Review of Dune: Chronicles of the Imperium

Ignore the list price. I put it there because that's the convention, but actually buying the game is a whole other story. You can expect to pay anything from one hundred to two hundred dollars for a copy of this book on eBay, making it one of the few true collectibles in the RPG hobby since the first "Basic Set" version of D&D. Needless to say, few can actually be bothered to shell out this kind of money, and there are only so many copies to go around, so those of us who do have it might as well take a nice, in-depth look.

As one might suspect, DUNE: CHRONICLES OF THE IMPERIUM is a role-playing game based on Frank Herbert's legendary series of DUNE novels (of which I have read the first two. I also really like the movie and kinda liked the miniseries, sorta. The computer game was good, too. That's about all the background I have.) The game was developed by Last Unicorn Games, shortly before the company was acquired by Wizards of the Coast. WotC, in the midst of releasing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Third Edition, had just adopted d20 as a house system and didn't want to support a game line which used LUG's Icon system. Not wanting to completely waste the work done, it printed three thousand copies of the finished core book, most of which were sold at GenCon (with others, including the one I managed to purchase, being sold online- reportedly some were pulped, but I can't confirm this.) They hoped, at some point, to release a d20 version of DUNE, and such is indicated in the book's title page. However, at some point the license expired and they decided not to take the trouble of renewing it. (Either there was trouble with the Herbert Estate, or the license became more expensive in light of the commercial success of the miniseries and the incipient prequel novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, which have sold well despite some emphatically negative (and in this case profane) reviews. Or they were just dumb.) The news that there would not be a d20 DUNE contributed further to the notoriety and collectibility of the ICON version, which remains the only DUNE RPG in existence (indeed, there have been no gaming tie-ins of any kind with DUNE since this whole hubbub.)

Ironically, this "buried" game release of a stillborn line of a long-gone license may be the one tangible product to come out of WotC's acquisition of Last Unicorn, whose former employees were fired from their new home when Hasbro announced its company-wide layoffs (after reaching the dregs of the POKEMON fad and overestimating the demand for PHANTOM MENACE merchandise by a factor of five kajillion.) This is all a mighty big diversion from the game itself, and I apologize if it seems irrelevant. But it's important to at least note what all the brouhaha was about. Now we can get to the game.

Almost. On the credits page we see proper billing given to the designers, the developers of the ICON system, and of course the editors- Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. When I first noticed this, I said to myself, "well, that explains it," but of course it does no such thing. If you're not familiar with licensed RPGs, just bear in mind that the creators of the property in question generally do not edit the games based on them. George Lucas does not claim developing credit on any incarnation of the STAR WARS RPG, nor is Joss Whedon listed as the editor for the BUFFY game. There are two major reasons for this. The first is that people like this are very busy; the second is that they are not game designers, and most likely have no clue how to put an RPG book together. They know nothing of balanced mechanics and rules terminology. So for Herbert and Anderson to take this credit (in addition to a credit as Creative Consultants) raises questions. Is it mere title-hogging, or a misunderstanding of how game books are put together, or does it suggest they were looking over the designers' shoulders even more intrusively than the average licensor, perhaps then explaining why WotC declined to renew the agreement? Did they, out of all the license holders in all the world, actually know how to edit a rulebook? Or was it just a typo? We may never know.

NOTE TO THOSE WHO GOT BORED AND STARTED TO SCROLL DOWN: I'm done with the behind-the-scenes stuff. I'm on to the game. Seriously.

The introduction is your standard "What is Roleplaying?" spiel, as eloquent as any. There's a glossary of game terms and a pointer to the Last Unicorn website, as well as, maddeningly, a promise that "future supplements" will expand the possibilities for roleplaying in the DUNE universe. I'll get into why this is particularly problematic later on. After this, the volume is split into three sections. Book One, "Imperium Familia", kicks off with a chapter detailing the history of the DUNE universe.

It is the 102nd century. The known universe is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, and controlled by the Great Houses of the Landsraad. The universe's economy is dependent on the spice melange, which in addition to combatting the effects of age, expands the consciousness of those who take it, enabling the Navigators of the Spacing Guild to effectively fold space and send starships across the galaxy without actually moving. The Spice, as it's known, is found only on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune. Cue Toto music. And by that I mean, the first chapter gives a fairly thorough summary of the setting's history, as well as an overview of its "present", which takes place before the events of the first novel (the precise year isn't narrowed down, but for DUNE fans it's while the Harkonnens still have control of Arrakis.)

The second chapter, "Houses of the Landsraad", looks more closely at the Great Houses which govern the universe. Detailed profiles are given for the noble House Atreides, the treacherous House Harkonnen, the all-powerful House Corrino, etc., along with a general view of how the Houses function. Important to the game are the entourages, the actual groups of people who run things- your Gurney Hallecks, Thufir Hawats and so forth. And then there are the Houses Minor, an equally key concept. They're effectively one rung down the ladder from the Great Houses; while the latter govern entire planets, the Houses Minor govern those planets' respective territories, while plotting and maneuvering for power within the planetary Sysselraad. The basic assumption behind DUNE: CHRONICLES OF THE IMPERIUM is that the PCs will form the entourage of a minor house. Remember the supplements that I said the Introduction hinted at? One of its claims is that "future books... will show players how to create all manners of characters, including Smugglers, Truthsayers, Spice Miners, Water Merchants, Imperial Planetologists, Spies and even Sandriders." Jumping ahead a bit, the Character Creation chapter discourages players from creating concepts that don't fit the House entourage model, and though the mechanics don't make it impossible, they do assume that characters have their allegiance to one of six Great Houses (and are presumably part of a House Minor which serves the same)- Atreides, Harkonnen, Corrino, Moritani, Tseida, and Wallach.

Those familiar with the DUNE universe may be a bit disappointed by this narrow focus. We're used to licensed games where you can play just about any character who would reasonably fit into the setting; they may have the model of whatever property they're adapting as a default, but often make sure to allow for extraneous concepts. The BUFFY RPG is built on the "Slayer and her friends" model, but easily allows you to create characters outside of it with no rules modification- the same can be said for Decipher's STAR TREK, which actively supports non-Star Fleet characters. On top of that, many of the stories in Frank Herbert's DUNE books take place outside the Great House structure (which, after all, has been shaken up considerably by the time the second book begins.) Then there's also the question of why the PCs must be relegated to running the minor houses instead of one of the Great ones. Sure, the Atreides and Harkonnens are spoken for, but there are 35 of the damn things in the entire Landsraad; at least one of them has to be underdeveloped. This may be another convention of licensed games: the PCs always start *under* the people in the original work. (Though, frankly, when one of the book characters is the universe's ultimate super-being, this was perhaps inevitable.) And to be fair, "I wanna play an Atreides" is the sort of thing we players tend to say, and the designers found a way to allow that.

Make no mistake; the House Minor entourage model is a good one. It allows for a good variety of characters (indeed, encouraging it), features a certain level of niche protection, and captures much of the intrigue and majesty that makes the DUNE universe interesting to begin with. It's just disappointing that other types of play are unsupported, and though the designers obviously hoped to tackle this as soon as the first supplements were published, this was not going to happen. There is a lesson here.

Let's get back to what is here. Sample Houses Minor are provided in Chapter II, but more space is given to the rules for designing your own. Each House Minor has four attributes (much like characters, as we'll find out), each with two edges which can be positive, neutral or negative. The House attributes are Status (edges are Aegis and Favor), Wealth (Holdings and Stockpiles), Influence (Popularity and Authority), and Security (Military and Intelligance.) The attributes are all ranked from 1 to 5, though even 1 is "acceptable"- no House comes out crippled in this system. To build a House you select one of six archetypes- House Defender, House Pawn, House Favorite, House Reformer, House Pretender, and House Sleeper; these provide the base attribute and edge values. You can then use 15 development points to purchase your House's Fiefdom (how much land it has- from City District to Subfief) and Noble Title (from Magistrate to Siridar Governor/Baronet), your House's starting Renown, and Assets, which are used by PCs to initiate House Ventures (to increase the House's standing.) Naturally, the House the PCs belong to will influence the course of the campaign, and there are a number of possibilities- a Harkonnen House Reformer would be an interesting uphill battle, for example.

The third chapter, Character Creation, will be at least halfway familiar to gamers who know the ICON system. The four attributes for characters are Physique (edges are Strength and Constitution), Coordination (Dexterity and Reaction), Intellect (Perception and Logic), Charisma (Presence and Willpower), and Prescience (Sight and Vision), and these are all rated from 0 (nonexistent) to 6 (peak of human potential). Character generation can be done in three ways. There are seven pregenerated templates, which represent the most common roles in a House entourage- the Adept, or resident Bene Gesserit sister (one of an order of highly trained telepaths), the Assassin, the Strategist and CHOAM advisor (CHOAM being the universe's major mercantile monopoly and nexus of all commerce- a Strategist can also be a Warmaster, Spymaster or Security Commander), the Mentat (someone trained to use their mind so efficiently that they act like human computers- real computers being verboten due to some complicated backstory), the Swordmaster, the Suk (the house doctor who has been conditioned for utter loyalty, and whose conditioning is almost never broken), and the Noble who is actually part of the host family and who does most of the diplomatic work. Advanced character creation starts by selecting your House Allegiance (which depends on what Great House your Minor House serves); this determines your base attributes and edges (the attributes all start at 2, which is average, while Prescience starts at 0) as well as giving you some skills and a trait. You then choose one of seven Conditioning Overlays, which correspond to the aforementioned templates, and also add to your attributes, skills and traits. You then build up your character by adding three Background Packages, one representing your early life history, another your house service, and the other your personal calling- each of these categories features a "Unique" package which is simply a number of Development Points to spend as you choose. At the end you get five Development Points so as to customize your character, receive a Caste rating depending on your profession, a starting Renown of 1, 3 Karama points to use for heroic feats, and Personal Equipment also dependent on profession. Finally, you can take the really advanced route and just spend 130 Development Points to make a character from scratch; this does allow you to circumvent the whole "House entourage" limitation (it's a matter of choosing the right traits), but it doesn't say how Caste or Starting Equipment are decided for these characters. (You can guess that a Water Seller would be of a higher Caste than a Smuggler, but since Caste costs nothing the Water Seller would effectively be at a higher level for free.)

The fourth chapter describes all the skills, advantages and disadvantages characters have in detail. Skills are handled by a specialization system; every skill, save for two Prescience-based ones and another which is for Adepts only, has a number of specializations for it. They're written out as Skill(Specialization) x(y), where x is the skill rating and y is the specialization rating; y is used in place of x when the situation demands. Theoretically it's possible, via the quirks of the building system, to end up with a situation where x is higher than y- you just have to watch out for this, presumably, but it doesn't say which value is used in such instances. (The phrasing of this whole concept is a little awkward and took me a while to figure out.) The traits (advantages and disadvantages) are nice and varied, allowing for False Allegiances, Prized Bloodlines, and the (mostly beneficial) effects of a Spice Diet, as well as standard things like keen hearing, superstition and perversion. (For the record, there is no "Kwisatz Haderach" trait. I don't think you can be a Ghola or an intelligent sandworm either.)

The system works like this: each test (or task, or what-have-you) has a difficulty, the practical range being from 3 to 14. You roll a number of d6 equal to the governing attribute (with edges modifying just how many that is.) At least one of these is the "Drama Die". You then pick the highest number of any die rolled, and add that to your skill (or specialization) rating. If this total equals the difficulty, you just barely succeed at the task; if it exceeds the difficulty, you have an unqualified success. If the Drama Die comes up 6, both it and the next highest die are added to the skill. If it's a 1, there's a chance of Dramatic Failure. Beyond this it actually gets a bit tricky, so let's just say that the degree by which you succeed or fail makes a difference. Karama can be spent to increase the Test result on a 1-for-1 basis. House ventures, which represent the political wheelings and dealings of the PCs' House Minor, are resolved in the same way, except using the House's attributes. It's fairly easy to grasp, although the probabilities are a tad skewed.

Combat is also relatively simple at its core, with room for elaboration. Each weapon has a basic to-hit number representing its accuracy, but if the defending character dodges and obtains a higher number for a result, that becomes the new to-hit number. Each character in a combat also has a number of Option Points which they can spend on maneuvers, from basic dodges and tackles to feints, ripostes and the Slow Attack that's ever-so-necessary for shield fighting. Damage is a cumulative system, with x number of hits taking you to a certain wound level which makes activity more difficult. Looking at the various weapon damage values, the lethality of the system seems about right; a good hit or two can put you in serious trouble, which fits what I've read. There's an inconsistency in the game's description of Resistance, which is described as being your character's Physique + Constitution in one place and your Constitution edge (if positive) in another (the latter is used in an example, so I'm assuming that's the correct answer.)

Book Two is all about running the game. Chapter VI, "A Voice From The Outer World", is the basic "tips for GMing" section we're familiar with from many RPGs; it's solid advice, not leaning too hard on any one style and not being condescending. "Pillars of the Universe" is about specifically running games in the DUNE universe; it talks about many of the themes which run throughout the novels, and about how to apply those to campaigns and adventures. Mostly concerned with the campaign architecture, it talks about establishing the setting and supporting cast, and introduces a handy three-act structure for adventures. "A Shortening of the Way" provides rules for experience and advancement; DUNE characters can, in addition to improving stats and skills, earn renown in four categories (Valor of the Brave, Learning of the Wise, Justice of the Great, and Prayers of the Righteous), which helps clarify a character's specific reputation, and of course PCs can also advance in rank within their House. The rules for advancing the House itself are here as well.

And then we go on what seems like a tangent. Chapter IX, "Chusuk, the 'Music Planet'", is all about detailing this particular world, the home of House Varota and, more importantly, the setting for the introductory adventure, "Instrument of Kanly" which makes up the next chapter. It's basically an expanded version of the planetary profiles included later in the book, which also includes some information on the House itself, including the Varota Allegiance Template. As for the adventure, it's a nice, low-key bit of intrigue which should work to get most campaigns going.

Book Three is the setting material (or rather, the REST of the setting material.) "The Culture of the Imperium" does what it says on the tin, offering an in-depth look at the major organizations and power structures that were briefly described in Chapters I and II. Not being an expert on the DUNE series, I can't vouch for the accuracy of all this information, but it goes together and holds up quite well; the Articles of Kanly (which govern and help the Emperor to control the vendettas and rivalries between nobles and Houses) aren't given much definition beyond people being able to duel under certain circumstances and breaking the Articles being a very bad idea, but I suspect that Herbert didn't go into too much detail about this himself. The CHOAM Company and the Bene Gesserits are covered with some detail, as are the universal caste system, the customs and the religious and cultural facets of the Imperium. "Technology of the Imperium" is mostly given over to equipment listings, but also explains the Butlerian Jihad which outlawed the construction of "thinking machines" (i.e., computers and robots) and which has therefore steered most of the Imperium towards the development of human capabilities. There are also rules for Vehicular Pursuit & Combat, which require some Narrator interpretation but are quite useable otherwise. "The Spacing Industry" gives in-depth information on the Spacing Guild and its practices, which is important if your entourage is going to do a lot of interplanetary travelling.

"Imperial Planetology" is given over entirely to listings of the major planets in the setting. All the homes of the six "playable" Great Houses are covered in detail, each getting about a page's worth of information, and a convenient sidebar with the major facts (population, climate, etc.) Other planets the chapter deals with are the machine world of Ix, the prison planet Salusa Secundus, and of course Dune itself. The latter gets as much information as each of the Imperial Homeworlds, with sidebar. For some reason, the planet is at times referred to in the text as DUNE, at other times with normal capitalization. This was probably a typographical error. Finally, "Imperial Personages" gives short descriptions of many prominent characters in the DUNE series (Paul Atreides is conspicuously absent) and stat blocks for generic personages. Some instances of the latter, such as "Guild Spokesman" or "Saboteur", might be useful for Narrators and players wishing to run non-entourage campaigns. Sadly, it's as much help as you're likely to get.

And here we get to the bad news. As we discussed earlier, this is the one and only DUNE RPG product in existence to date, and it's as dead as a line can get. I have no trouble with playing dead games, but this particular one serves as an object lesson for much of the RPG industry: NEVER ASSUME THAT YOU CAN PUBLISH SUPPLEMENTS. The designers of this game perhaps figured they could cover certain things outside of the core book, and there are seven instances where the book refers to upcoming supplements that will never be, which needless to say tugs at the heartstrings a bit. More importantly, it seems the "we can cover it later" mentality led to at least two limitations on content. The first, as I've mentioned before, is the lack of support for non-entourage play. You can cobble together a Fremen smuggler with the right trait combination, but it's a bit of a kludge; more exotic characters, like the mutated Guild steersmen (which wouldn't make very good PCs, but could easily appear as supporting cast members) don't seem doable at all with the rules as written. I'll confess this may have entirely been a matter of space constraints, but I wonder how much room it would have actually taken to expand the range of possible PCs.

The more significant shortcoming is the relatively low profile of Dune itself. As I said, it gets as much space as the Imperial Homeworlds, but even that is not really enough. This is, after all, the DUNE RPG, based on the DUNE series of books, and as broad and deep as Frank Herbert's universe is, it's Arrakis that has always been at the center of that vision. The sweeping sands, the mysterious Fremen and their dreams of jyhad and rebirth, the worms, the Spice... two pages can't do justice to it, let alone my quarter of a paragraph. The mistake seems to be obvious; the chapter on Chusuk should have been a chapter on Arrakis, and the introductory adventure should have taken place there. Now, the game is set well before the beginning of the first book, and Arrakis has yet to become the "center of the universe", as it were, but then again, ever since West End Games' second edition of STAR WARS it's been common for licensed RPGs to cover different time frames within the licensed universe, and support for at least the time range covered by Herbert's original series of books should have been a no-brainer (there isn't even a summary of what goes on in the books, and considering how weird they get a quick guide would have been appreciated). Then again, maybe the Estate wanted the emphasis to be on the new-on-shelves prequel books, and pushed for that focus just a bit too hard. Never rule anything out when it comes to licenses and the behavior of the people who own them.

Back to the good stuff. The art direction of the book is excellent, with a gorgeous cover and quality interior art (at least some of which is recognizable from Last Unicorn's DUNE CCG.) The character sheet at the back is in the color, but with its pale earth-tone background it should translate to a black-and-white photocopier pretty easily (then again, I haven't tried it.) The index has a couple of omissions, but has a good number of entries overall. The layout is attractive and looks like you'd think a DUNE RPG book would.

DUNE: CHRONICLES OF THE IMPERIUM's great success is that it gets the feel right. You play important characters in an vast, majestic world where politics and religion and ancient feuds intertwine in complex relationships that subtly but tangibly influence everything you're involved in. Like a lot of licensed settings, there's the question of how your characters will be as important as the heroes you've already read about it, but looking at the Houses and guilds and their fragile relationships, you can find all sorts of opportunities for dramatic upheaval. The universe of DUNE is a volatile one, and this game gives you more than enough to start doing something with it.

But is it worth $200? At a price like that, you're buying a collector's item as much as a game, and it's more cost efficient to kludge a DUNE campaign together using a generic system and a setting guide or two. But if you're a completist, or interested in rare games, have lots of disposable income or know somebody who can get you a good deal, it might be worth springing for. It's good, and I feel bad that more can't be done with it. Who knows? Maybe someday the license will be picked up by someone with the resources to hold onto it, and maybe even incorporate the material that's already been written. Maybe WotC will be able to put this up as a PDF somewhere, for a price that actually approaches being reasonable.

And while we're at it, I'd also like a date with Julia Sawalha.