Dune: Adventures in the Imperium - to Arrakis and beyond! 🗡💧☀ RPG Review & Deep Dive

like subscribe notification bell thingy dune adventures in the imperium is a tabletop role-playing game published by modiphius in 2021. the 340-page core rulebook contains everything needed to run a one-shot or campaign set in the era of dune from the original novel this rpg is based on the dune universe which is originally based on the 1965 novel dune by frank herbert if you haven't read that book or seen the 1984 movie directed by david lynch i'm gonna go out on a limb and say that they are both classics in their own respects the lynch movie having its own unique set of problems at the time of this recording there was also a new dune film based on the original novel coming out and hopefully that's awesome too as far as the books go frank herbert ended up writing five more after dune and then starting in 1999 frank's son brian herbert along with the help of sci-fi novelist kevin j anderson co-wrote a staggering 15 going on 16 more dune novels there have also been a couple of tv miniseries and a handful of video games over the years the good news is this rpg dune adventures in the imperium is very heavily based on just the first novel i'm one of those dune fans who really likes only the first novel so i was very relieved to see this over the years i've definitely partaken in a few of these other offerings from the dune multimedia verse but to be perfectly honest none of it beats the original novel in terms of its originality and world presentation the world of dude at least at the point that this game is largely focused on is the year 10191ag or after guild in this timeline humanity has outgrown our own earth and left it maybe 20 or 30 thousand years ago earth is all but completely forgotten but in its stead are millions of new planets settled by humans spread across countless galaxies and they are all ruled by an emperor this emperor uses politics and intrigue to manage multiple greater major houses families that control one or more planets each and in turn those houses control countless minor houses but what is more important than any one house or even the emperor himself is a substance known as spice with spice the spacing guild a monopoly that controls all interstellar travel is able to transport thousands of ships instantly to anywhere they want to go spice gives spacing guild navigators the ability to see the future and to see the correct future for making fold space calculations in fact spice gives anyone who uses it the ability to see the future and possess hyper awareness which makes it by far the most valuable substance in the known universe the big catch is that spice is found on only one planet a desert hellhole called arrakis or dune the spice itself is produced on that planet by giant sand worms that are up to a quarter mile long and the planet is ruled by house harkonnen a ruthless and greedy great house the planet is also inhabited by indigenous humans called the fremen who have adapted to the harsh environment and worshiped the sand worms the details of the setting as just presented in the first novel go way beyond this synopsis and this rpg pretty much unpacks all of it there are countless planets and houses maybe half a dozen of each explained in great detail on the book but there is only one emperor and one arrakis so where do you fit in the game tries to tackle this odd juxtaposition between the utterly vast and the very richly detailed but limited aspects of the setting by giving you your own house houses are created as a group and you run down a list of steps to do so first step is to decide your house's level of power there are generally four types a nascent house that has only recently been established a minor house that may control up to a third or half of a planet a major house which controls an entire planet and may have a seat at the imperial parliament known as the landsrad and then there are great houses which control multiple planets that are managed by minor houses all of the players can choose to create and serve only one house but it can be of any power level the thing is by choosing a more powerful house your group incurs more starting enemies of greater power in practice this just means more people in any given adventure are trying to kill or sabotage you next the group has to choose their house's domain these are the products or services that the house is known for offering the greater the house the more domains they get there are primary domains which are what your house does well currently and secondary domains which are where the house aspires to expand into there are nine listed domains each broken down into five general areas of expertise so for the sake of an example let's make a house our house will be called house ito and it will be a minor house as a minor house we'll start with one primary and one secondary domain our primary will be industrial with an area of expertise and produce let's say that we are known for the mass production of toys and maybe some household appliances since we're a minor house our toys and appliances may not even reach other planets perhaps we're just known on our home planet as for our secondary domain let's say that our house is developing the military domain in the area of workers specifically logistics personnel which is something that could lead to sufficient amounts of intrigue the next step is to define our home world the book provides some helpful questions for adding details to the world but for now let's just say our homeworld is called shikaku prime the step can actually be pretty important since the game won't always take place on arrakis itself or even on any of the half dozen or so major canon worlds later described in the book if the conflict of an adventure ends up transpiring on your home world then those details matter in a big way the next step is coming up with a family crest which can be anything then on to picking house traits these are just very generic descriptors of a house that pcs can invoke at a cost in order to help or hurt actions in their scene let's say that our house is industrious and secretive on to house roles it should be mentioned here that this game expects your main pc to be someone of at least some notable rank you can take control of minor low ranking pcs for a scene but by default your main will be someone of named rank in the house and since all players at the table control a character from the same house you can conveniently record each of their roles and player names on the house sheet smaller houses might have one person serving multiple roles while larger houses might have multiple people under the same roll for the sake of example we can just say here that there are four people at the table and my main pc is the marshall of house ido telo fadin the book does explain each of these house roles by the way but only in fairly general terms then we choose our enemies a minor house like ours gets one minor house as an enemy there is a tremendously helpful and detailed section in the gm chapter at the end of the book that explains how to build a rival house and this is another relatively important step if you're not going to be battling a house from the canon such as the harkonnens for the sake of our house let's make one up our enemy is house peckham their hatred level is loathing and the reason for their loathing is competition they're a rival toy company and that's it for creating our house onto rolling up characters one of the most complex things about this game is that players each control a main character but they also create supporting characters in the middle of sessions and control them too as needed and the supporting characters have stats and everything just like the main characters i'm not sure how well that works in terms of time management during a session but the book does offer a solution for creating characters quickly you can create any character either by planned creation which is what a vast majority of rpgs expect and encourage where you make all of your character creation decisions beforehand and then start the game or you can do what they call creation and play where you only make a few key choices for a character at first and then fill in the details in the course of play i would say for the supporting characters a group would probably want to opt for the creation and play option just to keep things moving along this is also a great option for new players or those who want to get started fast so let's roll up a main character first we decide on a character concept we already made our house and named marshall so let's go with him tello fadine of house ido the acting marshal it's at this step that you decide if you want your character to also happen to be a trained or indoctrinated member of a faction there are five factions detailed in the game and they're optional and some are independent of houses while others sort of lock you into a specific upbringing those factions are the bene gesserate fremen mentats spacing guild agent and sook doctor it's beyond the scope of this video to explain the history and practices of each of these factions but it's worth mentioning that the book does a very satisfying job of explaining each of them oddly the book also goes into great detail about the history of several more factions including chome the ultra mega corporation that controls all trade deals in the imperium the swordmasters of ganas master sword fighters and the bin a trailax rogue biologists who sell bespoke genetically engineered humans to any house that can afford them but there is no work up for actually playing as members of these factions anyway if you pick one of the five available factions they come with unique bonus traits some mandatory talents and suggested archetypes there are some other limitations that come with playing as one of these factions as well the binet jesserit are strictly female for the most part the fremen are almost always indigenous to the planet arrakis and do not truly belong to any house and the spacing guild agents are going to be fairly secretive and owe their allegiance to the guild rather than anyone else so you definitely want to work out group dynamics with everyone before just latching onto a faction here for our character tello let's just skip the factions which is also perfectly fine the next step is to choose an archetype these are broad concepts that help to focus the creation process a bit and provide some thematic backbone as well there are five groups of archetypes each based on one of the skill stats each of these groups contains four suggested archetypes which each themselves have a lot of the character structure you need to flesh out your character for our character let's make him a sergeant which gives us some guidance that we'll use in the following steps in our next step we will sort out our skill stat the sergeant archetype's primary skill is battle so that starts at six their secondary skill is listed as communicate so that starts at five the rest are four but we get five free points to distribute across these skills with none ever going above eight the next step is to work out our focuses you start with four focuses each associated with a skill the sergeant archetype chooses two focuses for us long blade and strategy so we'll put those down you don't actually have to use the ones listed under your archetype but we are in this case now we can choose two more focuses which can really be anything you can think of although the book does provide a long list of helpful suggested focuses when you're testing one of these skills with the role of the dice if a focus listed on your sheet happens to apply to the test at hand you get two successes for each success role next up is talents these each provide a special little game mechanic or feature that you can employ usually in a scene and you get three of them at the start our archetype sergeant gives us master at arms and will choose direct and to fight someone is to know someone i'll say that one drawback to talents in this game is the fact that you either have to reference the page number or transcribe a ton of text onto a separate sheet of paper there's no way you're going to fit all of your talent descriptions onto that little box on the character sheet next step is drives this is honestly one of the most unique and fascinating aspects of this game drives are the second half of your core stats with skills being the first they also range from four to eight but they are always four five six seven and eight in whatever rank you see fit for your three top ranking drives you come up with a drive statement which is a summary of your character's world view and personality and their motivations it's a short simple statement and at least one of them should be intended to cause your character problems or complications while at least one should be helpful to you these statements change and evolve over time so we don't need to agonize over the wording here at the start the next step is to choose assets these are special things that we have control over and can be tangible like a sword or intangible like loyalty to a group of people they can also be something large like a ship operated by a crew that is loyal to you but usually not something incredibly large like a battleship you start with three of these assets and they come into play when you want to employ some kind of advantage and a test where dice are rolled called conflicts after that there are traits it says personality traits here on the character sheet but it really should just say personal traits or just traits your character's first trait is normally their title so ours would be marshall of house ido the second would be a more personal reputational descriptor then there is an ambition statement which if you manage to advance in a scene you can get an award for and these are based on your highest ranked drive there's really no room on the character sheet for it at all but the book also encourages you to answer a ton of personality questions which i love and these are the sort of final touch on your character generally as far as character advancement the gm awards so-called advancement points in the course of play there are a few ways to earn these points and you can also spend them in different ways dune adventures in the imperium uses the 2d20 system that modiphius is known for essentially anytime a character in a scene makes an action that is difficult dangerous opposes someone else or has some stake in how well they succeed you roll some dice in this game it is strictly d20s with a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 5 for any given test the difficulty rating or target that you're trying to meet or beat on a roll is made by adding the applicable drive and skill ratings on your character sheet like all 2d20 games there is an art to figuring out which ones apply and coupled with the introspective psychodramatic drive statements every time you roll you are forced to ask yourself why exactly your character is doing what they're doing the book says outright that picking the right drive can be a bit of a challenge passing a test with the dice can require zero to five or more successes and that difficulty rating is set by the gm any roll of one yields two successes any roll of 20 creates a narrative complication complications also arise on roles of 16 and up depending on how dangerous the situation is and again if a skills focus applies to a test at hand any rolled success counts as two successes any extra successes each earn points of momentum which can either be spent on the spot or banked in a shared point pool momentum is used to do the following the group's momentum pool can never go beyond six and one point of momentum is burned at the end of every scene whether anyone uses it or not has to encourage a use it or lose it mentality with them there's another metapoint pool called determination where if a drive statement for a drive being used in a role supports the action itself the player can spin the point of determination before rolling to get an automatic one which counts as two successes or they can spend it to re-roll all dice after rolling players can also use determination to create remove or change a trait that pertains to a skill test at hand it can also be spent to get an extra action in a turn-by-turn conflict players can only have up to three points of determination at any given time on the gm side there are threat points the gm starts with one or a few threat points to spend and can gain more in a few different ways gm's can then spend threat points in a number of different ways all of them generally to make things harder for the players probably the most ambitious aspect of this game is how it tries to tackle different scales of conflict the book discusses in great detail five different types of conflict dueling skirmishes warfare espionage and intrigue in a way there are three different rpgs being presented here at least in the traditional sense duels and skirmishes are the most familiar paradigm of play where pcs square off in battle on a personal or very small scale then there is warfare which is supposed to cover huge swaths of story each turn entire battles can be resolved with the role of the dice and the players take on massive power and authority finally there is espionage and intrigue which could both fit nicely into their own little rpg and actually be branded a dune game without anyone really batting an eye but here you have all these types of rpgs offered in one game here is what all five conflict types in the game have in common first they all involve assets those three things that you start with on your character sheet are meant to be employed in one of these conflict paradigms so hopefully you chose wisely second there are zones and they can either be physical zones on a map or abstract areas meant to represent something like an area of influence third there is an action order where a pc will usually start first and then they get to either move an asset or use an asset and then once everyone gets their turn a round is complete and a new round begins until the conflict is resolved there are a fair number of rules about initiative and nominating who goes first and players can spend momentum to shuffle the turn order a bit in their favor moving an asset can be attempted in a subtle or bold way and there are mechanical consequences for succeeding or failing each using an asset in any way also requires a skill test and they affect the role the same way that any trait does assets as well as traits can either increase or decrease the difficulty rating of a test and have some narrative bearing on the action those are the basics for conflicts the actual details for each conflict type do get a lot more specific and the book thoroughly unpacks all the nuances for each the book lists a number of assets each categorized by the five conflict type and they can each have a quality rating of zero through four the higher the quality the better they will handle an extended test generally but they actually help in different ways depending on the conflict type players can level up assets at the end of each adventure or by spending advancement points but they can only have five permanent assets at any given time unless they have certain talents that increase that cap as for the actual list itself it's a complete tour through one of dune's most interesting setting aspects okay time for a quick sidebar about the settings technology in the timeline of dune humanity came to the brink of extinction about 10 000 years ago when robots and artificial intelligence threatened to enslave them forever after they narrowly defeated the machines they formed the imperium and banned so-called thinking machines so you don't see any advanced computers in the setting perhaps more importantly a shield technology was developed that could block all ballistic weaponry like bullets but when a laser weapon strikes this kind of force field it creates a nuclear caliber blast thus the imperium and all houses abide by the strict law of never using laser weaponry or actual nukes for that matter what you're left with is everyone wearing one of these shields personally as well as the shields protecting entire buildings and cities the only way to penetrate them in battle is to use knives and swords or finding a way to deactivate the shields and then using bullets and bombs also assassination by poison is very popular there are a lot of other fun details in the technology of the dune universe i can't cover here but generally it's a retro futuristic world of analog tech mixed with ultra tech getting a feel for what is and isn't allowed or plausible in the setting is a pretty important goal if you want to keep your game consistently doomed one thing i've never seen before in an rpg rulebook is a hard game over condition where if a player uses nukes or triggers a nuke-like explosion with a shield their character and house are forfeit no questions asked they just want you to take it seriously one other major type of asset that you'll see listed is personnel this is because your main pc is supposed to be someone of at least some rank in your house and you have control and influence over others if you're familiar with the setting of dune you'll know that the fife dumbs represented by the houses and the imperial ownership of all the planets leads to occasional exploitation of humans and human labor i didn't see anything in the assets chapter that suggested gross mistreatment of people but honestly it can be a little odd to list people as assets on a character sheet especially if you take it out of context i think generally speaking gm sections and professionally produced rpg books have become just about as good as they can get you can kind of tell that they copy each other and at this point just include about every morsel of good gmming advice you can think of i'm a bit of a lousy gm myself so i'm usually pretty enthralled by these kitchen sink gm chapters that cover all the bases both generic and specific to the game but in actual practice it would take months of careful study and trial and error to really follow all of the advice and that applies to this book as well this gm section is particularly complete addressing virtually every aspect of the tabletop role-playing game hobby from the perspective of the gm i guess i'm saying this might be one of the best gm sections i've ever read but there are a lot of great ones out there at this point and some are a lot shorter there's a whole chapter devoted to detailing virtually every major character and a lot of the minor characters found in the first novel in game terms these actually give you a great template for npcs that you can throw into your game the chapter also includes a bunch of npc archetypes for even more templating these are of course also great for making quick supporting characters that the players control themselves and finally there's a deep dive discussion on the creation of rival houses broken down by different types minor major or great and military espionage technological artistic or agricultural the last 12 or so pages of the book contain a sample one-shot adventure that showcases a few aspects of the game the scenario here is that your house has inherited arrakis and spice production and there are some problems on one of the spice collector operations it presents small scale conflicts and teases much larger intrigue in future sessions that you would have to come up with yourself alright here are my thoughts on dune adventures in the imperium cons conflict mode management the game offers five different conflict archetypes ranging from a duel to a war and encourages gms to allow players to switch between these at will and regardless of what mode the other players are in this sounds really hard in theory it's not that this kind of mode switching play is impossible since modiphius has employed it before but i think you'd have to be a veteran 2d20gm or at least a very clever gm generally to juggle these wildly different scopes of play humorless it's not the fault of the game creators but rather a feature of the setting in that it's kind of mirthless my instinct for whatever reason would be to try and inject a little bit of levity into the game as you might have noticed with our toy making house ido and rival toy maker house peckham but it would be an uphill battle because this game is wholly devoted to dark serious internal and external drama redundancies if you sit down and read this book cover to cover you'll quickly discover that information repeats itself over and over there are multiple short summaries of the same factions three or four times before you get to the chapter where they actually explain them again at length same goes for the core dice mechanics dune outside of dune this is less of a con and more of a question i'm left wondering about this game on one hand the book gives you everything you could possibly need to simulate the events of the 1965 novel dune through the prism of its rules it details arrakis the houses the technology all the characters everything but on the other hand it provides enough tools to create a decent adventure outside of arrakis with a little bit of elbow grease the question becomes is there enough life and breadth in the setting to make the game interesting outside of arrakis all the movies tv shows and video games take place on the planet dune desert and the spice and the sand worms and house of tradies are lashed very tightly to the identity of the franchise so can you faithfully and fruitfully play dune outside of arrakis pros if you zoom out a bit dune is more than just about the desert planet and spice and the sand worms it's a space opera drenched in spies and assassinations and politics with the backdrop of superhumans in an unjust baroque fifenum if you can accept that as the heart and soul of doom then this game is a grand slam the five types of conflicts might be hard for a gm to juggle but if they can manage it and deliver on the ambitious premise of the game's play loop then it could lead to endlessly fascinating adventures in the greater world that is dune drives modiphius always tweaks their 2d20 system to fit whatever game they're linking it to and in this case coupling drives with skills was a very nice touch when you're constantly addressing the core motivation of your character it brings that character to life and focuses a lot of the drama inside of their head i can't help but be reminded of the david lynch movie where the character's thoughts are narrated on extreme close-up it was an odd film technique but it's kind of what you get with drives it's great sourcebook this core rulebook is a nice one-stop shop for all the setting information you could ever want as derived from the first do novel i'd be interested to see the same detailed treatment of the prequel and sequel novels your own house personally this was the most important aspect of the game to me in terms of giving it longevity and playability if players were forced into one of the named houses from the books it would have been a complete disaster fortunately the imperium in this setting is so utterly vast that you can make up a house of your own and it doesn't necessarily feel like a home brew also by creating a unique house at the table together it becomes a session zero exercise that helps everyone to understand what they all want or expect from the adventure presentation our work and layout in this book is superb i noticed that the title letter design is identical to the new dune movie and there is a heartfelt thanks to legendary films in the credits but otherwise there doesn't seem to be any tie-ins to the film the art is evocative and painterly like in all modiphius rpgs and the page design is very readable and elegantly done also hats off to modiphius for providing a printer-friendly version of the pdf i actually read and studied that version since it was easier to read than the pretty version [Music] i think it's pretty much customary now for these thick rpg core rulebooks to tell you to play the game however you want they invite you to leave out certain rules if you feel like it and just focus on the fun but i'm left wondering about how much of dune's rules are essential versus expendable there's actually a lot of squishiness built right into the game actually gm's can award advancement points kind of whenever and earn threats just as easily i think in the end this is just a really challenging game to learn how to gm since it has all kinds of hard mechanics but it also hedges many of the rules with built-in whatever you want to do clauses and on top of that it's throwing five different paradigms of play at you with all the different conflict modes in the end the big question though is does the game work as a proper dune rpg the short answer is yes definitely but if you're the gm you better come to the table with some serious chops and as a player if you've never heard or watched dune before you've got a bit of homework to do thanks as always for watching this is dave signing off see ya [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Dave Thaumavore RPG Reviews

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Length: 27min 46sec (1666 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021