Edina

After purchasing a ship in Portoga, the overworld of Dragon Quest III opens dramatically. From this point on there are no real road blocks until the endgame, so you’re free to explore and complete the remaining quests in whatever order you choose. Up to this point, I’ve been covering every location in the order most players will encounter them in-game, but from here, the order I choose will be largely arbitrary.

The Kingdom of Edina is probably the closest new location that can be explored from Portoga, corresponding to the British Isles in the overworld map. The name I’m using here is actually a localizationism – the more accurate translation, as used in older releases, is Edinbear (more on that in a moment) – but I will admit that for all the many flaws with the new translation, Edina sounds much more like the name of a kingdom. For The Saga of the Ortegids, I’ll be using Edina as the name of the country, and Edinbear for the capital city.

We don’t see a lot of Edina in the game. On the map, Edinbear is simplified to only the castle where the royal family holds court. Even then, you can’t actually explore the castle until later, because the guards bar entrance to any mere commoners, requiring you to find an item granting invisibility in order to sneak by them. The dialogue of many NPCs there highlights a strong culture of elitism among Edinan nobility, looking down on the lower classes and viewing them as beneath their care. However, the kingdom would also appear to be a prominent naval power – they’ve established contact with the barbarians of the eastern continent (that’s a subject for a future post), across the ocean, and it stands to reason that they may well have colonies and trading posts established along the coast.

There are a number of directions I could go with Edina. The most obvious would be to make it the place where all the traditional medieval European fantasy trappings go, with knights in shining armor and pointy-hatted damsels in towers. There isn’t really a better place to put it – the equivalent region to continental Europe is split between Romalia and Portoga, which are grounded in eras before and after the High Middle Ages respectively. I’ve already given Aliahan an Anglo-Saxon coat of paint, and much of Torland carries light Norse themes. There’s nowhere left for the generically Anglo-Norman culture we associate with traditional fantasy and chivalric romance, and when this setting is as much a love letter to classical fantasy as it is to Dragon Quest, that seems like an obvious omission. Plus, if you want a highly stratified feudal society with stuffy, pompous aristocracy and disgruntled peasants inspired by medieval England, you need look no further than Warhammer Fantasy‘s Brettonia for inspiration.

However, the game can’t really make up its mind about what part of Britain Edina is supposed to be. The culture seems to be grounded in negative stereotypes of the English upper class, and the castle is located where London would be, but the name “Edinbear” is clearly derived from Edinburgh, pointing at a specifically Scottish theme. You could give a Celtic tone to Edina, with druids, bards, and fey folk about. Perhaps you could even do both, with chivalric knights in the southeast and forest-dwelling highlanders in the north and west. Edina’s elitist nature could easily be a consequence of its multicultural society, with its ruling caste adopting a sense of superiority to exert its authority over conquered tribes.

This, too, would lend itself well to potential plots. We don’t see the common people of Edina, but there is likely plenty of discontent with the ruling class – and the PCs might be just what the powder keg needs to descend into full-scale revolt…