SMOOSH JUICE
The Worldforest
The northern portion of Dragon Quest III‘s pseudo-Eurasian continent is dominated by forest. There aren’t many dungeons or settlements to be found here, and nothing that’s required to complete the game. However, the imagery of a massive primeval continent-spanning forest is a potent one, and I would be remiss to leave such a thing out of The Saga of the Ortegids. I’ll always be one to champion the values of outdoor survival and overland travel in RPGs, and an expanse of mythic wilderness is perfect for adventures in this vein.
Probably the most notable feature of this region is the four solitary mountains arranged in a cross. This is actually an Easter egg – if you inspect the ground at the dead center of this cross, you find a leaf of the Worldtree, a unique item that can be used to revive dead party members. You see what I mean about DQ3 having more in common with western open-world RPGs than it does with modern JRPGs? Anyway, I digress. I find the allusions to a world tree here to be quite interesting, and worthy of expansion upon.
There’s no actual world trees in the Erdrick Trilogy, but it is a recurring image in the rest of the series, and certainly in keeping with the vaguely Nordic themes of the first three games. Furthermore, from a practical gameplay standpoint, a tree linking Erdland and Torland would provide a means for travel between the two worlds. Using the Pit of Giaga is mostly a one-way affair, and it’s sealed off a third of the way into the Trilogy, so campaigns taking place afterward wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the concept of a hollow world with continents and kingdoms on either side of the planet’s crust if we limit ourselves to what appears on-screen. However, a single massive tree with roots reaching down into Torland could be climbed up or down to move between the two worlds, and is quite evocative of the Norse Yggdrasil.
Thus, I would rule that there is a Worldtree growing out of the ground in Erdland, sitting in the center of a large valley bounded by four mountains, and its roots reach down into Torland. At the time of DQ3, it was only a sapling, not visible on the world map, but over the course of untold centuries, it eventually grows large enough to join the two worlds, probably some time after the events of Dragon Quest II. Not only does this add an interesting feature to the setting that creates opportunities for travel from one map to another, if the two worlds existed without any contact with one another until relatively recently, the shakeup of different cultures interacting for the first time could create plenty of plot opportunities.
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| Art by Philip Straub |
As far as the continent-spanning forest the Worldtree grows in, I’ve accordingly dubbed it the Worldforest. This would be Erdland’s own Mirkwood, an unimaginably vast woodland with as many mysteries and dangers as any dungeon.
DQ3 doesn’t show us any real settlement in the Worldforest beyond a couple of isolated hermits. It does seem like a fitting place for elves, so I would probably scatter a few elven kingdoms here and there. There is one village, Muor, located at the eastern edge of the forest, but it seems to be a far-flung self-sufficient settlement – there are no kings anywhere close by, and the people there don’t seem to get many visitors, to the point where someone unfamiliar showing up is notable to them. This seems like a reasonable baseline for human habitation in the region, and I’d likely add more villages and tribes in a similar vein to the area if expanding upon it.
Also, in keeping with the History’s Greatest Hits spirit of DQ3‘s overworld, I could see playing the Worldforest as akin to Earth’s Ice Age or Stone Age. Maybe the place is so sparsely populated because the humans there are literal cavemen (or at least, cavemen exist alongside more Neolithic settlements – Muor seems settled enough for agriculture to exist), hunting and gathering and sharing the space with mammoths, sabrecats, and other prehistoric megafauna. This would allow you to play into the tropes of the Lost World, with an area of the setting seemingly untouched by time. I probably wouldn’t have any dinosaurs there – it’s too northern – but if you wanted to put them in I certainly wouldn’t stop you.
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| Art by Bob Larkin |