Taldameer, the resident Spain stand-in in my world. I still wanted Porto Libre to feel distinct from the mainland without losing its Spanish character, though. For a while, I was leaning toward drawing inspiration from the Balearic Islands (and I still do a little of that); conveniently, they themselves have a long traditon of piracy. But then I got an idea just stupid enough to work.

Porto Libre, I decided, would be the Lunar Lands' equivalent of colonial-era Mexico.

This period in history is a fascinating one, and one that gets little attention in the Anglosphere. You can see the last vestiges of feudalism in the noble estates and their industries, making it fit surprisingly well into a medieval framework. And the collision of indigenous mythologies with Catholicism gave rise to a rich folkloric tradition that continues to this day, even beyond the stuff everyone knows about like the Day of the Dead. That gives me plenty of material to work with already.

As I gave Porto Libre a facelift, I soon realized that the material given the Freeport books wasn't going to contain everything I wanted to explore. Lifting a name from the background, I expanded the Serpents' Teeth into the larger island of Valossa. I could still have sweltering jungles, but there would also be room for all the desert bandits, lonely cattle ranchers, isolated mission houses, and dashing swashbucklers one could ask for. If I run a campaign in Valossa there will be at least one NPC played by Danny Trejo and you are going to like it dammit.

Yes, it's a bit anachronistic. I know it's outside the late-medieval-Europe scope of the majority of my setting, and even more separated by space than it is by time. Yes, I know that I try to be relatively non-Flinstonist in my approach to worldbuilding, and the presence of Mexico within a couple days of Greece is going to raise a few eyebrows. But who cares? This is a fantasy setting - one heavily inspired by history and folklore, yes, but even though there's an attention to authenticity, it's not meant to be shackled to it. I've already mashed together parts of different time periods, if the fact I have a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and an Abbasid Caliphate is any indication. A Mexico on top of that doesn't feel that weird.

It isn't like this is particularly new, either. Robert E. Howard, the man who pioneered fantasy worldbuilding because he liked writing historical fiction but took the "historical" part of that as a suggestion more than anything else, wasn't afraid to throw aspects of the colonial era and even later into the Hyborian Age - Pictland might be named for an ancient Scottish tribe, but it draws more influence from the frontier settlements found in Westerns. He himself might have based Zamora off of Mexico, as this article theorizes - and my discovery of that article was a big influence on deciding to go this route with Valossa.

In short - don't be afraid to think outside the box with your worldbuilding. Even if the majority of your setting is based on a particular region or era, there's no reason you can't incorporate pieces of another. In fact, it might help set your setting apart. A lot of people have expressed a desire to do something different from standard medieval European fantasy for their games, but many players find a complete departure from the norm jarring and difficult to adjust to. But if you decide to go halfway, and dump 17th century New Spain off the coast of 15th century Europe, suddenly you have something that feels different, but with all the comfortable touchpoints within reach.

From here on out, the Year of the Gazetteer's Valossa entries will largely focus on the parts of the Republic beyond Porto Libre itself. For information on the capital, I would recommend you go to The Pirate's Guide to Freeport, and just mentally replace everyone's names with the closest Spanish equivalent and all entries of "Sea Lord" with "Doge" (I prefer my silly one-off titles historically accurate, thank you). But there's far more to Valossa than just Porto Libre, and I hope you're ready to exploring it with me!