Anyone played this? Love the Dune setting and considering running a game in it
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Anyone played this? Love the Dune setting and considering running a game in it
Anyone played this? Love the Dune setting and considering running a game in it
CRIME Shirt $21.68 |
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CRIME Shirt $21.68 |
there was an actual paid shill campaign for it here, not a meme an actual one, and it really turned me off so I just ignored it. I do actually wonder if it's good
kinda had to be here but if you look up dune threads on /tg/ around when the first movie came out you'll see what I mean. the classic paid shill thread is one which asks "are you excited for product?" posts a ton of official images and then doesn't explain anything about the actual mechanics or personal opinions of the system/game
I would interested in a Dune RPG if it allows the character to roleplay as one of the big factions outside of the noble houses or the Bene Gesserit.
Being a fremen or noble scion is nice but I want to be a Bene Tleilax acquiring genetic samples to create a ghola or a mentat investigating a possible conspiracy to create a thinking machine. The unexplored parts of the setting are what interests me the most.
There's essentially similar guidance for a campaign as you suggest in the book 'Power and Pawns,' along with rules to play as a Face Dancer.
Even in the core book you can be a Suk Doctor, a Mentat, a Fremen, a Bene G, and I’m pretty sure a Spacing Guild member (if not then it’s in one of the sourcebooks for certain) but you can’t be a navigator, although their is a Failed Navigator trait that allows glimpses into the future with a passed check
All of these are separate from your character role, eg: my char is my House’s Heir, with the Steward Role, and the Mentat trait along with a Mentat talent. His house is a CHOAM Directorate rather than royal titletry and he has his own personal orbital transport to make use of his knowledge of Smuggling and CHOAM bureaucracy to operate off the books.
All of this is demonstrated and represented through usable talents/assets/character traits/etc
I was actually quite pleased with the character options especially since I’ve come from Edge Of The Empire where I would autistically stat and mutliclass for either broken or immersive builds
Never played it, but on paper, the rules sound a bit too abstract for me. Whether you're leading an invasion, uncovering some conspiracy, negotiating a treaty, or having a knife fight, it all boils down to moving pieces around in abstracted zones and rolling a few dice. There are no equipment stats, no granularity, and you can invent things that help you on the spot just by spending some currency. It's all too meta for my tastes.
its a ripe setting for expansion. especially during the 10,000 years or whatever of the imperium before paul. the dynamic of the 3 overt institutional pillars, the noble houses/independent polities, the spacer guild with the monopoly of fast travel, and the emperor, and the fourth background institutionof the bene gesserit is a great base for a lot of adventures. then having subspecializagions like mentats, diferent feudal cultures in the landstrat like warrior or tech or biologically oriented ones jocking for this and that goal.
Tbh, I love the Dune books, but I struggle to think of stories you could add to them.
All the movers and shakers control planets worth of resources. That means you have to set the players at that level, or make them peons getting pushed around in someone else's intrigues and wars.
>All the movers and shakers control planets worth of resources. That means you have to set the players at that level
Well, yes. That's the setup in the RPG. You're high ranking members of your own House. It's all intrigue, politics, backstabbing, and warfare.
I dont really think so. what we see in the books are some of the most MASSIVE movers and shakers. Harkonen, Atradies, The Emperor himself, the most important planet in the galaxy. The two main houses were big dick names since the Jihad that formed the base of the empire. There are probably, no there is, many other less massive players in the imperial game. Smaller houses, subsidiaries of the Spacer guild, industries and minor mentat orders, imperial outposts acting as federal police in these minor scuffles, etc.
Its like looking at corescant during the clone wars and saying there arent any stories to add to the star wars setting. There are tones, both in this big dick center of the universe planet, as well as shitty backwaters in the equivalent of Tatooine.
just use these
>https://files.catbox.moe/74brrb.rar
Yeah I played a session of it. Was a bunch of court politics shit you might expect in certain VtM games. Was alright. If you’ve played Star Trek Adventures or Fallout, uses those mechanics
It's a very pretty book, but Dune as a setting is so crafted around its cast of characters that trying to do "your dudes" in the setting is difficult. You can tell the book struggles with this, because a good chunk of it is repeating information about the major factions on repeat, and then you have an issue where a lot of content is locked to Arrakis so if you do space courtly intrigue elsewhere that's just going to be wasted.
why? the only thing locked to arrakis is it being the only producer of spice.
That's the exact problem. Arrakis is the only location of any consequence in the entire Dune setting. It'd be as if all Earth politics unironically revolved around the Middle East and its oil supply. No fighting over control of sea lanes (because the equivalent is controlled exclusively by the Guild), no wars of religion (the Fremen Jihad notwithstanding, religion is controlled by the Bene Gesserit), and no grand wars of conquest (entire universe is controlled by the Emperor and Landsraad). Dune is a parable, not an actual setting.
>Dune is a parable, not an actual setting.
And I'd like to add I don't mean this as an insult. LOTR and Dune were written before 'worldbuilding' as an artform was formalized, and while they are instrumental to that artform's development the former will always be an artificial language that took on a life of its own and the latter will always be an article about dune grass that took on a life of its own. The intent behind them wasn't to build a world that could be played with from any angle.
>LOTR and Dune were written before 'worldbuilding' as an artform was formalized
Good. Worldbuilding is mostly a sham anyway, that serves no purpose other than if you want to create an instant recognizable franchise to sell merch. Even the word is a marketing ploy that just means the cohesion and verisimilitude of the fantasy/scifi aspects of the world the setting takes place. Every aspect tends to be analogous to the real world anyway, there's no need to create a world cause there's already a world this one where both the writer and reader exist and their lens of perception and acceptance will always be bounded by it.
I think there is merit in worldbuilding if done right, like if you added some more complications and conflicts to the Dune setting you could get a good RPG out of it. As I said, Dune can't be played from any angle. It has to be about Arrakis, because the whole point of the setting is the ecology of the planet and its effect on the economy and culture of the universe. It's certainly not about fricking Caladan.
I'm not against it, I just dislike the modern fixation on it and the precedence it takes over the goal of telling a compelling story. Modern worldbuilding just removes the general appeal of perennial tales like dune and lotr and just focus to much on aesthetics that can be divisive (wh40k/wow).
>It has to be about Arrakis, because the whole point of the setting is the ecology of the planet and its effect on the economy and culture of the universe.
For me the Butlerian Jihad and the subsequent formation of the technofeudalism society around the houses was always way more interesting.
Yeah, miniature wargames and vidya would be much better served by pretending they're novels.
Because they exist in a vacuum right? Just don't think about it and consoom
Butlerian Jihad, like the Horus Heresy, would have always been much better if they left it alone.
Yes and no- there are plenty of minor economic trade issues over production of goods and tarriffs, which start as cold conflicts and could easily escalate into small-scale feudal wars. Beyond that there's the never ending centuries-long blood feuds between houses which lead to the famous wars of assassins, also a ripe material for conflict.
I think of the Imperium as something akin to Sengoku Japan, where all the great houses of the Landsraad are at each other's throats which in turn allows the Emperor to hold power with his legions of Sardaukar.
>I think of the Imperium as something akin to Sengoku Japan
I think its much more HRE or (obviously since its inspired) 40k.
>That's the exact problem. Arrakis is the only location of any consequence in the entire Dune setting
No its not. unless you are operating at the exact HIGHT of galactic politics.
Its not a stretch to imagine spice depots around the galaxy between arrakis and the various parts. We know for a fact that the main job of the Emperor is to arbitrate disputes between noble houses as they go along their various perogatives, often against one another. Thats oprotunity for a lot of setting stuff right there. The guild isnt a monolith, its a political structure like any other with factions and such. The enforcement of Orange catholicism is an active process.
The whole point of the Landsrad is that they are disputing planetary governers. If you read the stuff on mentats and such its very obvious the galaxy is a bustling place with a lot of intrigue outside of just arrakis. economics, warfare, political struggles, etc.
Areakis is just the linchpin that you are NOT going to frick with unless you are one of the tippity top of galactic society. The Emperor, Head of Bene Gesseret, leading navigators, and the heads of the largest houses.
This.
But the problem you have to contend with, is that you have to invent those minor houses and their disputes, because there is no canon source for anything outside of those involved with Arrakis.
I think the bones of the setting are very interesting, but honestly with the amount of work one would have to put into making it an RPG, you might as well play "Dune with the numbers filed off" and just have a very similar set up without the complications of the canon houses and their conflicts to tippy toe around.
Seems like a none issue personally. Its known that those minor houses exist. You just have to make a few that line up with the (rather robust) amount of lore we know about the empire as a whole. Like homebrew space marine chapters.
There arent that many toes that need avoiding. It boils down to:
-Spice ONLY comes from Dune.
-Harkonen and Atradies have been rivals since the noted historical event (i forgot what it was, but its something)
-Spacing guild has preeminence over interstellar instant travel
-The empiror is the arbiter when a feud gets out of hand.
Otherwise we know for a fact that alliances and political happenings have shifted and swayed throughout the empires history. Sometimes the emperor is more powerful, sometimes less, sometime the spacing guild is in accendency, sometimes not, This part of the Landsrad is prominent, now that party.
Part of character creation has players deciding the size and relative power of the house (or sietch, or smuggling outfit) they serve, as well as specialties of the group, and the duties of their go-to patron. Between that and PCs having drives and ambitions as mechanically operative hooks, you have a lot of strong flashpoints to introduce conflicts with less overhead. You don't have to do it all from whole cloth, you can quickly work backwards from a really simple impasse informed by all the other choices.
Oh thats a nice way to handle that.
Although I imagine best practice would be character creation in a group.
Does the game favor a sort of pvp working against each other approach or a cooperative working towards a common goal approach? I think it would be fairly interesting to do a cloak and dagger pvp thing, but there aren't many RPGs that do that.
DMed it. It’s got interesting ideas like the drive system, but in practice the rules are too abstract and too light to pull in players.
Nobody showed up to my game and the ones that did got fed up with it quickly. Personally i’d recommend buying the pdf just to build a less abstract, heavier system on top of the existing rules.
I would rather play a Traveller/CE game in the dune setting than learning a cash grab ip game ruleset that's probably half broken.
>cash grab ip game ruleset that's probably half broken.
At the very least it isn't broken. Though that tends to be the case when your game lacks all mechanical depth. Rather than fleshing out espionage and intrigue in a game based on fricking Dune, everything's shoehorned into being resolved like a skirmish, with players and GM moving abstracted assets to abstracted zones. There are no ambiguously worded or poorly designed mechanics to cheese, as everything is abstracted to spending metacurrencies to add nuance to play. Why devise a circumlocution mechanic for your Dune game when you can spend 1 momentum and say "Our house has a coded lexicon."
Whatever happened to that Fading Suns revival? Did that amount to anything?
why not tell a story about a planet that would fall into darkness if the spice does not flow? Just too much of a hassle to keep a grip on if there's not enough spice to go around for food imports to land there. The players must rise to the top and wrest control of the planet and give it value the emperor can't ignore even with his eye on Arrakis.
Does it have rules for Duncan Idaho’s addictive penis in the later novels?
Anyone ever played the Last Unicorn Games Dune?
I've perused through the book a few times over the years and it seemed interesting
It suffers from the same problem Last Unicorn's Star Trek game did. The rules are way too bloated to be fun or interesting.
So, I have had the opportunity to go through the system with some friends I have. All with varying levels of interest in the Dune IP.
Ranging from having no clue what it is to being avid fans who have read the books multiple times over.
So I will go over the basics of the Modiphius system and how it operates with Dune, the external resources recommended, and the major pros and cons.
First, the basics.
The modiphius 2d20 system with Dune is pretty simple. Rolling 2d20 and the lower the number the better. 1 being awesome and 20 being awful.
However, unlike their other games like Fallout, Conan and Star Trek. This doesn't just apply to some basic ideas of skills or knowledges.
It is broken down into two groups. STATEMENTS and FOCUSES.
FOCUSES is a breaking down of skills.
And STATEMENTS is the idea of what your character believes or values. Either for themselves, though usually for their house as well.
The major thing that this does is allow and build the STATEMENT and FOUCS rolls to be shifted in scale for what the relevant challenge is. And builds around the idea of playing into the role you fill for the House you serve.
As an example, the Battle FOCUS can obviously be understood the represent the skill you have at combat on an individual level. Though you may also need to roll Battle if your roll as a general requires you to plan war strategies for coming and ongoing combat across the battlefield to minimize casualties.
This can also be helped or harmed by STATEMENTS. For example, continuing off the Battle example from earlier, if your general has the STATEMENT in the Justice category like, "One should use whatever amount of force to end a war quicker". If then in that grand battle strategy requires the use of such overwhelming force that you, as a general, and your House is accustomed to. You will get an additional d20 to use. Up to having a pool of 5d20.
However, say that this same general had to play an ambassador role at peace talks with the rival house, all of sudden that same STATEMENT that helped you in battle may increase the complication range or negate other bonuses your House would give you to communicate your House to a peaceable truce with your rival. Up to removing a d20 from your dice pool. Down to a minimum of 2d20.
Other things can be used to help leverage you in battle or politics. From your other house members having more agreeable STATEMENTS, better suited FOCUSES or having Assets. Such as as blackmail on a particular rival House member for the spies. Artillery for your generals. Contacts for ambassadors. Or just having certain shields or structures for the people of your House to feel their interests are being accounted for.
Now, THE GREAT GAME - HOUSES OF THE LANDSRAAD is the main supplement book I'd recommend as it helps add in new details and Houses you can use to fill a world that each have ties to the setting. I mainly recommend this on as I saw many people saying issues with the setting of Dune being hyper fixated on only Houses we see in the main line of books. The way I have approached creating campaigns for the game is like a game of Civilization. Making Houses based off ideals, structures and systems of power like the ones of history. Just playing around with how they fit into the timeline of the game setting.
Outside of that. Just look for fan made fillable PDF's as Modiphius decided not to make or provide any of their own for the separate character and House sheets.
The major Pros I can list are as followed:
- Easy dice system utilizing D20's.
- Interesting use of scale in scope of rolls that fit into the setting of the game well
- A good jumping off point for people just getting into the IP to learn about the world without feeling constrained by the set story and time period of the books
Major cons:
- The shifting of scales or rolls may not appeal to some players, requiring some guidance to best interact with the system
- While the core book does a good job at detailing basic rules and examples, it is a bit bare and will require some work on the DM's part to provide more dynamic pieces for the players to use
- One will need to ensure that everyone is on the same page for what they intend to do for their House and proper delegation of roles. Far too many times do I get players who just want to be general/captain/admiral dude who shoot and tell other people how to shoot good. All while missing on who is going to fill all the other pieces of the House that keep it from burning to ash.
It's funny that the most playable part of the game, (ie the Houses jockeying for power) is thoroughly demolished by climax of the first book
The Scattering and the Honored Matres eras would make good campaign settings without being "le intrigue campaign" that 90% of GMs gush over but only 10% have the skill to run.
Oh, a game for Dune...cool.
>Modiphus 2d20
Oh...never mind.