I have very mixed feelings on the Modiphius Dune: Adventures in the Imperium RPG, but that won’t stop me from doing a Dyson Logos-style character creation! Hopefully this will be marginally informative as well. Important terms will be explained along the way, excepting universe-specific Dune terminology. There are many better sources for explaining the intricacies of a Fremkit out there.

Housekeeping

To quote the text:

“In Dune: Adventures in the Imperium, the player characters all serve a single noble House. So, before we create those characters, it is vital to determine a few details about the style, agenda, and attributes of the House they serve. […] it’s equally important to the gamemaster, as it determines the general level of the campaign and what sort of adventures the players want to encounter. So the nature of the House should be a group decision between the players and the gamemaster.”

I actually think this is kind of nice. Although the rulebook is sorely, sorely lacking in systems that support actually doing something with your House, it does give some guidelines about how the different tiers of Houses can affect play. Seeing as this is a sample character creation endeavor, I’ll go with “whatever sounds pretty cool to me at the moment” rather than gaming group democracy.

So, the tiers of Houses are Nascent House, House Minor, House Major, and Great House. Let’s go with a House Minor – not quite an upstart, but still with plenty of room to rise and expand. Then, we choose the Domains of the House. They are basically what the House is famous or creating, or some other notable ability. Because we’re House Minor, we get to choose 1 primary domain and 1 secondary domain. Within the domains, the areas of expertise are Machinery, Produce, Expertise, Workers and Understanding. A whole lot of neat examples are then listed.

I like the idea that our House has been embroiling in a long War of Assassins, so let’s pick Expertise (Kanly: Assassin Masters) as their primary domain. But killing people won’t make a killing in money, so how do we finance this? For the secondary domains, let’s pick Produce (Industrial: Refined Alloys). Perhaps our House seat is on some mineral-rich moon – and our claim to it has always been fiercely contested by a rival House? Hmm.

Next is (appropriately) Homeworld. I think it’s sufficient to say it’s a mineral-rich moon orbiting the homeworld of our liege House – probably with fairly few areas that are comfortably habitable, thus setting the stage for a War of Assassins. Let’s call the moon Naomos. Oh, and what should we call our House, actually? House Kezimov? Why not?

Next is banners and arms. Our emblem, let’s just go with a mannaz futhark rune, with orange and white as our colors.

Then it’s something really interesting: House Traits. Basically, characters can spend Momentum (one of the game’s several meta-currencies) to apply their a House Trait to their character for the remainder of the current scenes. It’s a pretty cool idea – but the wording of the rules is somewhat strange. It states that one of our starting traits is “is the same as the area of expertise for that domain”. Since the sample house provided by the text has chose an Artistic area of expertise, that’s straightforward. But “Kanly” is hardly a trait. “Secretive”? “Plotting”? “Calculated”? I like the latter, but it seems a little off nevertheless. We’ll go with it, but I find the wording in the rulebook incredibly odd on this.

We also begin with a descriptive trait. I think “Austere” might be fun. Will House Kezimov keep their austere, spartan styles as they ascend in power, or will they embrace more decadent and ostentatious displays? We may never know.

Next is a lengthy section for determining who is the House head, advisor, scholars, chief physicians, and so on. We can skip that for the moment, although we should think about which roles player characters occupy. Each House role has a description of their rights and responsibilities, which is cool and helpful.

Then, a fun one: Enemies. And behold, there are actually random tables to help determine this! We’re a House Minor, which means we’re the enemies of one other House Minor. We roll 1d20 to determine just how much bad blood there is between us. 13 – the result is Loathing. Seeing as the highest step is full-out Kanly, this might represent a liege-enforced peace between House Kezimov and House… Androkar? Why not? Then we roll the reason for the Kezimov-Androkar rivalry. 16 – Theft. Obviously the foul and conniving Androkars stole, yes, stole deeds of land that rightfully belongs to Kezimov, covering their tracks well. But House Kezimov knows the truth.

That concludes House creation.

A Question of Character

The game distinguishes between two kinds player-controlled characters: main characters and supporting characters. It’s about what you’d expect. Your main character is your primary mover and shaker, supporting characters come and go as the story and scene demands. Interestingly, there is nothing preventing you from making a, say Suk Doctor main character and a House Heir supporting character.

Also somewhat interestingly, the game presents the option for character creation in play, where only a few things are defined before the dice rolling starts. Schrödinger’s character creation. Whether it works, I have no idea, but I imagine it depends on a somewhat successful ephemeral combination of player proactiveness, GM flexibility, and rules knowledge.

The components of a character are:

• Personal Traits (whether you got Bene Gesserit training or is a real good talker and so on)
• Skills and Focuses (how good you are at Battle, Communicate, Discipline, Move and Understand, and consequently whether you are really good at certain sub-areas of these)
• Drives (Your scores in Duty, Faith, Justice, Power and Truth, as well as statements about your highest-ranked ones. Similarly in some ways to Burning Wheel beliefs)
• Ambition (Long-term goal(s))
• Assets (Your stuff! Actually also covers intangible assets, let leverage and favors and information)

The character creation is outlined in a somewhat odd way. First, you are encourage to settle on a Concept, and then an Archetype. At a glance it’s kind of hard to grasp exactly why they’re different steps, since Concept may very well do some of the same mechanical things that Archetype does. Design tip: If you have terms with near-synonymous meanings, don’t make them adjacent processes in the rules or the text.

Concepts additionally have faction templates. They are relevant if you want to make a character tied to one of the specialist organizations of the setting, like the Bene Gesserit, Fremen, Suk Doctors and so on. Belonging to one of these Concepts grant you an appropriate bonus trait, lists some suggested Archetypes, and then a Mandatory Talent that you must pick. For instance, the Bene Gesserit Sister must pick Prana-Bindu Condition, the Suk Doctor must pick Imperial Condition, and so on.

Anyhow, since the game allows us to play Mentats, let’s go with that. While a Kanly-specialized Mentat seems right up House Kezimov’s alley, I imagine that a) turnover rate of assassin-Mentats is quite high in the House; b) it’s just too conceptually easy. So why not make a Mentat who is a record-keeper or administrator, helping oil the cogs that keep the Kanly machine going? Or a diplomat?

When settling on concept, you also choose one trait for your character to represent this. We get Mentat for free, but the character concept calls for something as well. Let’s go with ‘Advisor to House Kezimov’.

Looking at the Mentat Concept block, it lists Herald as a possible Archetype. I like that. If House Kezimov is to rise, they’ll need to put on a good outwards face. So a Mentat to assist in the finer points of feudal politics. As a Mentat, we thus gain the Mentat trait, and we get a list of Mandatory Talents, any of which may additionally be taken in lieu of other talent choice. Why? Because Mentats are cool that way.

And so, we’re on to picking an Archetype. Technically this is isn’t necessary; the archetypes are just neat and theme-tuned packages of skill, focus, trait and talent choices. But the book seems to really want us to pick one, and we’ve kind of done so already – Herald.

Side note: I find this kind of game writing a little frustrating. It’s the same issue Backgrounds in D&D5e has, where a bunch of neat and highly thematic choices are presented, and then a “or you can homebrew entirely” remark thrown in, almost as an afterthought. In a way, I wish Dune: AitI would just pick one or the other. The formatting makes Archetype choice seem like a precise, ordered process, while the text offhandedly admits that they aren’t. Sometimes hard limits on character creation is a good thing, and in the case of a universe like Dune, it can really help create setting-appropriate characters. So let’s just pretend that yes, Archetype packages are mandatory.

The Herald Archetype gives us the Herald trait, Discipline as our Primary Skill, and Communicate as our Secondary skill. Our Focus options are Command and Composure (more on that soon), while our Talent is Rigorous Control (though we may, if desired, substitute it with a Mentat talent). Additionally, it offers some advice on how to distribute our Drive.

Skill Bill

So, skills! They range from 4 to 8, and we get a rating of 6 in our Primary skill (Discipline), 5 in our Secondary Skill (Communicate), and 4 in all the others. Furthermore, we get 5 points that we can distribute as we wish. After a brief Mentat trance to decide, our final skill array is:

• Battle: 4
• Communicate: 6
• Discipline: 7
• Move: 4
• Understand: 7

Each skill of 6 or above grants us a related Focus. Focus choices are open-ended, but the book lists a prodigious amount of samples, enough for us to choose from without a problem. So, including the pick we got from our Archetype, we end up with these Foci:

• Composure (Discipline)
• Persuasion (Communicate)
• Observe (Discipline)
• House Politics (Understand)

What does all this mean? Well, Dune: AitI uses a version of the Modiphius 2d20 engine, a slightly convoluted system. A skill test is made by first adding together the rating of a skill and a relevant Drive, which gives us the target number. Then, the GM decides on a difficulty from 0 to 5, which is the number of successes needed in order to succeed. Then, we roll 2d20 plus any addition d20’s bought with Momentum, by accepting additional Threat (which is essentially the GM’s metacurrency they can invoke to make things harder/more complicated), by spending Determination (yes, Momentum and Determintion are different things, bizarrely), and/or by getting assistance. Each rolled d20 from this dice pool that shows a number equaling or less the Target Number is a success, and if one of a character’s Foci applies, each die scoring equal or to or less than the Skill being used grants a critical success. d20’s showing 1’s are natural critical successes. Now, compared the number of successes to the Difficulty. If the total number of success is less than the Difficulty, failure. If equal to, success. If higher than, each success exceeding the Difficulty becomes a point of Momentum.

Got it? Whew. It looks more complicated in writing than it actually is, but that doesn’t stop the text from using almost-synonymous terms in close proximity. I’m noticing a pattern here.

Anyhow, our Mentat is all skilled and focused up. Talents are next.

The Talented Mr. Mentat

What’s the difference between a Trait and a Talent? Traits affect difficulty positively or negatively, and interesting, places and situations can have traits as well. It’s left up the conversation of the game to decide exactly how this plays out and affects skill tests. In the case of our character, say we want to convince the head of House Kezimov to approve the assassination of his cousin. Our Mentat has the ‘Advisor to House Kezimov’ trait, which we can argue would lower the difficulty. On the other hands, the scene might have an ‘Atmosphere of Caution’ trait, which would raise difficulty. And so on. This is kinda neat.

Talents are more recognizably ‘powers’ that a character has. They’re extra procedures or rules that allow you to do certain cool things. Some require that you have certain traits – for instance, there are a bunch of Talents specifically for Bene Gesserit.

A newly-minted character gets to pick three talents. We must pick one or from the Mentat list, and our Archetype (Herald) also suggests one. There are actually quite a lot of Talents, and the relatively freedom to pick whatever we want is cool. Many of the Talents directly influence the flow of information and communication between characters in-game, which is highly appropriate for the setting. Awesome. Overall, I like the design of the Talents a lot, even if some of them might benefit from a bit more explication.

Small note: The print version lists Foreknowledge as a possible Talent for the Mentat, but no entry for this Talent exists. The newest PDF version, however, incorporates errata, and replaces the reference to Foreknowledge with a reference to Calculated Prediction. The PDF is complimentary when you buy the print version, courtesy of an included discount code, by the way, so the errata is close at hand.

After some browsing, our three Talent picks are Calculated Prediction (eyes go white and we make a Mentat probability calculation), Masks of Power (allows us to conjure a social asset at no cost in a scene, though the asset will disappear when the scene is done, because it was never there in the first place – we lied!), and Verify (a Mentat talent that allows us to spend Momentum to verify information from the GM).

Drive On, Johnny!

Next up, Drive and Drive Statements. First, we assign the ratings 8, 7, 6, 5, and 4 across the five Drives: Duty, Faith, Justice, Power, and Truth. I like this idea a lot. It’s like alignment for the Dune universe, thematic and evocative, and asking you from the get-go to make some choices about your character’s conception of the world.

For our Mentat, Duty gets an 8. Faith gets a 7, Power 6, Justice 5, and Truth 4.

We then assign Drive Statements to our three highest-ranked Drives, in this case Duty, Faith and Power. The book provides a fairly meaty sample list. I’m seeing a lot of similarities to Burning Wheel Beliefs here, insofar that Drive Statements need not be true per se, but reflect some cornerstone of your character’s motivating worldview. The Drives as a kind of numerical scaffolding for these statements is a cool structure.

So, for Duty we go with “Whatever must be done in the service of House Kezimov, I will do.” For Faith, we pick “God’s divine plan will reveal itself if we look hard enough.” For Power, we pick “Explicit power invites explicit decadence.”

It is, however, slightly unclear just how much the game wants to roast characters over their Statements. Disillusion is a valid option in Burning Wheel; I’m unsure if it is in Dune: AitI as well. Nevertheless, this is a cool way of fleshing out the game character vis-a-vis the themes and core concepts of the Duniverse.

Ten-foot Frempoles

Next up is equipment, or, in the game’s parlance, Assets. Which is, frankly, a better word, because Assets needs not be your run-of-the-mill list of credit sticks, mesh armor and sundry adventuring gear. The game assumes that your character is dressed as befits their station, and generally has access to amenities and basic objects of the world. You don’t need to spend an Asset slot on a pen or an eyeliner. Assets have Quality, the lowest being 0, and highest being 4. High good, low bad.

Frustratingly, the game offers very little information about how your House can influence your equipment and gear situation. This brings up some rather awkward situations where relatively common gear still needs an Asset slot. The greatest mitigation to this apparent problem is how the game actually manages Assets in play. You can, through skill rolls, create new Assets in play, and spend Momentum to make it a permanent part of your character. Essentially, don’t worry if you suddenly need a glowglobe – you can introduce on and then discard it as fits the story.

The list of Assets is quite meaty, ranging from personal gear to political influence and favors, crysknifes and blackmail, and so on. There’s a lot to like here.

Yet the section has two quirks: First, there is very little guidance to introducing new objects that could conceivably exist in the Duniverse. A kind of pervasive fear of player/GM-driven invention runs through a lot of the writing, where loyalty to the intellectual property sometimes take primacy over user-facing tools. Secondly, a large amount of Assets (fremkits, jubba cloaks, crysknifes, etc.) are particular to Arrakis. This inadvertently makes the universe of Dune appear much smaller than it really is. What if we’re not playing on Arrakis? What if the focus of the campaign is a hundred planets removed? Surely other planets ave developed at least some kind of local technology or variants. Lurking all over the Asset pages is the tacit assumption that dwelling upon the known parts of the universe is preferable to providing tools to expanding upon the unseen parts. It’s a shame.

Anyway, for our Mentat, we probably don’t want any guns or swords. The rules that that at least one of our Assets must be tangible, so let’s get that out of the way. A poison snooper seems like a good choice for a political actor. To balance the scales, we pick up a verite Asset too – a truthsaying drug that will allow our Mentat to avoid messing with the Bene Gesserit when extracting information. Finally, let’s pick a Blackmail Asset – one of the choices is Hostage, and obviously the uneasy peace between Houses Kezimov and Androkar hasn’t stopped the factions from picking up some house guests.

He Who Controls the Character Sheet Controls the Universe

The final step, Finishing Touches, involves picking a last trait for our character to represent their personality, assign them an Ambition, pick a name, and flesh out their personality. After some brief calculation in which the balance of powers on a hundred planets is weighed, our finished character thus ends up looking like this:

Farid Lavigne (Herald)

DRIVES

• Duty: 8 – Whatever must be done in the service of House Kezimov, I will do.
• Faith: 7 – God’s divine plan will reveal itself if we look hard enough.
• Justice: 5
• Power: 6 – Explicit power invites explicit decadence.
• Truth: 4

SKILLS AND FOCI

• Battle: 4
• Communicate: 6 – Persuasion
• Discipline: 7 – Composure, Observe
• Move: 4
• Understand: 7 – House Politics

Traits: Advisor to House Kezimov, Mentat, Orator

Ambition: To eradicate House Androkar’s presence on Naomos (Duty)

TALENTS

• Calculated Prediction
• Masks of Power
• Verify

STARTING ASSETS

• Poison snooper
• Hostage
• Verite

DESCRIPTION/NOTES

To the pudgy, bearded Farid, House Kezimov represents something rare: A young House unsullied by corruption, just in its cause, and the perfect place to exert some hard, divinely-ordained justice. Farid belongs to a strand of Mentats with a more mystical and spiritual inclination than most, though his theological understanding ranges about as far as “might, in most cases, makes right”. Nevertheless, he adheres to Zensunni-influenced principles, and encourages his liege House to act with honor. After all, kanly and the arts of politicking have their own kinds of honor. Farid dreams of destroying the House that stains the Kezimov’s reputation – the despicable House Androkar. No weapon is too subtle or cruel if used in the service of glorious kanly, after all.

Concluding Thoughts

I had more fun making a character than anticipated. Much to my own surprise, I’m actually quite hyped up fro playing this damned game. I do still think it has problems, and most of them can be traced to lack of direction, lack of commentary, and lack of tools to go outside the parameters erected to replicate a certain conception of Dune. A fairly strong neo-trad ethos seems to inform many design decisions. Maybe I’ve just gotten too used to the blunt-but-no-BS type of game commentary common to modern OSR and indie RPG writing. Because Dune: AitI does’t seem bad. There’s some exciting ideas here, and making a character was a fun and informative way to explore them a bit more. So don’t consider this a formal review. More as a quick test drive of the car in first gear.