The Saga of the Ortegids is intended as a dialed setting - that is, there are several main streams of inspiration behind it that influence its tone, look, and feel. A DM interested in fine-tuning the details and creating a mood that seems right to them can turn these "dials" up or down, exaggerating or downplaying certain elements to make the setting their own. Trey at Sorcerer's Skull explores a similar paradigm with Star Wars - identifying the main sources of influence as swashbuckling, classic science fiction, Orientalism, and mid-century Americana, and how giving these aspects more or less focus could create a setting still identifiably influenced by Star Wars but with its own distinct flavor. This is a vast oversimplification of Trey's point, but it shaped how I think about Saga of the Ortegids and how it could be approached.
The three major dials of the setting are:
1. Western Dragon Warrior Art
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These are the same people -
You probably didn't need me
to tell you that. |
As discussed in my last post, the idea behind
Saga of the Ortegids as a setting is to create the connective tissue between the art pieces produced by Nintendo, Enix of America, and others to market the
Dragon Quest games in the west during the late 80s and early 90s. Nintendo tried very hard to sell people on
Dragon Warrior, even giving out cartridges for free with subscriptions to
Nintendo Power, and there's a great wealth of art out there that illustrates how I envision the world of the Ortegids looking. The folks over at
Dragon's Den, some of the most in-depth archivists of all things
Dragon Quest, have been invaluable in this project, and I suggest anyone interested in the subject to click around.
I've seen people describe this art as "a bastardization of Toriyama's art to appeal to western audiences," but that's quite dismissive of the hard work of the artists, and to the audiences they captivated. It also ignores the fact that in Japan, Toriyama's art is considered much less integral to the Dragon Quest experience than it is in the west; there have been numerous projects, including the long-running manga The Adventures of Dai, which he was not involved with at all. What's very interesting to me is that elements of Toriyama's original designs actually crop up quite frequently in this art - the artists clearly knew what they were doing, and wanted to translate the imagery of the series to a different visual style. They could easily have thrown some unrelated fantasy art on the cover, but they didn’t. They used artists who had played the games, or at least saw the original concept art, and reproduced the designs faithfully.
This is, admittedly, a hard dial to turn up. It mostly relies on these images being in the minds of the people at the table, and it's hard to control that unless you use visual aids and handouts (I don't). I would suggest looking at this art as a way to get in the mood. Lean into its visual tropes in your descriptions - shadowy taverns, horned helmets, Moebius-like tall grassy plains. The first two games rewrote all the dialogue in Shakespearean speech, so throwing around some Elizabethan pronouns might help evoke this mood if your players won't kill you for it. Alternatively, you can turn down this dial if you'd rather have a world that looks and feels like Toriyama's depictions, emphasizing the anime influences of the world.
Inspirational Reading: Nintendo Power circa 1989; NES manuals and strategy guides; Clyde Caldwell and Larry Elmore art has the same vibe. If you hate yourself you can watch the two Captain N episodes that adapted Dragon Warrior.
2. Norse and Germanic SagasThe thought that kicked off this whole experiment in the first place was the idle musing I had that the Erdrick Trilogy is an Icelandic saga. I don't know how intentional this was - given the trilogy's use of Norse motifs, it's certainly possible - but structurally and thematically, there are very strong similarities. The conceit of the first three Dragon Quest games is that they take place in the same world(s), generations apart from one another, all following a single lineage of heroes. A constant recurring theme is living up to one's legacy - protagonists of one game must prove their mettle by weighing their deeds against those of their ancestors, which are shown on-screen in other games in the series. Even though DQ3 is the first game chronologically, it too plays with this, as your NPC father and his heroic exploits are constantly mentioned.
This is the same throughline found in Norse sagas, which tend to be genealogical in nature, recounting several successive generations of a given clan and having the actions of one hero resonate through the ages to impact their descendants for good or ill. It grounds the trilogy in the context of a mythic tradition, and that tradition can easily be used to provide color and texture to the setting.
More superficially, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the plot of the original Dragon Quest starts with a warrior arriving in the court of a foreign king, seeking to prove himself so that he can be trusted with dealing with the king's problems with a marauding monster that has broken into his castle. There's a kidnapped princess, which immediately casts things in a fairy-tale lens to most people, but it's also not hard to see the similarities to Beowulf.
If you wanted to play up the higher literary influences on the setting, you could simply throw around more runestones and longboats, but to go a little deeper than that, you could make reference to themes of fate (even better if you call it wyrd) and cite legendary heroes of the past, who may or may not be related to the PCs. Use of the word "hwaet" is optional. Turn this dial down, and you have a setting that pays greater homage to pulp fiction, emphasizing action and exotic locales.
Inspirational Reading: Beowulf; The Saga of the Volsungs; the Kalevala.
3. Sword and Sorcery FictionIn my previous post, I talked about how Conan the Barbarian does a better job in bringing the basic story beats of Dragon Quest V to the big screen than that game's official movie adaptation does. But it goes both ways, too. Here's another revelation I had - Dragon Quest III is the closest a video game has ever come to capturing Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age.
Yes, I know about Age of Conan and Exiles and all the other official Hyborian Age games, but a significant portion of these games are drawn from the aesthetics of the movies. And I've come to realize on my replay that DQ3 feels very much like Howard's original stories, before Milius and Schwarzenegger's interpretations colored the public perception. As I've discussed on the blog before, the setting of DQ3 is very much a History's Greatest Hits setting, taking an Earth-like map but populating it with areas based on very different eras of history. On your adventure, you encounter characters who appear to be stand-ins for Cleopatra, Henry the Navigator, Galileo, Simon Bolivar(!), and Queen Himiko, among others. Does it make sense for all these people, and the settings they are grounded in, to be around at the same time? Absolutely not, but the game does not care. Much like Howard, it's more concerned with creating a fun venue to have exotic globe-trotting adventures than maintaining internal coherency.
Furthermore, the protagonist of DQ3 can easily be imagined as a Conan figure. Spoilers for a 40-year-old game to follow (for the record, the recent HD remakes did not even bother to try hiding this any more): at the third act of the game, you travel from one world to another, seemingly located on the inside of a hollow planet, which turns out to be the setting of the original two games. By the end of the game, it's become clear that you are in fact the same legendary hero who was mentioned in the first two games and set the legacy their heroes will follow. But this also means that DQ3 is about a hero leaving their homeland, having adventures that span the globe, and then settling in a foreign land to become a figure of legend, much like how Conan left Cimmeria and became the king of Aquilonia.
Also, there's a female pirate captain, and by picking the right dialogue options you can apparently seduce her. I sincerely doubt this was a deliberate nod to Queen of the Black Coast, but it makes for a fortuitous coincidence. The antagonists of Dragon Quest II are a doomsday cult that worships a sinister reptilian god, so there's that.
Luckily, there's a rich vein of imagery associated with pulp sword-and-sorcery stories you can tap into to play up this dial. For more superficial examples, use fewer historical names in favor of imagined two-syllable constructions (bonus points if hyphenated), put in some slave girls, giant snakes, and carnivorous and/or winged apes (both of which, incidentally, appear in the Erdrick Trilogy), and use the term "mighty thews" at least once. Or emphasize the sweeping scope of adventure and the exotic locales it takes place in, and provide the party with plenty of examples to cause mayhem. Turning this dial down will result in a more "highbrow" Saga of the Ortegids, emphasizing its roots in mythic traditions.
Inspirational Reading: Conan the Barbarian (books, comics, and films); Thongor of Lemuria; Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser; that one sadly short-lived Beowulf comic DC did where Grendel kills Satan for favoring Dracula over him.
