TheRPGSite

While I have other projects in mind this is fresh and hot from the Tenbones thread that I'm too lazy/incompetent to link to.  Keeping in mind that I've been a Fading Suns booster around here, and one of many claiming that it would make a good Dune Rpg, I figured I'd do some grunt work adapting. Mind you, I'm a little out of practice in thinking of the Dune Setting... I haven't read the Herbert books in at least ten years, and my long standing hate for KJA is well established.

Seeing as this is free on the internet, I'm not going to do too much deep lore research, so I may need some gentle nudges if I step on any fan-wank toes.  If you want to use it at your table, with more, or better, details... add them yourself!

I'll be using my Second Edition Fading Suns Books for this, so if you're redbricking it, or whomever... I got nothin'?

Setting:

This is the big question. Clearly the Dune Setting, but what does that mean?  Well, I'm all for avoiding stepping on too many toes in the book/lore department, while also not planning on getting too deep into the future history weeds, so I'm just as happy to keep it to stuff that would be familiar from only the first book... as we really do have three settings in Frank Herbert's take: The Atredies/Harkonnen slapfight, the God-Emperor period, and the Chapterhouse/post Scattering era.  While in theory the Honored Matres and stuff would make for a more complex and broad setting, it wouldn't feel much like Dune to people who mostly saw the movie(s).

On the other hand, I don't want to be tripping over Paul Atredies and ilk, but since the setting seems to be pretty damn stable for a long damn time between the ascention of House Corrino to the Padasha Emperorship all the way to the rise of Maud'ib, that gives me several thousand years to play in relatively safely. Lets back off a full thousand or so years.  A quick glance at the Dune Timeline Wiki shows that almost no history is recorded for Dune around this time, so boom, the year is Nine thousand, One Ninety One, and we don't have to worry about tripping balls over 'screwing up the setting'. There a Corrino on Kaitan, Salusa Secudus is a wasteland prison planet producing Sadukar, the Atredies and Harkonnen hate each other as they have since the Butlerian Jihad, nine thousand years ago.

What about Arrakis? Its there, producing Spice as always. Some random House (Tantor) runs the place, have for the past few decades, will for perhaps a few more until the Emperor deposes them in favor of a different house, seeing as it is the biggest political hot potatoe in the damn galaxy.  Fremen are problems, but not a notable one.  

Ok, so we have some ten thousand worlds to play around with, and literally thousands of Houses in teh Landsraad, how does this work out?

Well, Houses are defined by two seperate things: Stock Shares in the CHOAM corporation, which largely focuses on Spice trade, but dabbles in pretty much everything. The Emperor is the biggest shareholder, and secondly by a stockpile of Atomic Weapons, of which Stoneburners are but one example, and we can probably include more old fashioned nuclear bombs in that arsenal.  These are technically illegal to produce and buy/sell... not that anyone with Atomics would sell them, as that would weaken them politically, just as using them threatens retaliation in kind from 'everyone'.   So, Houses don't measure their power in worlds.  Most Houses will have at least one world they directly control, but that's more a status symbol and a form of security than political power in and of itself.  Corrino, the house of the Emperor, only really controls Kaitan and Salusa Secudus directly, and Arrakis indirectly.  We can presume entire worlds with minimal Noble influence.

Nobles titles are not entirely a big deal. Baron Harkonnen is not subordinate to Duke Atredies, despite Dukes being traditionally the noble title second only to kings and emperors (and we can assume no "kings", aside from a few self titled minor lords ruling whole planets, but without much, if any, say in the Landsraad...).  That's not to say there is NO difference. We know for a fact that Atredies is very influential in the Landsraad, while the Harkonnen are not. Aside from personality, the noble titles reflect comparative shares in CHOAM, and therefore power in the Landsraad, if nothing else.  While we don't see a lot of vassalage and use of titles in Dune, we can assume it does exist, so Duke Leto Atredies may have a number of Barony's who are vassals and members of his House, and who Vote their shares in the Landsraad according to their House (and may, in fact, hold those shares entirely in proxy to the Duke Atredies!).

[Note that I'm beginning to see the framework of a subsystem for political manuevering, a balancing act of atomics, CHOAM shares and Wealth/Spice Holding... but that isn't very FS, so I'm going to speed past it for the moment... maybe a later post.]

Technical Specialists... that is to say people without (necessarily) advantageous birth but great skill with machines etc (the Guilder in FS), fall under the aegis of the Spacing Guild and CHOAM. Many minor nobles and second (or third) sons may find their own paths here, and many are born to it, but anyone with ambition or talent may find a place in these organizations, and grow.

Religious groups: This is where the various Bene organizations fall (the Bene Gesserit and the often illegal, or at least suspicious Bene Tlielaxu) fall here. Actual belief in god isn't really necessary, we are looking at the form of the group.  Fremen Fedakin would be analogus to Brother Battle (without the cool armor) as is... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

What else do we need? Mentats?  Certainly. What are Mentats exactly? Men trained to think like machines? We see Thufir Hawat serving as a spy master and trainer to Paul Atredies, and Piotr is similar on the other side. Frankly, I think Mentats don't need special rules so much as just recognition in the setting. If you've got X abilities and take the Mentat perk, you be a Mentat. Boom.  Same with Duncan and sword masters. Duncan is just a really well trained fighter guy with a perk that lets him claim to be awesome officially, and so forth.  We've also got the teeming masses, the smugglers and criminals, along with military forces.  The Sadukar are well trained, well equipped military forces with some special gear and a penchant for Turkish titles.

This is an overview. In later posts I can/will do things like give a roster of big important names that people are likely to care about, but I want to go over the framework of rules so that I won't be just skinning up Dune as a blank setting 'like' Dune.

Rulez:

One big one I'm going to need to hash out along the way is Spice.  I'm going to posit that it is like a 'zero point' perk, neither an advantage nor disadvantage. You are addicted to a super expensive substance and will DIE without it (and assume all Nobles/people of importance are addicts...), but on the other hand you'll live for two to three hundred years, may gain psychic powers and so forth.  So despite the downside, its so damn good that EVERYONE WHO CAN takes the stuff.  Now, we can also assume LEVELS of addiction, with many people just taking a reasonable amount once a month or week or what have you, and just getting the health benefits, and blue within blue eyes daily constant need where you are damn near a superman, but without Spice near constantly, you shrivel up and die (which is why the Fremen weren't terribly eager to do more than live in their desert... They probably were well aware that their utility in space, without massive stores of Spice (making tehm a target for everyone with half a brain) was highly limited!).

For now, we'll treat it like the books/movies do: As a background detail.  Spice is VALUABLE. Its the basis of currency and one of the legs of political power, beyond that we don't care much just yet.

First, let me pare down my FS books a bit.

Lifeweb: Unnecessary except maybe to design space monsters to fight.  May be useful for discussing Honored Matres and their forces later, but we're not going there.  Next.
Children of the Gods: No aliens, though we might draw Ukar details for the Fremen, we don't really need it right now. Next.
Sinners and Saints: A collection of NPCs, useful at the table, useless for parsing rulesets. Next.
Byzantium Secundus: Makes a good standin for Kaitan, but more than that discusses the Imperial Eye (spymastering!), so we'll put it in the useful later pile.
Into the Dark: Adventures involving dark demons. NOt really appropriate, but might be mined later for NPCs and ideas. Next.
Lords of the Known Worlds: Nobles. Yes, we are keeping this more or less intact. Useful "Now" pile.
Aliens and Deviltry: Well, half of this is Children of the Gods, but the other half includes various psychic and 'magic' rules, so I'm going to keep it for adaption purposes.  useful 'now'.
Players Companion:  Skipping all the aliens that takes up a good third of the book, its pretty much all gold for us. Useful Now pile.
Noble Armada: Ship Fighting Game. Potentially useful, but adds nothing to 'adaption', so Next.
Orphaned Races: More aliens, Next
Forbidden Lore, Techology: Useful Now
Star Crusade, Lost Worlds: A collection of planets. Useful in game, but much like Sinners and Saints offers nothing for adaption, Next.
Star Crusade: This one covers to alternate human cultures in Fading Suns. Plenty of things to adapt, but also somewhat unique. I'm gonna put that with Byzantium Secundus, to be dealt with case by case.
*I'm sure I'm missing a book on priestly sorts, but I can't recall if I misplaced it or never bought it, so we'll have to do without.


So, to process the Rulez I'm going to go in reverse order from detailing the setting. Now I"m going to look at what Fading Suns provides, and putting a Dune Spin on it.  As I drill down later, I will be more syncretic, but first I have to have my frameworks. I've got the setting framework (up above) so now for the rule framework.  I'm going to go over the rules as they exist in the book. This might get tedious, but I'm adapting an entire setting to another entire, but similar setting, so details do matter. I get that my first pass will be primarily reductive, I won't be adding shit to the game at this point.

First up the book talks about nobles. We've got Five major Noble houses and a dozen or so Minor Houses (taken from Lords and the PC).
So first glance, mechanically there isn't much difference in characters between the two 'sizes', its mostly roleplaying. Characters from minor houses tend to have lesser titles and wealth, etc.
So, first up is to state, catagorically, that the names of the noble houses are irrelevant, its what they represent. We don't know all the noble houses of Dune, only a tiny handful of mostly Major houses.

So pick a House whose flavor fits your idea of a NOble House. Atredies is a good match for Hawkwood, etc... but other houses may look like Hawkwood too (or take after Hawkwood in other ways). Ideally we can come up with a list of Dune Houses matched to the flavor of various Fading Suns Houses, but really that's an exercise for later.  If we stick to the LIfepath creation system in Second Edition (Printed in 1999) then the Lords of the Known Worlds (printed in 1996, so first ed) is less useful to us, but if we use point creation we should be good.  Either way, anyone playing a member of a noble house can make a noble without too much change At This Stage.

Maybe we can even steal House Names to bulk up our Roster of Noble Houses of the Landsraad.

The second up on the block is the Church.  Obviously we have a major issue here, as Dune doesn't posit a universal church, or at least not one with extreme politcal power and divine miracles backing them up. So we're gonna have to do some shaping. A LOT of shaping, so much so that I don't want to jump right in just yet. Notably, however, we can adapt certain elements to the Bene Gesserit and the Bene Tlielaxu later.   From Fading Suns, however, we have an issue of sorts, as none of the factions really stand 'as is' for Dune. We can, with squinting, take a largely martial 'religion'... and squeeze it with difficulty into the Brother Battle, with a LOT of skin changes, and the same with Temple Avesti (Fire using inquisition/fanatics), and possibly the Amaltheans (healers), but right now its just not worth it. Lets shelve this section entirely until we get to mystic powers, and suggest that Point Buy may be necessary to make your Bene characters, though I think House Decados does have psychic shapeshifter spy/assassins that would be a decent 'skin' for Facedancers but that is for when we dive into Lords I believe.

The Guilds: As noted earlier, any technical specialists and a great number of civilians will fall in around here. Charioteers make a good skin for Spacing Guild members, I'm going on a limb to say here and now that Navigators ARE NOT suitable for player charaters, and leave it at that.  Engineers may be members of the GUild or of CHOAM, while Reeves will be mostly CHOAM members.  Scravers and Muster (merc/slavers) are independents. Mind you, this will have little bearing on the setting, this is just providing the framework for character creation AT THIS STAGE.  Militant members of CHOAM and/or the Spacing Guild would still exist, and Muster characters would be a good fit to make those sorts, but we are not suggesting an organization of Muster or Scravvers (scavenger/scrappers) is canon Dune, just that people would develop those skill sets.  

Now we skip the rules chapter entirely and look at the life paths in a much quicker gloss.

Questing Knights? Nothing says that Corrino, or other Great Houses may not find use for 'second sons' of nobility doing random shit.  What was Sting doing before he was tasked to take over Dune? Fighting in gladatorial duels for his amusement.   So the Noble LifePaths can remain more or less the same.

Priestly Lifepaths: Well, an 'Imperial Priest' makes a good match for a Bene Gesserit assigned a Noble House, and Mendicant Monk could match a Missionaria Gesserit, but again, we're stuck trying to fit a canonball through a square hole. God that sucked. Forget I tried it. Please.

Those Who Trade Lifepath: Pretty much can remain intact I think, though of course you have to adapt to the setting along the way. Find a close fit and go with it.

Those who Differ (aliens): Scrapped, though you MIGHT borrow it for human savages, such as the Fremen.  Lets do that now: Ur-Ukar represent Fremen. Ignore the Blessing and Curse, adn the changes to attribute max and min, change Speak Ukarish to Speak Zensunni. We'll have to do more work, but this is just a starting point.  This works pretty good for any non-civilized bunch in the setting, not just the Fremen.

Extra Stages, Tour of Duty:  Largely unchanged, though we'll deal with psychic, theurgic and cybernetics as we go, likewise the Questing Knight and Cohort rules.  Cohort simply reflects a non-noble serving in the upper eschelons of a Noble House, with implied Patronage, rather than a specific Imperial blessing.  We can argue the same for Questing Knights, they've got noble privilege, but won't be voting in the Landsraad any time soon, but they can still call on family and title.  Again, we'll deal with that later.

In the Custom Creation gloss we can again ignore most of the Alien stuff. The Kurgan and Vuldrok are good starting points for relatively backwards cultures, and the Kurgan can be tweaked to be Zensunni very easily, though they'd be less desert dwelling savages and the more erudite city dwellers. I'll note for the records that the Kurgan and Zensunni Fremen share an origin culture (arabic), but have been diverged in different directions by different authors.  The Vuldrok are space vikings.

So we delve deeper into character creation.   First up, as usual, is attributes.  Obviously we won't be changing anything here, as there is no real need, but lets talk about them briefly.
Three groups: Physical Mental and Spirit
Physical requires no real notes
Mental: Clearly someone playing a Mentat requires high mental stats. Fading Suns is relatively unique for providing a "tech" stat and no 'INt'. It is Wits, Perception and Tech. I'd say a Mentat requires all three to be high, and we may use the other parts of teh system to drive one or more higher than 10 (which is the normal human max) to reflect the accepted fluff that Mentats are somehow smarter than normal people.
Spirit Stats: This is unique to Fading Suns, in that you have a number of opposed Pair stats that don't work much like other stats. You have Introvert/Extrovert, Passion/calm, Faith/Ego and Human/Alien... though that last one seems to have dropped from Second Edition.  With the exception of Faith/Ego, we can safely ignore these, leaving them to define personality and function as is.  Faith/Ego will come into play when we start delving into the supernatural aspects of Dune.  In truth, we don't need to change it, merely to note how it interfaces with Dune powers vs FS powers, as the fundamental personality types remain more or less universal.  Let me know if you need me to expand on that statement in the comments.

Natural Skills: Fight, shoot, fuck... no, that last one isn't in there. Unchanged expressions of human adventuring behavior. Next.
Learned Skills:  This is the more refined skills that not everyone has, and we have a few worth noting and/or removing.  First of all, Dune is more openly technical than Fading Suns, so these skills maybe generally easier to get, with less religious hokey-pokey along the way. Lots of flavor text may be excised if someone wanted to re-write the rulebook.  So lets take a sampling: Alchemy? May remain. Poison use is highly refined in Dune. Archery and Crossbow: We don't see these weapons in use in Dune, but primatives may have them, and Crossbows may provide a skill for 'slow firing' dart weapons.  Focus is meditation, and we know that plays a role, so it stays (and yes, I'm skipping a whole bunch of generic skills like drive and academic and shit).  Read: This may be pulled if we assume literacy is the norm, or we can leave it in for learning to read other languages. Obviously the language list here and in Speak, need setting updates.  I don't think Herbert got into the weeds of language, but we know the Fremen speak a Zensunni Dialect, as to the Bene Tlielaxu (though a different one, and only in private amonst themselves), and we can mockingly assume English is the default for everyone (though I believe Herbert DID proclaim a universal language for the Empire... I can't for the life of me recall).  Stoic Body and Stoic Mind will be among skills taught to Bene Gesserit, among others, tech redemption is just a fancy name for fixing shit, so remains.  Think Machine might exist, but it would be pretty much illegal, unless you want to adapt it for use by Mentats reading Shigawire reels at high speed or some crazy shit.  Xeno-Empathy is gone, no aliens.

So, we can mostly keep the entire skill list, with one certain exception and one maybe/caveat exception. It will be more important to note who/how the skills exist in a different setting, but that was a given.

Now we get to the Blessings and Curses, which are a form of Advantages and Disadvantages.
Most of these remain unchanges. Pious may not serve well in Dune, but then again, people may still respect a Pious man/woman, so a GM should really just guide his players here rather than have me declare that pretty people (for example) do or do not exist in Dune.

Benefices and Afflictions:
Yes, Virginia, Fading Suns DOES have two sets of advantages and disadvantages!   This is where we have to go a little slower, as these are more setting specific.  Lets do it by catagory. Upfront note: If a benefice doesn't quite fit in Dune's setting, but represents something possible (Vow of Silence, say), I'd rather leave it to the GM to sort it rather than waste time commenting to say the same.
Background:
Alien Upbringing can be reskinned (no Aliens) to represent someone from outside the Imperial culture (For example: Fremen!).
Lost Worlder: Doesn't really fit Dune, but we do know there are worlds outside the Imperium (Scattering), so 'maybe'. Again, GMs rather than random asshole on Forum.
Stigma: People in Dune generally don't seem overtly superstitous, and plenty of 'supernatural' abilites (Prana Bindu etc) don't seem to leave a mark, but there are still deformities in the setting, and people could well respond to them. Blue in Blue eyes are a stigma, right?
Community:
Nothing of note to change
Possessions:
Jump Key: No jump gates. Maybe a Reskin to represent a right to passage aboard a highliner?  
Advisor: This is a Think Machine, so its right out, but maybe could be salvaged as a reskin to some other form of 'high tech' knowledge device? Clearly they have some form of data storage instead of entirely relying on paper books, so it could represent a database of Shigawire reels (experts on the setting feel free to correct my heathen ass).
Flux Sword; Well, we never see a light saber, but that doesn't mean it can't exist? Nah, ditch it like a bad rash.
Mist Sword: Depends on if you leave in Flux Swords, as this is just a psychic version, innit?
Neural Disruptor: Seems right up the Dune Ally, so I'm all in for mind burning illegal guns.
Psi Cloak: Eh, I'm up there with the Neural Disruptor for this one.
Wireblade: Arguably a third light saber, but given the constant references to Shigawire in almost every role, I'm cool with a monowire sword in Dune.
Adept's Robes: Power armor. We don't see much armor in Dune, but then we don't get very clear depictions of many soldier types. Whose to say Sadukar aren't wearing heavy armor? GMs call.
Article of Faith/Saint's Lore/Vestments: Ditch entirely. Too religious themed with no clear analog in Dune even for our religious reskinning of the Benes.
Wyrd Tabernacle: Holds psychic/theurgic energy, doesn't really fit, but maybe with a reskin?
Riches:
All of these work fine on a character level.  Not sure, but it may be useful to add more for things like CHOAM shares or Spice stashes.  
Status:
Cohort Badge: represents a non-noble with noble patronage. May require GM adjudication to handle minor discrepencies between settings.  Alternatively, keep as same if Patron is House Corinno, lower cost and benefits for Major Houses, and again for Minor Houses.
Commission: Represents membership in either CHOAM or the SPacing Guild (or any other similar 'civilian' power... not that I can think of any, but whatever...) Minor tweaks for setting specifics.
Coven: May be reskinned to represent membership in a loose sense to Bene Gesserit or Bene Tlielaxu, at a local level.
Imperial Charter:  Could be removed, or it could remain to represent relatively minor nobles with powerful patronage with some tweaking. Think Count Fenrig, a man of small personal power, but carrying the weight of the Emperor in his duties.   This may require a lot of GM tweaking for each character/campaign... or we can assume the Padisha Emperor likes to send noble second sons on important public affairs missions as 'questing knights' and leave it entirely intact.
Nobility: Remains intact, but note that some measure of Title reflects power/voting rights in the Landsraad.   Detailing House status and vassalage may come into play. As presented we really only see one noble title for Atredies (duke), and one noble title in Harkonnen (Baron), with no real discussion of titles for Paul (heir apparent, so he may not require a title of his own), or Raban or Ruatha/Sting. (though I'm sure the books hint at least in this regard, I'll be damned if I remember!), so we have to either ignore, or expand the setting here. I'm in favor of expanding.  
Ordained:Just reskin, this reflects rank in the larger Bene Gesserit and Bene Tlielaxu organizations (compared to Coven, which would cover the Reverend Mother on Arrakis and her subordinates, say).
Professional Contract: As written I think this can be ditched. There is no indication that only CHOAM/Spacing Guild members can learn certain skills (aside from Navigation, which we are going to leave out of hard rules), so a benefice to learn guild skills, as a non-guild member can be ignored. However, this MAY allow non-bene members to learn prana bindu and so forth, as Paul was taught by Lady Jessica, so... hmm... tweak?
Branded/Escaped Slave/Escaped Serf: Branding might be a thing, but we don't have evidence. Escaped slaves exist (Gurney Halleck), but are not universally hunted. We don't know much of Serfdom, so GM
Excommunicated: I'd skip it entirely, but the possibility exists for people mucking about with Think Machines or what have you to fall into some sort of universal damnation in the public, so... maybe?
Fallen From Grace: Lady Jessica is a perfect example, still a member of the Bene Gesserit, but in deep caca for giving birth to a son instead of adaughter, and then more caca for teaching him Prana Bindu stuff (but not really), and then utterly condemned for giving birth to the Abomination, Alia. Yep, this one stays. With good reason.

So we can add a bunch of benefices after a final tweaking to more fully cover the various social benefits and ills. Swordmasters and Mentats probably need Beneficies to represent their official status in the 'rigid' society presented, and a sharper look at Bene Tlielaxu afflictions to cover their general bad rep.  I'm guessing a moderate expansion of groups in the 'technical' and Bene side of the house is in order as well.  Also: Spice. But this is a framework, not the total package, so we'll add that once we've pared down the rules to get the day to day out of the way.

Vitality/Healing/Wyrd: No need to change anything here so far. We can assume good, high tech, medical care is available. Spice may affect all three of these for the better.


It is at this point that Shit Gets Real.

Lets be honest, most of what I've just done has been to show how easily any generic RPG, and Fading Suns in particular can be adapted to handle Dune in the grossest sense of the term. However, I have been saving some Dune Specific stuff, the Supernatural elements if you like, of Dune until here and now. Mind you, I'm not going to lay out every fucking detail here, this is still Framework territory, but now we're starting to focus on teh harder work.

With the exception of Paul's Presicence, and the Ancestral Memory shit, Frank Herbert tries to leave actual psychic and space magic out of Dune. Its all super special training and so forth. Well, I'm not obliged to pay any attention to that when I've got perfectly suitable supernatural rules to play with that provide near perfect mirrors to much of what the various witches of Dune can do, so I'm gonna use them.

First, an overview of how this stuff works in Fading Suns, then a look at how I'll be using it as I go along.

True Occult power is generally divided into Theurgy and Psychic powers (with further 'sorts' of Diabolic magic and so forth), but what is important is that they use pretty much the exact same rule framework. There is no practical difference beyond some fluffy names and a the specific effects you create.  This is hugely useful to us here, as we can toss out all that fluff and steal the framework and put whatever Dune Flavored Fluff you like on it.  Since Frank never bothered to name it, we'll just call it Psychic for now.

So how do they work?  Well, for magnets you have to learn a bit of chemistry, focusing on electron orbits and their alignment, but for this its a lot simpler.

Essentially Psychics (most Bene Gesserit, some Bene Tlielaxu, some others, like the Kwisat Haderach...) have a Psi attribute (or theurgy, or antinomy, but lets keep it simple), which governs how powerful a power they can learn. Psychic powers tend to be grouped in paths, while Theurgy Rituals are merely grouped into schools, but all powers have a level that must be equaled by the Psi rating to be learned. Wyrd, mentioned earlier, is used to FUEL powers, and Spirt (Faith or Ego, usually) is used in conjunction with a skill (specific to each power) to activate it.

Relatively simple, though I'm sure my explanation made it seem a bit hard.  Given the relatively limited scope of most powers seen, we can largely ignore the rules for spending extra Wyrd to extend ranges and so forth.  Also, we'll avoid Maud'dib levels of god powers, no teleporting between planets or what have you.

Now, there is a flip side in Fading Suns, call Urge or Hubris, which is sort of an inverse psi rating, though independent of Psi, with its own list of Sins that cause it to rise. This isn't necessary for Dune, but it maybe useful to explain why Psi is only common among extremely disciplined and cloistered types... anyone else managing to start learning it on their own might be overwhelmed by their Urge before they got too powerful.  It is also a good balancing mechanic, so we'll leave it in, though it does mean a bit more work as we'll have to actually create proper sin lists and urge penalties.

Now the next real step is to list out some basic powers per potential groups of psychics.  

Lets start with the Bene Gesserit.

They have The Voice, which is a form of mind control
They have a truth telling power
They have some bad-ass physical arts they call Prana Bindu
They can inflict diseases on people on physical contact
They can cloak themselves from human sight

That may not be all, but those are the ones I remember specfically. THey can do other crap like ensuring pregancy and gendering their infants, but that's not really helpful in game normally... let's just chalk that up as low level crap.

Now, we might construct a power list, but those aren't terribly well connected. Lets look at what is available to us.  Now, I am VERY STRONGLY tempted to just make Prana Bindu a 'martial art', rather than a set of powers, certainly it tends to play that way in the books, as it is almost always mentioned alongside using it to kick someone to death. However, for right now lets assume there is a psychic component, and a Bene Gesserit Kung Fu both.

I can steal the entire Soma path of psychic powers and rename it Prana Bindu and call it a day.  Is it a perfect match? Probably not, but I'm not enough of a fan-wanker to notice any serious differences, and so it is more than good enough for me. Boom, headshot and DONE!

The Omen psychic path has some potential, so lets look at teh four powers it has.
Shadows Gone By: Psychometry. Not in theme of what we've seen so far, so we can discard it... or simply cripple it by insisting that it only works with the ancestral memories.
Shadows To Come: Future Psychometry. Well we have a LOT of precognition in Dune, but they usually aren't item focused.
Voice from the Past: A Dune Skin allows the Bene Gesserit to summon up the ghosts of her long dead ancestors, not quite what the power says here, but close enough. Note that Bene Gesserit cannot call up male ancestors, but Abominations (and possibly male psychics) can.  However, I'm not sure if I really want to deal with Abominations just yet. Lets leave that to a very specific sort of Urge, maybe?
Oracle: This is simple precognition, in a suitably weak and cryptic form (remember: what makes the Kwisat Haderach special really comes down to how clear his vision of hte future is, and we're staying out of god territory here...).  So two decent powers to reskin, and two questionable powers to ditch.

Note: I'm skipping over telekinesis, but let me know if I"m in error.  I'll probably skip over other paths (vis craft, Sympathy (psychic bonding)) as well.

Our next 'Path' is Psyche, which is telepathy. I'll keep it simple, most of it can remain intact, reskinned as 'The voice', and allowing I think for a Truth Telling power in there somewhere.

Then we've got Sixth Sense, which is basic ESP. This one gets hit with a weed whacker possibly. We can easily pull some powers as clearly Bene Gesserit, while others are more questionable. Hell, we can simply expand the canon and keep the whole damn thing,and I'm cool with that...

So you can see we have a framework in place.  Hammering out the exact powers available is going to be the hard part. I could go over the Theurgy Rites and look for thematically appropriate powers for Bene Gesserit, but honestly we pretty much covered most of the big ones right there, except disease infliction (antinomy maybe?), which might go in hand with some theurgic healing rituals, if we assume teh Bene Gesserit have such fine control over their bodies that they can do weird crap like that to people they touch.

So lets talk Urge. Now the only real downsides we see to the Bene Gesserit is when they awaken the voices within in a child, and thus create Abominations... which doesn't really work for a game, and in fact being an Abomination is not, of itself, a crippling problem... though it often becomes one (see God Emperor of Dune... Alia is Abomination and goes mad/possessed by Baron Harkonen (her ancestor, recall), but the children of Paul and Chani are also abominations through Paul, and neither (or at least one?) doesn't go mad/get possessed.  We can debate the sanity of the God Emperor (of Dune, anyway) if you like.

Now, absolutely the Taboos of Fading Suns are not thematically useful for the Bene Gesserit, but they do provide a framework.  Obeying orders from the Order is a thing, disobeying is Taboo, and thus Jessica has a small Urge Problem.  I actually don't have a problem with the actual Urge levels, given that we're working 'whole cloth' here.  Freudian slips and dark voices in one's mind are no inconceivable, and certainly Reverend Mother Mohaim may have had problems with dark urges (negative emotions caused by bad psychic juju), which put her in opposition to Maud'dib unnecessarily, to her detriment, so I'm pretty cool with them in the main.  So for now I'm happy to leave Urge powers alone, but I'll have to work out the Taboo lists at some point. I'm pretty happy with the powers as is, but we'll go on later.

Now, At the moment we're ignoring the Tlielaxu face dancers and gholas and shit.  I'm moderately sure there is a shape changing psychic power in another book, but actually I have another plan. Like so much else the Tlielaxu are largely a marginalia, so we have a fairly open hand to develop them in ways that don't necessarily support, or contradict, canon.  Lets argue for now that non-face dancers have some psychic gifts, but not to the extent the Bene Gesserit do. We can also posit wild nature shamen (using the rules extant for that elsewhere), and as I go through my books I'm sure I'll find useful shit to pull for the Gesserit.  We can also assume some people just have small gifts with precognition, as the books demonstrate MANY 'almost' Kwisat Haderachs are floating around.

The next chapter, after occult shit, is functionally Martial Arts.  Now, I'm too damn lazy to look up the funny names Herbert uses, but right here we have all we need for Swordmasters and so forth. This covers pretty much everything, from kung fu, to fencing to gun-fu, so I'ma leave it as is.  People learn this shit, and we can put together specific schools from the peices we have if we need to, but I gather Frank Herbert didn't care much for the details of fighting, so all we get are abstracts in the books, so its wide open as far as I'm concerned.

I'll talk about weapons and shields in a little bit (these are covered here, but I'm working on something here, so I'm trying to move ahead...)

Now, a bit later int eh book it gives us a generic set of rules for cybernetics, and breaking with form, in the Players Handbook we have rules for "The Changed", which are genetically modified 'mutants'.

Fading Suns does not posit a cybernetics heavy setting. In First Edition (I'm using second, recall), being any sort of cyborg at all required taking the Alien spirit trait as your primary over Humanity, as did being a member of the Changed.  Second doesn't have that, but it was worth mentioning.  Dune is mixed. Herbert's book doesn't talk much about cybernetics but may (dimly recalled, but possibly a file error from a non-dune inspired by Dune setting?) have an injunction about making men into machines?  the Lynch movie, on the other hand, clearly has no problems with cybernetics, at least among the Spacing Guild, or heart plugs in the Harkonnen.

So, in the front of it, we could simply leave Cybernetics in place and leave it well enough alone, or cut them entirely to avoid canon-corruption (which, I clearly give no fucks at all about, but I'm upfront about it...). However, consider the possibility of using Cybernetics for example, to cover teh changes to Mentats.  You can buy up your Wits and Perception attributes, taking them above Ten, or into 'superhuman' territory.  Its possible the Sadukar, or other legendary warrior types use cybernetics to achieve similarly superhuman levels of greatness.  I believe we see some sort of implants in Tlielaxu products (facedancers and Ghola-Duncan's eyes?).  Mind you that FS cybernetics are primarily effect based, you buy up the effect you want, then modify it for appearance and quality, rather than buying a specific implant (though a few 'pre-made' implants are given as examples), which fits just fine with our Dune needs... even if individuals disagree on the exact canonity of cybernetics, there is enough room to make a Lynch grotesquery and a subtle 'enhanced human' using the same rules.

This leads me to the Changed.  This is clearly the bread and butter of the Tlielaxu, and we can assume that variations on this theme exist throughout the Imperium in the form of spin-off groups (splinter factions) and simply people who use the same basic technology in vastly different (and probably less ethically challenged....) ways.  This includes the Metonym power/race, which are basically Facedancers with the serial numbers filed off.  All of these 'powers' are based in the Blessing/Curses catagory, and while many are thematically Not Dune, this is a good place to start building, well, Dune.  For those of you playing at home, being a Facedancer is a Seven Point Blessing. They don't really have a lot of rules beyond that, which is one thing to like about pre-3E rule-sets.  Boom, shapechange. GM tells people when to roll to detect you based on judgement. Simple!

To an extent, you can use the Blessings 'rules' to make a smarter than normal human (Mentat), and even use part of the Changed rule set to support it, so we have options.

So, we can gloss Starships. FS uses Jump Gates to do FTL, Dune uses Fold Space Highliners, but that's a fluff reskin. Players should not have absolute control over either. Dune doesn't put much emphasis on starships, but they are clearly a part of the setting, and an important one even without discussing the... prequels.   Without more information on Starships in Dune, I think it is safe to use the Starships of Fading Suns as written.

Which essentially leaves me with 'basic gear'. Guns and sheilds and shit.

Melee Weapons (to include 'frap sticks'), unchanged. Popular due to shields.

Armor: Unchanged, except perhaps at the high end. Depends on if modest Power Armor is too far out of bounds for your taste.

Common guns? Unchanged.

Lasers....


Now we talk shields.   The FS rules for shields are basically teh same as Dune, only a bit more simplified. No slipping and sliding on your shield (a la Lynch movie, and supported vaguely in books...), its just a 'slow blade penetrates' sort of defense, but one that can be overwhelmed by normal firepower... which makes sense and is balanced.  SHields are not OMGZOG powerfull, but they do a good job stopping bullets and hasty melee attacks.

Now...  I know the intraction between lasers and sheilds in Dune is Nuclear. And it is stupid as shit. Its unscientific, to begin with... unless you suppose every laser gun and every shield generator is powered by a full sized nuclear reactor... never mind how stupid it is for the effect to propagate backwards through a laser beam.  Frankly, I think Herbert did it because he didn't want to address how fast as light attacks couldn't be 'sensed' by a shield that was 'speed driven', or something to that effect. IT IS DUMB.

That said: It is canon. So we have to add some sort of back ass effect to the game to account for it. However, I'm not nearly stupid enough to put players into pocket-nuke territory. This isn't a novel, and PCs are notoriously dastardly when you give them a fucked up tool like 'nuclear bombs', so fuck canon. If you absolutely MUST use this idiotic bit of canon in your game, simply treat it like a simple explosion with a power equal to the number of shots in the magazine, or hte number of Hits left on the shield. that should be plenty deadly.  

Alternatively: Have it be a fucking lie that everyone believes. Don't tell the players that, just have it be some ancient propaganda the shield wearing Nobles put out eons ago to keep assassins from sniping them with lasers all the damn time (in FS lasers 'bleed' through shields, imperfect, but better than guns!), that everyone buys (except maybe a few scientists who know better than to blab), so no one has used a laser on a sheild in living memory... and if anyone does, no one talks about it to keep the myth going.   Because, and I can't stress this enough, it is fucking stupid and bad, and a very bad idea to let players actually use.

Okay, now that I got that out of my system...

Ok, so Lasers stay in teh system, and sheilds work as advertised. Lets remove Blasters and Light Sabers and we're pretty much done.  We'll need to add 'slow guns' or something... though honestly, how shit a warrior was Duncan to be killed by a gun/bolt slow enough to pass through a shield when a fast swing won't?  I mean: You gotta be god damn slow is what I'm saying. A baseball pitch is too fucking fast.  Duncan fails at motherfucking dodgeball!  

We'll also need to spend some energy on assassin drone/needles and crap like that.


Ok, so later (tomorrow? A few hours? Same diff if I'm honest) I'll look in detail in my 'must use' books, but to close out I'm going to look at some of the more esoteric groups in Dune with 'solutions'.

Suk Doctors: Curse of pacifism, combined with a Blessing similar to the Cohort Badge or something.
Mentats: Frequently mentioned here. Some form of intelligence enhancement, possibly Cybernetic or a Blessing, again, combined with a Status Blessing to identify themselves (and a low levels Stigma to represent their stained lips).
Bene Gesserit: Psychics with some religious trappings, will require extensive work to build a full faction, but could be done simply with points buy and creativity.
Facedancers: Metonyms
Swordmasters: Various, mostly martial artists with lots of sword techniques. May include some cybernetics at GMs discretion
Fremen: Use modified Ukari or Kurgans as a basis for 'savages'
Twisted Mentats: See Mentats, but include a curse for some form of sociopathy?
Sadukar:  Could use 'Grimsons' genetically enhanced soldiers as a base. Could use Cybernetics. COuld just be soldiers with a rep, really.
CHOAM: Reeves mostly. These are businessmen and accountants for the Great Houses.
Spacing Guild: Engineers and Charioteers. Only an idiot asks to play a guild navigator. Assumption that many in the guild are working their way to Navigator status, however.
Spice:  Fuck you, Spice.  Just kidding, I'll work something up later.
Honored Matres: Not used in this setting. May get a notional workup later.  Note that in canon they come across as non-psychic bene gesserits, having developed physical powers to make up for the loss of psychic gifts. May be done using Changed rules for superior physical abilities and 'sexual control'?
Ghola: Dear god... no, just kidding: Changed Clones with minor alterations. Not really worth it, eh?

Who/what am I forgetting?


Edit: Bah. I still need to work on the Wierding Way/Techniques based on Sound. OF course I may wish to go back ot the book to make sure I'm not stealing TOO MUCH Lynch, though honestly most casual players would likely not notice.   Also, Shai Halud, but honestly I'm not sure how relevant that may be to your random Dune game... but then again, a Dune Game without trips to Dune (for Spice if nothing else) is probably cripple ware, so...  yeah.  Big fuckoff worms are coming, you damn betcha!

I'm gonna burn some stray thoughts off before I dig in for some deeper work. I've been idea mining the various wiki pages.

First, I have NO intention of treating anything from the pen of Anderson as canon, per se.  I'm not sure how much is Frank Herbert's notes, and how much is bullshittium, but i'm pretty damn sure they ran out of notes around the time they hit the Butlerian Jihad series. Maybe Frank layed out a crude sketch of ideas, maybe he didn't but the final product had so much ass in it that I though my face was a toilet.  That said, trying to parse out Frank-canon from Anderson Bullshit may be a bit too much work, so undoubtedly I'll let some stuff slide, and some stuff will deliberately slide as its simply easier and better to just use the houses that have been identified already 'as is', rather than make due with a much smaller list then bulk it up with my own bullshit.   Some things I am burning with fire: Ultraspice (That name alone justifies burning it as pure asspull bullshit, never mind the story behind it...), and the Think Machines being the threat pushing the honored Matres back from teh Scattering.  I'd rather have plain old aliens than a rehash of the Butlerian Jihad, not that it should matter, but just in case you were asking.

One thing I mostly ignored in my previous musings, though it was on my mind, was how essential Spice is to any Psychic powers.  By default any noble, bene gesserit or other serious 'notable' will be automatically addicted at some level. That said, my reading is that I'll have to work out levels of addiction.  

One thing to keep in mind is that we are taking, for all its breadth of time, a very very narrow view of a very big star empire very far into the future, all written by one guy.  So a lot of things simply aren't shown to us, and some of the things that ARE shown fall apart if you look too closely (look at all the narcotics in the setting. Every single one comes from Ecaz, two come from the exact same plant!!!. Look at Shigawire, its used in almost every single data storage mechanism in space, but it comes from a ground vine that only grows on one (two) planets?  That is some serious cultivation given the size of the Empire! Never mind its really bizzare secondary use as a weapon.   Certainly I'll try to detail Semuta and stuff like that, but a lot of things have to be taken on faith. Regular Guns exist and are useful, but shields make it possible to arm forces for close action against gun wielders...  a 'straight' dune, allowing no deviance from what is shown, would have to presume that the only guns are lasguns that go nuclear against shields and some form of slow-dart thrower, and everyone else is swording each other all day, every day.  In a setting with space ships. With Space Guns that presumably don't worry about Lasgun nuclear explosions.  Details? Unknown.  But we know they exist, as the Harkonen shot down a ship in a heighliner with a no-ship (in teh Anderson books, but the event was mentioned in passing by Frank I believe... and this was early enough that undoubtedly there were Frank-canon notes about it still).

Fraufreleches:  Undoubtedly this exists, and is a sort of strict caste system in place. I know I've sort of glossed over it, as I did with a thousand other things like Kanly, but I want to make a point clear: from reading the books it seems obvious that the Nobles use Fraufreleches as a system of control, but that it is not an absolute straight jacket. People do change classes all the damn time, usually at the behest of a noble patron (Gurney Halleck for example, and we can presume some sort of movement of Duncan Idaho in his first life...). We know the Bene Gesserit have their own class outside the usual, and what do the Fremen care about the Imperial Fraufreleches system? None at all. Ditto: Smugglers. Do you think there is an official 'caste' of smugglers? Of criminals?  We also know there is a vast middle class hidden in there, because we know how they consume spice (in small sprinkles, like a seasoning, with their food).   All of this is to say that Fraufreleches is an ideal, more than a straight jacket.  If someone gets too rich or two uppity, the system is used to put them back in their place and preserve the status quo... but beyond that the exact level of social control varies wildly based more on local rule. Geidi-Prime is a slave and serf world, where only the Harkonen and their favorites have any freedom. Caliban is much more egalitarian and laid back, with locals greeting the Duke by name in the streets (when he puts in an appearance), and presumably very little social control. Don't want to farm Pundi Rice? Become a fisherman instead... whatever. Just don't try to out monetize the Atredies or some other social coup.  

Money: Honestly, I have no idea what the normal Currency is in Dune, I don't think Frank Herbert does either, since no one he was writing about ever had any NEED of money, given that they measured their wealth and power in terms of Spice Stockpiles.  This puts me in a sweet spot in Fading Suns adaptions, as I have no reason to try and change the Fading Suns economic system by very much. On the other hand I DO have to work out a value to Spice that somehow reconciles three hundred liters of Spice buying half a world, yet also allows middle class folks to afford ANY of it. What is the value of an entire (or half) a planet?  Tough question.  How much to normal people consume in a day (a dram, more or less...actually a lot less than a dram, maybe a quarter of a dram?) and how many drams in a liter (270).... meaning that the annual consumption of 1000 odd people, rounding a bit, is equal to half the value of a planet?  Seems... very low for a planet.  Never mind that elsewhere we hear a 'handful' of Spice can buy a world... though that is clearly poetic license, but we haven't even talked dosages yet.  If the lowest economic rung of everyday users is going through something less than a gram a day (a dram is almost two grams), well and good, but the nobles are putting away several grams, and people like the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild are consuming decagrams? Handfuls? I mean: In the Lynch movie (not canon, not not-canon), a noble sized 'dose', sufficient to put Paul into a brief prescient trance is the size of a small cigar! That's like... two ounces of the shit, and contrary to the movie we KNOW this isn't Pauls first rodeo with Spice, just a bigger and purer dose than he's used before.  But that does give us SOME sense of how much spice the average Noble uses per day. Call it an ounce and be done with it (discussions of purity aside....).  For practicing Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers (not including lesser members like Lady Jessica in her Calaban days), the average daily useage is probably a half dozen of those fat doses, and even for lesser members (sayaddina, in the Fremen way) we can say its probably twice the usual at a minimum, simply to fuel their superhuman powers.  See: Working up a playable setting is a vastly different beast than simply writing a series of novels. Frank Herbert NEVER had to think of the logistics of Spice, and the price. He could simply declare it was 'expensive' and move on with the story, and it was probably better that way for everyone.  But if you want to INTERACT with the setting you need a bit more details.  Though, I'll be honest, I probably will gloss over it a bit better than this deep analysis.  I could see tying 'doses per day' to Psi rating for the hard core... but then Bene Gesserit don't buy the stuff, the Sisterhood does.  There may be politics involved with being allowed sufficient doses to advance... who knows?

I CAN see linking the cost of a dose of spice to the main currency for flavor, though that may make Spice seem too damn cheap.  Minding that I will change the names, to put it into perspective, a Single Beer costs one eighth of a "Firebird", so would be one eighth of a dose of Spice.  Seems pretty cheap, right? On the other hand: Once you are addicted to SPice you can't quit, or you die.  So the annual outlay for a minimal user is 365 Firebirds.  Now, if we suggest that is the dose for middle class sprinkles, and nobles start with higher doses? Well... maybe I can get it to work, and still use Psi as a multiplier (the 1 firebird would be a zero Psi dose? Probably... maybe start at ten times that (ten firebirds is a PSI 1 dose, adn equal to the average Noble user.  Natives of Arrakis would be at teh Ten Psi dose, psychic or not, simply due to environmental exposure! See why Fremen don't travel until they become the arm of the Emperor of Dune?)

So, with some misgivings, I'm liking this framework, though it does imply that people need to have serious income to pay for spice addictions.  I'll probably provide a simple Asset Benefice system to cover a usual supply, with the normal caveats... stay in good graces, stay in contact for resupply, etc.  Getting cut loose would be very, very bad.  But that is Dune, right? The Spice MUST Flow.


Anyway: I've been going over the Must Use books. I'm thinking I can quickly gloss them rather than drill down as I did to create framework. They're still useful, but typing out all the steps will be too tedious for teh payoff. You'd all (my still silent readers) rather see a more finished product than the musings of an idiot with too much time on his hands.  It might be a bit of a go, I haven't touched the FS books for two years, at least... and thought seriously about a game with them for maybe... five?   So I'm a bit rusty. Heck, I didn't even remember I had the Star Crusade books until I dug them out of storage for this project!

Going to formally jettison the Lifepath system. It really only works for maybe half the character concepts people who want to play Dune will have, and that only loosely. Better to just use the freeform point buy system (same final result, a bit more flexible) and let people make characters they think FIT.  Given that I wasn't about to create all new lifepaths for Bene Gesserit and so forth, its for the best.  I be a lazy fuck, i know...

Okay, so I'm going to formally build the Spice aspect of the game based on my previous post.

As a default asumption  EVERY player character (unless they are explicitly members of the slave or serf social castes) is addicted in some fashion, at some level to Spice. The player can define HOW addicted within certain limits.  First: There is a certain level of social signalling involved here, so many people consume much more spice daily than they actually need or can benefit from, simply to prove they can.  This is less punitive than I originally imagined.

Anyone with any Psychic ability can only use Psi powers/level equal to his average daily dose... if they've cut back to a lower dose, they lose power until they take a more massive dose. MOST psychics will habitually take at least one dose daily MORE than they need, giving them room to grow.

For middle class characters (anyone not part of a larger faction, no nobles, no bene gesserit, no CHOAM or Spacing Guild) the cost per dose is a single Firebird (to be renamed later). This provides no real mechanical benefits, but also few penalties for missed doses. Any day with No Spice will cause a penality to any health and endurance checks (-1 or -2... not too severe, but they will get sick easier and so forth). That and they will be generally miserable. Food doesn't taste as good espeically (since it is most commonly used as a seasoning).  

For everyone else the minimum Dose, used from here on out as One Unit, costs Ten Firebirds.  For Nobles, the expectation is that they will take Doses equivalent to their rank (Knights are One, Dukes are 6, the Emperor is a Seven).  Heirs and non-inheriting nobles can take much less without too much social difficulty.   A supply of Spice (a stockpile for nobles, or the order/organization for everyone else) is an asset with a cost equal to the doses a day available.  It is possible to gain more spice a day than necessary this way, but if its not a personal stockpile (nobles) there may be penalties for misuse.  

CHOAM personnel will generally consume doses roughly equal to nobles, using their CHOAM Rank instead of noble title, but also cannot stockpile it, as they are drawing CHOAM assets. Spacing Guild members tend to consume twice as much as their rank, but also gain twice as much from their asset (with the same caveat)... note that especially for Spacing Guild members that any disruption in the supply will result in immediate rationing (for any non-navigators).

The Upside of Spice Addiction is a general boost in health and well being, along with mental acuity.  Heavy users live up to four times as long.

[I'm torn on mechanics. The simplest and most 'Setting faithful' mechanic I can think of is to simply give a +1 boost to every physical and mental attribute. That seems... powerful?]  Any doses above the user's daily average will immediately refresh the Wyrd Pool, making it a common boost for psychics.

Heavy use (ten doses) a day for extended periods (up to a year) will result in the development of Stigma, Blue in Blue eyes. This is NOT appreciated off of Arrakis, and most such users (including most Reverend Mothers, almost anyone of note in the Spacing Guild, and a few gluttons among the nobility) use contacts to hide this.  A single massive exposure (toxic levels, such as teh Water of LIfe) produces the same result instantly.  

Cutting Back: If you aren't at the Blue-with-blue eyes stage of addiction it is possible to cut back to a single dose daily, though the heavier the user the more miserable they will be during the process.  For every dose cut back they suffer (stacking) the health penalty noted above, and loose all benefits for a full month, until the new, lower, normal is achieved.  For those who are Stigma level users, they can never cut back to less than ten safely, and will complain bitterly (though not mechanically) if that is all they can take in a day. Junkies, man...

For normal users, even modestly heavy users, missing a single dose is not fatal, but it is unpleasant.  Every day without a full dose inflicts a wound on the user, which only begins healing when normal consumption is resumed.  For Stigmatic users, the minimum Safe dose is about five doses, and they suffer the 'cut back' penalties cumulative for every dose less than ten they take, and can never stabilize lower than Ten.  Every dose less than five in a day inflicts a wound, so its rare a stigmatic user can go more than a few days without some Spice.

Arrakis: Just being on Arrakis, except in sealed environments, is worth a single full dose a day. The Deep Desert is at least two, while Sietch life is an average of ten.  Most Natives are fully stigmatic, but simply living on Arrakis they have access to all the spice they want, and its rare for a Native to stock pile more than a few days worth... a bit like grocery shopping, really.  Most non-natives, even the Spice Miners, are not quite as exposed and rarely develop Stigma levels of addiction except deliberately. It is unavoidable in the Sietch, however.   Note that most regular users on Arrakis still take a dose daily, as they aren't quiet comfortable with 'environmental' Spice exposure.  For Fremen and other natives, taking Spice, as Spice... rather than just breathing/eating/drinking it constantly is something of a religious rite, done only deliberately and for good reasons.

Availability: For Nobles and others, Spice is readily and legally available for the price listed, and most people do keep a decent supply on hand. CHOAM members can buy it the same, and are expected to as a status symbol above their allotted dose, but they buy from the CHOAM company (as do most Nobles, actually...). The supply is always a bit lower than the demand, so buying large quantities is difficult (most Stockpiles are assembled very slowly and with great deliberation, as most are aware of how vulnerable addiction makes them).  Spacing Guild Members aren't expected to need to buy it... the Guild sees to their needs, but they have been known to cut private deals with nobles and smugglers to boost their personal supply.

The Black Market, smugglers, are a major source of stockpile quantities. The CHOAM corporation carefully monitors the spice availability to the competing members of the Board (That is to say; Nobles of the Landsraad)... and has a vested interest in keeping stockpiles low, especially among the less powerful nobles and houses.  Smugglers cut deals with teh Spacing Guild to ship out on Heighliners without question, which may be a trivial amount of spice compared to the Guild's CHOAM supply, but the Guild is a bit more desperate than anyone else, so tends to hoard more than anyone else. Nobles tend to build up their supply from these Smugglers, but anyone with coin can make deals the same as they would for any illegal goods.  Once bought it is impossible to tell illegal spice from legal spice.  The law cracks down on Smugglers, which helps House Corrino maintain their monopoly, but quite a bit of the confisticated Spice winds up in the hands of whichever power caught the smugglers.

One thing to keep in mind is that almost everyone who matters has more than enough spice to see them through any short term interruption in the supply, though not happily. Enough 'short term interruptions' can severely deplete stockpiles built up over years, decades... even centuries of careful hoarding and illegal dealings.   Major interruptions should not happen in the game unless the Players are responsible (or conversely, failed to prevent it..) and a galaxy shaking events that can unseat emperors (though this has not happened even once in the time frame of the game... not for another thousand years, bub!).

In short, if a player wants to buy extra Spice to bulk up their emergency supply (and that supply will depend on the source and the shape of the campaign!), they can probably get it unless there is a shortage... GM determines if there is.  IF there is a shortage, then being a Noble helps, add their rank to their Beauracracy Check, with successes being the number of doses available for purchase. Depending on the source of the shortage, smugglers may not be affected, but there is no bonus except being willing to pay extra. Make a streetwise check to acquire doses (on the personal level. To build Noble House sized stockpiles will have to be done a bit more involved than simple dice rolls. Streetwise to find a smuggler willing to deal, of course, then you're talking about moving massive amounts of assets around...).



Its a bit crude and wordy, but I think its fully functional.  I may need to double check for any rules for acquisition, etc.  I should note that I don't think that officially the Bene Gesserit or the Spacing Guild would deal with money on an individual level. You aren't paid, but you ARE fully cared for. Clearly the Guild itself (or the Sisterhood) takes in vast amounts of money, much of which is spent on Spice and the rest on other necessities. That's not to say they can't have money... just that nominally speaking they won't get it from their organization.  Clearly, however, if they've taken an asset benefice they will have a source of income, so my opinion means jack and squat...

Gonna take a quick crack at Playing Politics. Note that this isn't really detailed in any way in Fading Suns, and even if it were, the Dune Setting would put paid to much of it.

First a quick take on the political structure of the Imperium of Dune.

You have the Padisha Emperor who is functionally the Head of the Board of Directors of CHOAM... but probably isn't the acting CEO. He has the power to assign and remove Directorships in CHOAM to anyone he wants, one of those is essentially the Directorship of Arrakis/Spice Production...which is usually rotated out at least once a century (so less than the average noble lifespan), to prevent any given house from taking control of the Empire.  This is Serious Business.

The Landsraad is roughly two thousand Noble Houses, and functions as a sort of weak Parlimentary body. We don't have a lot of information about it, so I'm gonna spitball. There probably aren't formal parties, but looser voting blocs. We know that Duke Leto was very popular in the Landsraad, which gave him enough power to threaten the Padisha Emperor, which he failed to use costing him is life on Arrakis.  Voting Blocs are probably a combination of ancient alliances and personal popularity.  House Richese undoubtedly voted with Atredies due to Leto's mother being a Richese... and could count on Leto's vote for Richese as well.

But how many votes? Well nobility includes 'shares' of CHOAM. I'm not going to try and work out exactly how many shares, but at a minimum a 'block' of shares for one 'vote' unit is equal to the asset point for a noble title... so even a lowly Knight commands three personal shares, while a Duke commands.. eleven?  And the head of the House undoubtedly not only commands his personal shares (eleven for Duke Leto) bu all the subordinate shares of his own house (Unknown for Atredies. It is possible that the House was so attenuated that all shares devolved to him personally. We understand there are no other Atredies other than Leto and Paul at the start of Dune.  In 9,191, our putative starting point there may be significantly more. Of course, there may be 'distant' atredies not directly affected by the plot of Dune we simply never see).  All Houses hold at least one Directorship in CHOAM as well, which is not a given due to Imperial Meddling.  We also know that the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild hold shares in CHOAM, but probably only have trivial, and possibly non-voting, voices in the Landsraad itself... perhaps a potential tie breaking vote?   We can presume they do not have formal directorships of their own, nor can they... as a group... be assigned a directorship by the Emperor, though perhaps individuals from them can.

I have no intention of trying to draw up two thousand members of the Landsraad (that is two thousand Houses, which tend to vote as blocs, the actual seats would be much greater due to junior members of the houses holding seats and titles!), much less their relationships, but we should discuss the Greater and Lesser houses.  As it stands, if you know their name from any Dune work, assume they are a Major House. Noble Titles do count for voting, but not so much for status of House, note the Baron Harkonnen outranks his 'Count' nephew, Raban. Technically Raban holds more votes in the Landsraad, but Raban doesn't hold the House Atomics, and thus is the lesser noble in actual power (and the House presumably takes the lion's share of the CHOAM payout that forms the main source of wealth, and spice, for the House. Raban probably gets more money from CHOAM than Baron Harkonen at the end of the day, but he doesn't control the House finances, which tips the balance back the other way. Note too, after deposing Duke Leto on Arrakis, Raban is the one with the Directorship of Arrakis, as the Baron is setting up his nephew to take a fall for him, to replace him with Feyd Ruatha/Sting.... and to keep the Emperor from destroying House Harkonen in turn!).

We can presume a full spread of titles across the spectrum of Great and Minor Houses, but Minor Houses would have fewer collective shares. Presumptively there is no formal divide between the two 'ranks' of Houses, but everyone would know which was which.  

The second leg of the political tripod is the House Atomics.  Presumably it is well nigh on impossible to replace these, and any use is deemed 'unthinkable'. This isn't so much a lost technology as it is a fixed detente.. anyone trying to make more, openly, invites immediate retaliation from just about everyone, any use invites retaliation in kind.  The only Atomic we know much about is the Stone Burner used in Children of Dune (though the Lynch Movie almost accidentally suggests more conventional nukes are used to take out the shield wall mountains).  What we know of the Stone Burner is that it doesn't use conventional nuclear power as we understand it (J-radiation equals what?), and that it can be configured in such a way that it can crack a planet... so every stockpile of House Atomics can obliterate an arbitrary number of worlds.  For the sake of argument this is a binary factor: Your House has Atomics, or your house is absorbed by a House that DOES have Atomics. Actual numbers and power become irrelevant except for dick measuring contests.  

The third leg of the Political Tripod is Raw Wealth... which is measured in Capital, Spice Stockpiles and Military Might. Here things get tricky.

So, lets turn to how to use this raw framework to a political system worthy of the name.  We'll focus on the voting blocs and the wealth, leaving Atomics as background (presumably only the head of hte HOuse has the keys to the arsenal, and we know they are hidden very well... presumably there is a great story about how Maud'dib left arrakis, retrieved his house Atomics and brought at least one to Dune...but it was probably also pretty boring, so wasn't shown...).

On thing to keep in mind is that getting anything done in the Landsraad will involve swaying a whole lot of people.  But what can the Landsraad do? Well, among other things they appoint judges from amonst themselves to oversee Kanly Disputes and other things. This may seem minor, but an offical judge is able to reap a small personal fortune in bribes.  This is a good baby step for a would be player politician, by the way... and undoubtedly getting appointed doesn't require any massive voting bloc, you just have to beat the other candidates for total votes... and be neutral to the dispute in question.  Similarly, some minor directorships can be similarly voted in.

A bigger deal is opposing the Emperor on just about anything, or similarly levelling some official censure against another Noble House.  This presumably requires, in not a majority vote per se, at least a significant aye vote and a trivial or non-existant Nay vote to pull off.  This actually does happen to Shaddam the Fourth at the end of Children of Dune (I think?), to force him to recognize that he's no longer Emperor in fact, despite still controlling CHOAM officially. (or, it happens earlier in response to the Adjimal fake spice, in 10175 and the Great Spice War. I'm using fucking wiki, what do you expect?).  

Note that Houses opposing each other in the Landsraad, and votes about the conflict, do NOT automatically resolve any conflicts. See the ten thousand year hatred between Atredies and Harkonen, or the Ecaz-Moritani war that sees Moritani decimated and destroyed (for certain values of destroyed, presumably) that helps earn Leto his good reputation in the Landsraad.  We might assume (since I don't feel like reading KJA books to find more details) that Leto may have served as a Judge of the Change in that conflict, which would endear him especially to House Ecaz, the victors.  Even if he merely helped elect the Judge Ecaz would owe him at least a political favor, as would Ecaz's major allies.

So, a major vote of the Landsraad can pretty much do almost anything you can imagine. Great, how do we 'DO' that?

Well, the simplest starting point is to have an actual Seat in the Landsraad itself, which means a Noble Title.   This isn't absolutely necessary, the Bene Gesserit prefer to directly influence the Houses personally (through sex and producing Heirs), and as an organization can pretty much pull everyone's string at least once... but the harder they pull the more backlash they risk.  They are potentially the strongest player (in terms of actual influence) and the weakest, having no real monopoly or power to fall back on. THE Spacing Guild can get its way through brute force, embargoes and the like, but they can only embargo so many nobles at a time without breaking themselves. CHOAM IS, for all intents and purposes, the Landsraad, so is irrelevant here.

The best starting point is as the Head of a House, particularly a Greater House.  To spitball, lets assume a Greater House has More than 20 total Votes, as determined earlier, which maybe formally divided any way the House pleases... the Head of the House is the guy with the Nukes, not the guy with the prettiest hat.   A Minor House then has Less than Twenty Votes, also divided up however they like.  This really will come down to GM's setting their campaign to whatever size house they think is most fitting, I'm going with the absurdly small numbers of titled nobles in clearly Greater Houses here that we actually see (One Duke for Atredies, a Baron and a Count for Harkonnen...).  Since the actual number of shares is likely much greater, we can assume any house to have any number of shares necessary... we merely deliniate voting blocks by rank so that Title actually has some value.

As a general rule, a House will vote as a bloc, regardless of who called the vote, as a matter of honor. Internal intruiges are preferred to sort out who stands for a specific position... influencing the Head of the House, who will generally be too busy/important to take a personal posting in MOST cases... obviously Dune Director, by Imperial Appointment, is a special case!

So, lets assume that there is a Benefice... worth five points... for 'keys to the house atomics', which establishes any noble (Baron and above only) as the Head of their House, and a 3 point benefice that difinitively establishes a House as Greater, rather than Minor. Only one person in a House can have teh Keys to the Nukes, but any titled noble who intends to muck about in the Landsraad can take Greater House (outside the Landsraad voting system its not really that important?).... provided their house is in fact Greater in size (that is... technically ALL nobles of the HOuse.. at least Titled Nobles... have the same advantage).

So now we have a rough idea of your starting number of votes on any topic.  How many votes are possible? Well, two thousand members... lets say a hundred of which are Greater Houses (thus averaging thirty or so votes), and the rest are Minor Houses (averaging say... 15 votes. Less is than that is simply impractical with our current system...).  That gives us a rough total (33,000 votes!), which also shows that any given house is, by itself, a trivial power.  I'll note that you don't technically need a title to be a Noble, plenty of untitled Nobles abound... but presumably after a few generations they start slipping down to 'noble servants' or some such. Seeing as non-titled Nobles don't get votes, they aren't out of the political game per se, but they do have an additional step: COnvincing the House Head to call for a vote on X...

Our next step is to find out how many Houses will simply vote your way out of tradition or habit.  Presumably Greater Houses spend more energy on cultivation of allies by default, and most Minor Houses will vote alongside certain Greater Houses almost without fail.  Obviously the specific vote may influence this, so if for example a Richese and an Atredies were both up for a Judge position, then clearly they would not vote as allies in that one specific case... but that would also represent a failure of politics, as House Heads (and interested members) should be making private negotiations to prevent that sort of public showdown... unless its all for show in a greater game! Wheels within Wheels, mofo!

Lets argue that any Greater House can call upon, without thinking, up to d6 Greater House Allies at any given time, and 4d6 Minor House allies.  This can be rolled once, or per vote.  Minor Houses can call upon 1d6 minor house allies (that should remained more or less fixed except in exceptional cases) and may be able to trade upon past votes for support from a Greater House (and their Greater Allies!), which is why they so reliably support the Great Houses in most votes!  Note that these random rolls, especially for the greater houses, represents the entire network of traditional allies.  Any given minor house might reliably vote for Greater House Richese... except when Richese is supporting Atredies, because that Minor House also has an alliance with Harkonnen.... and all of these relationships are presumed Baked Into the Cake, so to speak.   As you can see, Minor Houses can only reliably get things done with patronage, while Major Houses have sturdy enough blocs to get most minor votes without much else.

Now, personality and persuasion matter.  The Landsraad probably doesn't meet in full very often due to the expense of travel, Kanly (security concerns), and the sheer scope of a Noble's duties. Simply packing up Paul, Leto and Jessica to decamp from Calaban to Arrakis took weeks of moving pieces around and preparations, time enough for teh Reverend Mother to make a special trip to Gom Jabbar Paul without actually disrupting the move.  But since we don't see much FTL phone calls, we can assume that personal attendance and voting does matter.  Leto's personal magnetism mattered, as does Baron Harkonen's lack of magnetism.  So a good orator can pull in votes from the undecideds and univolved... and over time can forge a larger bloc of reliable votes with less need to persuade.  Mind you, he's not too likely to pull entire blocs this way, but rather personal seats. Only a critical success would net him an entire Greater House 'bloc' vote (treat it like his own house network, with allies and such), otherwise he sways a number of seats equal to his success (not votes, seats. Actual Votes are d6+2 per seat).

Of course, if a non-head of House is calling a vote for his personal gain, or personal politics, he may not be supported by house at all, which may gut his support from his House Allies. In this case, he should individually test his own other House Seats (assume the Head is not going to vote in his favor at all in this case), and the GM determines if any allies vote for this upstart. His personal title matters a great deal in that determination, few people will throw even a minor house behind a mere Knight, but a Count?... and possibly the second most important man in the House? Well, that's worth hedging a few bets.  Charm may matter here more than oratory, if you want a skill test.

The third method of gaining votes is personal glad handing. Presumably there is a fair amount of communication between Nobles at all times, and there may be a few days before/between votes in the Landsraad, where a young ambitious noble can go around to non-traditional allies (or if he's particularly bold/foolish, traditional enemies) and attempt to sway them to support him personally. Clearly Heads of Houses are best here, gaining entire blocs of votes (but sometimes/often not their networks of allies...) for a single effort.  This is not something that can be handled by a single skill test, but requires Roleplaying (and this could involve efforts of other PCs!).   Many such contacts will fail to pay off (and you never know exactly until the votes are cast), others will demand prices, services. Rarely will they ask for money/spice... and only the most foolish Nobles would entertain trading CHOAM shares for votes... or the most desperate.   This sort of back room dealing is the meat and bread of Politics, and this is how networks of allies and rivals shift over long periods of time, so only a fool doesn't at least make some effort, even if only in traditional correspondence.  The Simplest of deals involve trading a vote for a vote, and sometimes a Head of House might want to avoid obviously throwing behind someone, but might be convinced to sway some of his allies.  The GM and the Player have to negotiate, though skill checks can influence these sorts of deals, they can't replace them entirely.  

It is common to trade directorships or seats on councils in the Landsraad for 'important' votes.  Directorships tend to equate to money, while Seats on Councils (often held by junior nobles of a house) are a matter of prestige more than anything else. Less commonly swapped are entire planetary bodies... and almost Never a major world, much less a homeworld.  If someone asks for your homeworld its seen more as a sarcastic dismissal than an honest offer... which is one reason Noble Houses take relatively extreme measures to ensure their heirs are not complete idiots...  though this doesn't apply to Corrino (who, to be fair, doesn't actually get too directly involved with Landsraad politics... he's rather at the other end of the stick.)

That more or less covers the basic form of Landsraad politics, if only because this is 'Free on the Internets' level work. Maybe I should set up a patreon? Nah...


So lets talk the other side of power... raw wealth.

There are three main aspects here, discussed earlier: Cash Money, Spice Stockpiles, and Military might.  These don't shift very much on a day to day basis, but a clever Noble can shift assets from one pile to another to take advantage of circumstances to grow the total pile.  For example, Duke Leto spends a lot of cash one a new technology developed in house and manages to start building a 'new army'... growing his military might far faster than normal. This, combined with his popularity in the Landsraad leads to Shaddam the IV to fear him and conspire against him. For all we know, Leto may have planned on doing something with all that power, but he was cut down before it was ready. Smart nobles play their cards very close to their chests and keep their options open.

Lets look at Cash Money: Most Houses, even minor ones, have a source of income from any planets they hold.  This is taxed by the House, or is in fact a House operation.  This income is not trivial (it does vary from house to house), but it pales in comparison to the payoff of their CHOAM shares.  There are trillions of people in the Empire, and a vast swath of their economic actions go through CHOAM in some way, not least of which is the vast income from Spice. Some tiny portion of that incalcuable wealth is paid out regularly to the Share Holders... the Nobility.  Some of that payment is in Spice, but the rest is in Cash Money!

Needless to Say, a Noble House, even a minor one, has more money than can realistically be spend on a character level. Members of the House generally get some portion of either income source through their Assets benefice, which is to say their walking around money.  Most of this money is 'spoken for', and doesn't really interact with the character rules.  Even a small family tends to have a large number of householders...each of whom is 'paid' in one form or another.  Bequests to the Bene Gesserit, to the Mentat schools and other minor organizations are very common, far greater than the cost of actually employing a Mentat or Swordmaster or Suk Doctor (Bene Gesserit are not paid directly. THat would be prostituition in many cases...).  Likewise, while a Titled Noble may be entitled to a small number of Free Heighliner trips (such as to and from the Landsraad), most Houses pay a significant fortune to allow their Nobles to travel without having to pay directly... and they pay again to move goods and services to and from their worlds.

In short, the amount of money being tossed around by even a minor house is somewhat game breaking from the character standpoint.

Spice is much the same in too many ways. It can be treated a bit like a second pile of money. Hoble Houses are voracious users of Spice. Every Noble will consume a fair amount on his own... but so does every single Householder... and all of it is generally supplied by the House itself!  Failure to supply Householders with Spice isn't really an option, since it virtually garauntees disloyalty in a very paranoid galaxy. Even bastards like Harkonen supply their Householders with Spice, and don't just cut it off because of a tight supply.  Anybody worth employing is worth Spice.  The CHOAM shares more or less garauntee a certain amount of spice, and most Houses use almost every gram of it in Households automatically, rather dynamically.  A Stockpile represents the freedom to say 'fuck you' to any of the major powers that can threaten that supply, from the Emperor, to the Spacing Guild, to whomever is currently running Dune.  This is a rather big deal, as the longer you can hold out, the stronger you are when dealing with major opposition. Most Houses can, with a bit of belt tightening, hold out for a few years, and being willing to trade a small pile of spice for a favor is worth more than the cash it represents, simply due to the difficulty in acquiring 'stockpile' amounts of Spice, even for Nobles.   Having enough Spice to trade some, and knowning when and to whom to offer it is almost better than being cash rich.

Lastly, military might. Note that there is no such thing as an Imperial Army or Navy.  Each House has its own House Guards, and these are massive forces.  To give you an idea, The Emperor loans Harkonen Ten Legions of Sadukar, which are House Carino troops. Each Legion is 30,000 men. This is only an overwhelming force when bolstering the House Harkonen troops being used AND because Arrakis is not the seat of House Atredies. Had they assaulted Calaban it would not have been a win, or at least not an easy win.  Mind you, this also required Yueh to sabotage the Shield Generators.

In short, Houses are tough nuts to crack!

There is an interesting downside to this structure: Few, if any, House guards have much in teh way of non-infantry based forces.  You don't see Armor formations or mobile artillery. They use the same transport space ships as fire support in the Lynch Movie.  Its a given that heavy artillery style weapons are in the arsenal, but predominantly as DEFENSIVE weapons.  Houses have a Seige Mentality about them.  What armor exists is largely light-multipurpose vehicles, gun-trucks and APCs rather than tanks, with Ornithopters as a local air-wing (combined transport/scout/ground support general purpose air wings).   We can guess at the levels of complexity, that aren't revealed, or rely on the dubious Movie... my inclination is to make up less rather than more, so at least we see SOME heavy weapon ground teams and some vehicles.

The only real way to handle this sanely is in a sort of abstract. So each House will have a rating from one to ten in all three area. Greater Houses will have greater overall ratings... presumably Minor Houses that get enough Money/Spice buy more CHOAM Shares, and with a strong enough military may go to war with a weaker House to take their assets (EG, force them to give up CHOAM Shares or be wiped out... the stronger the attacker, the more shares they can squeeze, up to the point where their opponent goes Atomic just to save themselves or at least get revenge from the grave...).  Due to the presence of Atomics, 'wars' tend to be short, shocking affairs, at least against other Noble Houses.   Using Atomics against the Fremen is a bad idea... less Atomics for your house, plus any use is a 'bad' use, inviting people to use atomics against you. Atomics are Deterent weapons, therefore primarily defensive, rather like a Fleet in Being.   Just having them is more useful than employing them.

So, ratings from one to ten.  Ratings can be shifted from each column to the other, but this is a risk. If being done 'blindly' in hopes of some advantage (often this is just buying Spice with Cash Money when it comes available) roll a die. On an even number you get an extra point of rating in the new column, on an odd, you just lose the point you tried to shift.  Clearly, in the long run blindly moving stuff around represents a zero sum game... in the long run you are back where you started eventually. If any column hits zero your house is effectively done for... except for Spice, where you can limp on for a while and hope no one realizes how desperate you are.  If its military, congrats, your worst rival just absorbed your defenseless family. You can go out with a bang and be reviled by history as a monster, or trade the keys to the nukes to some noble somewhere in exchange for a comfortable retirement in their territory. You probably took off with a big pile of spice and a fat wad of cash... and legally you might even retain your personal shares in CHOAM... in which case its nukes and a membership in the new house for you! If you run out of cash, you had to sell off all your assets, including CHOAM Shares as you go broke.

To guarantee advantages moves requires a lot of adventure/political stuff to find a good deal. This isn't quick and dirty moves, this stuff takes years per 'action', though the PC Adventure portion may be shorter. This might involve setting up your own personal, deniable smuggling operation, or cutting a deal with a network of smugglers. It could mean taking 'house troops' and loaning them to a rival for a deniable action in return for a share of the proceeds (Money or spice)... this is a crude framework, and I'm reluctant to turn it into mere dicing.  When dicing is called for, however, the current rating of the 'spent' point is the target on the D20 roll, perhaps modified by a relavent skill (such as building wierding modules would be an academic/science check... made by whichever householder is researching this new tech!.

As a matter of fluff, most Houses will be most reluctant to dip into their Spice Stockpiles. Sometimes 'spending' spice represents instead going head to head with someone who can hurt your spice flow temporarily, which is more common.  Clearly a winning move here represents outlasting the bastard and gaining whatever you were trying to gain.

These ratings are more or less absolute. House Corinno defaults to all tens, and the lowest, meanest noble house (or even a non-atomic non-noble organization trying to play on this field...) would be all ones. A seven is better than a six.  While Greater Houses generally have better ratings than Minor Houses, this is not absolute. A remarkably poor Greater House might have less cash available than a fairly rich Minor House... remember the big determinant of Greater/Minor is Landsraad votes.  A minor House with a lot of wealth might not get much from CHOAM but could very well have an extraordinarily wealthy homeworld... or has simply manuevered for a lot of minor, but lucrative directorships and judges of change (or even a long running Judge of Change, say between Atredies and Harkonen... who may have generations long Kanly Feuds between them... maybe even one single feud going back to the Jihad, meaning some lucky house has been taking bribes from both sides for ten thousand years! Potentially.

If I need to expand this I might pull down Traveller's Dynasty supplement (Mongoose). This would cover thirty year cycles, which may be a bit long (or not: Spice LIfespans are potentially four hundred years and change!), and would provide a long deep game... but would also be outside the scope of PC actions, I think.  Most campaigns would be inside a single Cycle by default.

Anyway, thats enough brainstorming for one night!

Wall o' Text Crush!

I'm tryin', workin' hard through your ideas. Love the effort BTW! Outside of starting House Harkonnen off a Decados plate I was nowhere as prepared to run with this idea.

Keep 'em comin'!

I only have time to read the first post right now, but just wanted to say this is good stuff. Priests of the Celestial Sun is the priest book you are missing, along with Merchants of the Jumpweb, the guild book. There was also a military faction book called Legions of the Empire which wasn't bad, but certainly the least essential.

Thanks!  What's funny is that a couple of the middle posts were meant to be quick dashed off notes, adn when I hit post I'd see BOOM! Another wall of text... even my quick notes are faaking huge!

I'm going to revisit SPice Addiction.

First, after sleeping on it I realize that it is better NOT to buff everyone addicted to Spice, but assume that Character creation ASSUMES Spice Addiction.  ON the off chance someone wants to play a Non-Addict, they get penalized one point off of every attribute, but they aren't using spice (more on that in a moment).

Given that everyone of note is addicted to spice, we can assume a vast hidden mechanism for getting spice to the right people, moving spice around and all that exists. Rather than buying a Spice asset, assume instead that a minimum daily dose is provided according to rank as already noted.  A player can chose to use less than their normal dose, in which case they can (and WILL, if they are normal poeple) be able to save up a small amount of extra doses.  Does every Duke take six doses of spice every day? Almost assuredly not. He'll tell EVERYONE that he does, but he may only take three or four, and he'll save the rest. This is how stockpiles get started.

While most people will carry a small lock box of SPice with them when they travel, ranging from a pocket snuff box taken for a night on the town (two or three doses), to a bread/cigar box shaped travel box (see LYnch Dune) carried by high ranking nobles and Gesserit witches for travels, to several liter 'Family Vaults' used when doing anything remotely risky and long term, everyone carries Spice. More than that CHOAM is literally everywhere, and if you've got a right (nobles with shares, CHOAM agents etc...) you can go to the local CHOAM facility and draw an allotment of Spice, ranging from Daily value (For the NOble and any HOuseholders.... recall that Noble Shares are worth a lot more spice than One Person needs), to weekly or monthly supplies.   If you paid assets for a Householder (or... for PCs, if another PC is offiically a Householder of yours) a Cohort or any other 'dependent' you, as a NOble can officially draw their daily need of Spice without question or repercussion.   Denying a Spice Ration is the ultimate form of dismissal from service.

That said, Players may still buy extra spice rations with assets (1 point of asset is worth one daily dose), or they can buy a stockpile they personally control (Every point represents A month for the player and any dependents at minimal use (normally 1 per person per day).... though this should be adjusted upwards for high point value stockpiles. Logarithmically? I'll compare it other assets and see what the usual pattern is... later).

What about players deliberately using less, or no, SPice?  Well, they have excess, congratulations!  Keep track of it, and see how they store it. Too much personal reserve at one time makes you a target. No, dismissing a householder and claiming their share is generally not a good idea. That sort of thing is Head of House political manuevering, not personal stores level tracking.  Mind you, the official value of a dose and its actual "street" value are not the same at all. One dose is worth ten firebirds pretty much all the time (except if the other person is in withdrawl... then its worth whatever you can squeeze out of them!), but a hundred doses?  

My main point is that the GM and players don't have to track any of this if they don't want to... so long as teh players stick to civilization.  Billions, perhaps Trillions of addicts means that there is an awful lot of support to get them their fix.  For short excursions out and back... so long as they were planned (or are on Arrakis!)... shouldn't be a problem any more than water would be.


Edit:

I want to revisit dosages a little. Consider that House Corrino can loan out 300,000 Sadukar, and barely have enough men to overwhelm House Atredies (due to their recent move and the presence of a Black Swan event traitor), we can assume that the DAILY consumption of the Imperial House is upwards of a million doses A DAY.  That is literally a metric Ton of Spice used by ONE house... if the dose is a single Gram.  That would suggest the daily sprinkles consumption of a middle class salaryman is a tenth of a gram.... spread out over two or three meal and accompanying drinks? Hard to imagine working with such tiny amounts, equally hard to imagine two thousand noble houses each pulling in similar daily amounts. Not counting CHOAM agents and the Spacing Guild, we're already looking at 1500 metric tons of Spice leaving Arrakis Every Single Day. For Ten Thousand Years. By that measure (and still counting the trillions of lesser users...) Arrakis should have a hole in it the size of a small moon!  

Consider also that our only real grasp of dosage sizes comes from the Lynch movie, where Paul pops a fat tablet the size of his thumb into his mouth like its nothing. He's wrong, in that case, but still.

What does that tell us?

Well, it tells us our doses are too damn high.  We know purity of Spice is a thing, and we know from the modern Drug trade that cutting pure drugs is a common thing.  And we know that Spice is fucking potent as hell.

So, what we are missing is the 'cutting' stage.   Most Spice consumers are taking it mere grains of spice per dose, maybe a few hundreths of a Gram, and 'middle class' users are probably getting even less that that, just heavily cut with other nootropics (even one of the many failed varieties of 'fake spice' invented over the eons to break the monopoly). They still pop a fat tablet for a dose.  Most people, even NObles, may be unaware of just how diluted their drug of choice is, unless they work for CHOAM or the Spacing Guild (or smugglers....).   Maybe the difference in Doses per Day consumed isn't measured in how many pills you're popping, but how pure those pills are?

Which brings me to my other point: Paul, exposed to Pure Arrakis Spice, a hundred times more pure than he is used to, takes it and immediately has a Precognitive flash that incidentally saves both his life, adn the life of Shadat Mapes, but its still not a 'toxic' dose... most people probably assume there IS no toxic dose... since almost no one could afford to take such a massive amount of Spice at once (unless they lived on Dune, of course).  

So, I'll need a rule.  Off the Cuff, if a person consumes a 'massive' dose of spice (at least a ten dose shot, but probably much higher... thirty dose shot?....)... for every Ten Doses consumed at one time, roll a D20. If it is under the number of 'ten' doses consumed the user has an immediate precognitive flash about something important to their life in the very near future.  The greater the margin of success (the Victory Points if you are playign Fading Suns straight... this is a dead easy 'hack' for people who hate the VP system, by the way. Just reverse the way you count success.), the easier it will be to understand the vision and the more detailed the vision will be.


EDIT, again::::  For the curious, Gurney Halleck, apparently, does not do Spice Addiction.  Its in the Wiki, where it comments that he is a traditionalist and avoids life extension techniques, such as Spice Addiction.  Undoubtely he's tried it, but didn't go addiction with it, so there is a precedent for this.  Mind you, this is the only man who got out of the Sadukar assault alive, and is at least equal to Duncan Idaho in a fight (17 Sadukar kills, DvG fights are 6 out of 10 splits).  This may cause me to rethink my no-spice take? At least have some sort of points break or something?  Hmm...

Having gone through all the books in my 'need to use' pile last night, I started to realize something: There was nothing I really need in any of them, but there is an awful lot in them that is useful to players and GMs.  Sure, if I ever sit down and try to type it up as an actual ruleset document I'll want those resources, but for this level of project none of it really matters.

That leads me to my second point:

Don't believe the hype.  We are told frequently how much Mentats are smarter than normal people, but we never really see that. Nothing Thufir and Piter do is any different than a modern consiglieri, really.  We hear how bad ass the Sadukar are, and we hear how bad ass the Fremen are, but what do they actually do? They fight and win, or lose, battles. So what? Humanity has been doing that for forever.

Swordmaster of Ginaz? Duncan Idaho fights off a bunch of sadukar like a boss, then dies like a little bitch to a nameless Sadukar. Suk Doctors are unbreakable? Yueh goes down to the most obvious subversion technique ever tried... like ANYONE else would.  Its all hype.  The only thing we see that is special is Paul's Precognition (and even there that doesn't really work out well for him, does it? Can't save your child... oh, its the Golden Path. Can't save your eyesight? Golden Path again. Sure it is, Paul. Sure it is.), and the Bene Gesserit psychic stuff.  We even learn that there isn't much special to their Prana Bindu, as the Honored Matres, with no Spice and no Psychic powers are actually BETTER at kicking ass than the Bene Gesserit. It's just kung fu with some mystic bullshit attached to it.

My point is that a great number of Dune specific honorifics are mostly just that, Honorifics.  We meet a number of people who are Mentat Trained (Fenring among them, Ghola Duncan, I believe is another) who don't use the Juice of Sapho (should be Saphoo? or Saphu?... wiki spells it with the one O, which makes me think.... Lesbians!).  That sort of implies that being Mentat trained is a bit like getting a PHD in "Smart".  We can say the same of Bene Gesserit training. Lots of non-bene Gesserit seem to have been trained by them, men and women both, and not all of them are psychic.  

Think about it this way: Would an Noble ever admit to employing a 'second rate' or even 'Average' Mentat? Of course not: They will ALL claim their Mentat is teh bestest Evah.  Ginaz is a Noble House, of course they will claim their House Guard (swordmasters) are superlative!  To do otherwise is to show weakness and invite attack.  Suk doctors work at the highest level, and certainly they are very well vetted to avoid suspicion... but are they REALLY conditioned to never betray?  Seriously: All Harkonen does is kidnap his wife and boom, Yueh's famous conditioning breaks. It was really that easy.

So what am I saying? Well, I'm saying a lot of the mystique of Dune comes from the attitudes of the CHARACTERS of Dune, not some objective facts. These people really BELIEVE what they are saying about themselves, all the time.  THat's not really something I can capture in a rule set, it has to come from players and GMs.  So, if you think I'm giving short shrift to any given bunch of yahoos.... consider how badly almost everyone (including Maud'dib!!!!) actually does in the Dune Books.  They all fail, miserably, at one point or another.   A Crysknife doesn't get special rules for being a crysknife... it pokes small holes in people, like any knife.... it is special because of the attitudes people have towards them.

That said, I have a LOT of work to do making those factions and groups that really do need my attention... particularly the Bene Gesserit.   If you're disappointed that I don't make them godlike... well, this entire post was Just For You, you special guy you.

Ok, I'm going to start putting away various Dune Specific 'factions', working my way up to the big ones.
One thing I've thought of is that the closer you get to the Books/Movies in tone, the more creation points/experience you need to start with. Something to keep in mind when you start creating your campaign.

Sadukar, and other Equivalent House Guards:
Straight up, I'm going to use the House Decados Kossacks for Sadukar.  being 'Changed' is not a stigma in Dune, so we can ignore that.  If you don't have the rules handy, the Kossacks are known fearless, relentless (but not mindless) Killers. They are genetically and/or surgically enhanced to make them extra strong and extra tough. They've got a similar reputation to Sadukar in Fading Suns.

Mentats.
We technically have three seperate things to deal with here. Mentats, Twisted Mentats (Tlielaxu Trained), and Mentat Training (For non-mentats, like Fenring).
To be a Mentat you need to make sure ALL of your mental stats are higher than ALL of your Physical stats, and have Calm as your primary Spirit. Twisted Mentats take Passion as their primary and may have other 'Curses' to represent mental instability.  
Mentat Trained people just need a high (7 at least) Wits.

THEN: Take Enhanced Attribute Wits and Perception Blessings (this is true for all three).
Actual Mentats/Twisted Mentats also take the Benefice; Mentat (3), which means they are legally considered Mentats and may legally acquire and use the Juice of Sapho.  

Mentats are a lot more common that you might think. We only see Mentats who are trained to serve in Noble Houses, but Mentats can find work anywhere that 'calculation' is required, anything with lots of thinking involved.  Mentats therefor don't have a specific set of skills they are taught, the emphasis is on improved thinking ability (which is probably more than just training, but if Herb didn't expand on it, I won't either!).

Swordmaster of Whomever (Ginaz and others...)
This is primarily another form of House Guard.  The Sadukar are primarily a military shock troop force (disregarding the KJA ideas that they fight in groups of three and throw cybernetic toes at people....), while the Swordmasters represent, generally, a smaller more elite force of warriors, focusing on training and swordsmanship over brute force.  THis is proven to be less effective as House Ginaz is 'destroyed' by House Grumman before the start of Dune, but warriors trained in those schools still have a very fine reputation indeed.
To be considered a Swordmaster you have to have the relevant combat skill (melee) at 8 and have at least 8 points of Sword Combat Arts trained. You also take the Asset Swordmaster (1), which allows you to declare your training and seek work (or duels of honor if you are a noble....) using your skills.  Usually you will already have employment in a Noble House, often the one that trained you, but that's not 'rulez'.

Note that this can be adapted to Gunmasters of Grumman (or whomever) using the same format, or Fist-Masters of Beezlebub.  The taking of the Asset is, however, mandatory. Otherwise you are just a well trained sword guy, but otherwise nothing special.

Suk Doctor
To qualify as a Suk Doctor you need a Wits and Tech of at least 6, with one (your choice) at 7 or higher. You also need 8 points in Physic, specializing in either Surgery or Tech Medicine, and need to be trained (at least one point) in Remedy and Science. Also take the Asset: Suk Doctor (2).  Suk Doctors receive one dose of SPice daily from teh Suk School, and usually another from an employer (nobles, up to an including the Imperial Family), to help ensure they are not easily bribeable. Any Suk Doctor who demonstrates the slightest hint of greed or other obvious signs of treachery is usually pro-actively stripped of their Suk status, or denied it in the first place (so... no obvious Curses or Afflictions that would indicate probable future treachery).

Face Dancers
Face Dancers are always members of the Bene Tlielaxu.  All Face Dancers have the Metonym trait (7 point Blessing), most have a curse of mental conditioning or other loyalty traits as well, but this is not required.

Ghola
Honestly? No special rules are required. A Ghola is a clone of a dead person (though nothing is really stopping them form cloning the living...), and starts out functionally identical to the living person, but without their memories (unless Awakened).  All Ghola have ties to, but not necessarily 'membership' in the Bene Tlielaxu.  Make a normal character, take a reputation based Curse to reflect the poor attitudes people have towards Ghola, or not, and call it a day.  

Fremen and Feydakeen:
No special rules required. They are likely to have Faith as a primary, and many Fremen may develop some low level psychic abilities (particularly Soma). You can treat Feydakeen as Dervishes if you really want, but its not really required.  From a game standpoint its more necessary to understand teh culture you are representing rather than rules being written for them.

Bene Gesserit
This is a big one, so I'll do a whole post on it... eventually.  My plan is to put together not just a working template for the Bene Gesserit as a whole, but to demonstrate how to use the tool in Fading Suns to create your own factions (if, like me, you want to see Ten Thousand Worlds actually FEEL like ten thousand world!).

However, for the moment I'll detail a little of Bene Gesserit Trained, which represents women (like Irulan perhaps) who have some training but are not true members of the sisterhood.
All Bene Gesserit, and Bene Gesserit Trained are equivalent to titled Nobility, regardless of background or actual titles.   A young (given Spice consumption, this could mean 'less than fifty or sixty years old) Bene Gesserit will always be attractive (Beauty Blessing), smart (Wits of at least 6), and skilled at Ettiqute, Charm and Empathy. (for Etiquette and Empathy this means at least one rank, for Charm, at least 3).  They take the Asset Bene Gesserit Training (3), which grants them status equal to a Knight, and also means they can control pregnancy. This is for women only.

Men who are Bene Gesserit Trained generally refers to having learned either the psychic gifts of the Bene Gesserit or the Prana Bindu Martial art... or both, but gain no official status, and in fact are generally disdained by the Order.

Okay, so my Posting Plan is this:

Religion in Dune
House Guards Overview
Bene Gesserit.

Yeah, yeah. I'm stalling on the fucking Bene Gesserit. I already did the fun part of the job, working out their psychic powers and whatnot... its the grunt work of putting it all together that I'm dreading.  Also, I've already decided that its a 'big job'... meaning I get to clean up their psychic rules, lay out the struture of the characters (sans Psychic stuff) AND do their Martial Arts, not to mention detailing the actual organization, number and structure. In my defense, a LOT of what I've been doing has been setting up ground game for the Big Bene Gesserit Post, brainstorming and what have you. Laying out the Spice rules is a big part of that.

Of course, at some  point I should put some more effort into explaining how CHOAM and the Spacing Guild can/should play out in a game... which means a smaller 'Big Post' for each of them.... sigh. Mah werk ain't nev'ah doan.

So lets talk religion. I'm going to get into some serious Canon Weeds on this one, so again: I invite the Fan-Wank crowd to cite chapter and verse at me if they want me to correct anything. If they can't, then I'll assume its a personal interpretation and ignore them.  Also: Nothing from the Pen of KJA is remotely considered holy writ.  I'm not happy with the level of KJA Taint I'm going to use just by accident.... it is a bit like asking how much is too much dog shit in your ham sandwich.  ANY. Any is too much.  If I must, the less the better.  Since I've never heard anyone proclaim KJA fandom, I'm going to assume my attitude is universal. Good.

While we can assume that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of minor faiths in the galaxy, we only know of two major movements for certain. The Orange Catholics (I'll assume that the Irish were NOT in Frank Herbert's mind here), and the Buddislamics.

We're on firmer ground with the Buddislamics, so lets start there.  THis is actually a minor sect in the main, the primary groups we see are the Bene Tlielaxu, and the splinter faction, the Zensunni wanderers, which includes (but we will assume is not entirely limited to...) the Fremen. Note that both of these are outgroups in the Empire.  The Bene Gesserit are very familiar with the Buddislamic faith... but then manipulating religions is sort of their bag but I'd like to suggest that in the earliest days of the Bene Gesserit they were strongly influenced by Buddislam.

Now, I'm not going to go too deep into the weeds of the tenets of Buddislam... we can see that peace isn't a big deal, jihad and mahdi (islamic concepts) are, but Allah is not.  Due to the name of the Butlerian Jihad, we can presume that Buddislam was a dominant faith among those fighting the Jihad.

I'm going to go on a limb here: due to a lack of religious overtones in the Fremen fight against the Empire (external... internally there was a lot), I'm going to say that Buddislamic faiths don't consider non-buddislamic faiths to be actual religions.  That is, the Orange Catholics of the Empire aren't viewed as members of a hostile faith, but rather as people of little or no faith at all.  On the other hand, they tend to consider all other Buddislamics to be some form of Heretic (this comes from the Tleilaxu attitude towards the Fremen/Fish Speakers, or I'm imagining it... either way).   Either way, all Buddislamics tend to be a lot more overtly spiritual, and 'exotic', with plenty of middle eastern color.

On the Zensunni Wanderers, they track the various stops along the way of their famous migration... which primarily ended prior to the Jihad... or at least prior to the end of the Jihad. This is Ancient History, almost to the point of being Mythic.  One thing to note, however, is every Zensunni Sect would consider their own group to be the final stop on their migration, the only True Zensunni Nomads. In fact, in the ancient days of yore, a bunch of Zensunni may have left Dune, deciding not to stay one a world that hostile AND addictive, and settled elsewhere. The Fremen wouldn't record them at all, and they would consider the Fremen pretenders who couldn't make the final step of the journey (which is, after all, a Holy Pilgrimage of sorts. Failure to complete it, to reach the Promised Land, is a sign of a lack of Faith, of worthiness.)

One more note of importance: the Buddislamics, to include especially the Zensunni, actually don't care much about the Butlerian Jihad.  The Tlielaxu are less despised for their religion (which is a secret) then their perceived lack of morals.  The Fremen are considered savage barbarians.  

One difference between the Zensunni and the baseline Buddislamics is the role of women.  The Bene Gesserit have spent ten thousand years shaping the faith of the Zensunni, placing themselves in positions of power and authority, so among the Zensunni women are considered Closer to God. There are no religious roles for men among most Zensunni groups, outside of tribal chieftans and paterfamilias duties, everything else is for the Sayadinna and the Reverend Mothers.

The Buddislamics are another story. The only group we SEE are the Bene Tlielaxu, over whom the Bene Gesserit have NO influence whatsoever.  The Bene Tlielaxu are relentlessly patriarchal, to the point of actual misogyny, on a level rarely seen in real life.  The Bene Tlielaxu actually turn women into living factories, churning out life on demand and to design, with literally no other role in society than Aoxotl Tank. (I may be exaggerating, but if so, only slightly).  We can assume many Buddislamics have similar, if less extreme, attitudes towards women in the faith, which would be one reason the Bene Gesserit never went Full Buddislamic.

So lets talk the Orange Catholics:
This is a misleading name. I'm going to go on a very sturdy limb and suggest that the term Catholic refers to Universal, rather than any relationship to old school christianity.  We see little to no signs of basic christian sentiments anywhere in Dune, in any version.  We know for a fact that the Orange Catholic Bible was written AFTER the Butlerian Jihad, and is the source of the injunctions against Machine Minds.  I'll suggest that the primary focus, the religious myths if you will, of the Orange Catholics, is in fact the Butlerian Jihad itself.  We can presume a lot of older faith elements were included as backdrop, but the focus is the Jihad, and probably a highly allegorical account of the last days prior to the Jihad up through its end.  Ten thousand years later, with little context, these stories are probably hard to understand directly, so only the sins and virtues, the morality provided, remains.

What is that morality? Well, it includes Kanly(revenge) and poisons, so clearly its not a morality we would be terribly comfortable with.  It also seems to suggest that perfecting humanity by any means necessary is ideal (Mentats, Bene Gesserit, even Navigators are all okay!).

I'm going to posit that Orange Catholicism isn't just the most common faith, it is the de facto state religion, with the Padisha Emperor serving more or less officially as the head of the Faith. We have absolutely zero evidence of a structured church, which either suggests it doesn't exist (hard to believe), or that its utterly subservient to the political powers (the Nobles).  Much of the Fraufreleches system is rooted in the Orange Catholic Bible almost by default.  

Note what is missing from all this?

God.  

The Orange Catholics aren't concerned with what is Divine so much as what is Right.  We could draw a parallel to Confusionism here... but I just did, so...

So you have a bible without a church, a faith without a God, and a culture that almost reflexively obeys their faith without ever thinking about it. Even the deeply cynical Bene Gesserit can't really beat or subvert it, so they don't even try.  A Bene Gesserit probably views reading the Bible with a sort of haughty disdain (being above all that), but nevertheless can recite without thinking the Catechism Against the Thinking Machine, or any number of other OC proverbs she absorbed all her life.  



Which brings me to a third faith, almost a fourth.

We have the philosophy of the Bene Gesserit (which is distinct from the OC faith), but more importantly we have the Cult of the Kwisatz Haderach.  Mind you, there are several competing programs to create, to breed, the Kwisatz Haderach, not just the Bene Gesserit program see so spectacularly in Dune. The Tlielaxu have their own program, and the Empire (particularly the Noble Class) is practically litered with KH failures or 'almosts' from a half dozen or so programs.

First of all, KH is a Buddislamic term, which lends addtional credence to the theory that the BG were orginally much more BI than in modern times... but given its popularity, we can guess that the idea/term was pretty widespread during the Jihad period.  For all we know, Judith Butler (or if you like... whomever Butler that the Jihad refers to. Judith works.) may have been considered, in popular opinion, a Mahdi/KH figure during the Crusade, a Natural KH, if you will. It certainly makes sense.  Given the general philosophy of human improvement through 'science', we can presume that the idea of creating (and controlling, paradoxically) a divine prophet is a natural outgrowth.

It might look a bit weird. Imagine if for the last two thousand years the Roman Catholic Church had been rounding up holy virgins and marching them off to bethleham in hopes of another immaculate conception....  but it is believable in Dune's conceits.

So, what is a Kwisatz Haderach?

Well, that does actually change depending on who you are asking, but fundamentally it refers to a male psychic, particularly a powerful (Psi 10) Male Psychic.

One thing to keep in mind: The Bene Gesserit aren't after any old Male Psychic... that's why all these failed psychics are all over the damn place. They are after one they can CONTROL. So a 'failed' KH from their perspective is a male psychic they don't believe they can control, so they refuse to train... and is thus NOT a KH in the BG mode of thinking.

The Bene Tlielaxu have pretty much the same definition, except that they can't actually train psychics (they themselves NOT having psychic disciplines and powers), so they need a powerful natural psychic who can train himself (Maud'dib!), and they aren't interested in breeding programs so much as genetically engineering one... I'm not sure, but I think Piter De Vries (the twisted Mentat) was considered a failed KH?

Other groups may be content with non-psychic 'ubermenchen', particularly the technologically minded Ix and Richese Houses, but their attempts to create a 'controllable' Hand of God are also a lot less notable.  

Pretty much everyone agrees that when a TRUE Kwisatz Haderach appears He (and yes, it is always male, which might be curious if we follow the Judith Butler was a KH thought...) will lead a great holy Jihad and pretty much re-order society... and presumably bring his creators to the top with him.  You can see why people don't openly brag about, or share details of, their KH programs, as its pretty much admitting to attempting to create a rebellion.   You can also see why CONTROLLING the KH is so damned important.

From a game play standpoint, if a male character develops a 10 PSI and a fully suite of psychic powers... and is openly using them, consider that they will be more or less drawing religious fanatics to them like flies... what happens next is the interesting question.


EDIT::: I am not at all ashamed that I misnamed Serena Butler as Judith Butler. To have felt that Shame would be to admit to preferring the Works of KJA to my own fevered imaginations, and I am not that low. However, IF you insist on SOME level of canoninity to such namings, you may prefer Serena. I won't shame you for it, but... well... KJA. Seriously. Notice I left out any mention of Manion Butler.... ah, crap!


Second Edit: We know for a fact (Chapterhouse: Dune) that some old earth religious sects exist even past the Golden Age of Leto II and the Scattering, specifically the Jews that have been in hiding on Gammu. Why in hiding? Anti-Semitism for a sect that pretty much everyone would have forgotten existed probably before the Butlerian Jihad was finished? Well, they are out there, and we can assume some sects exist for other old faiths, but after approxiamtely 20k years (or 15k for Dune) they may not be entirely recognizable.

Also, the Orange Catholic Bible (which does have a retcon excuse for the Orange part of the name, its a bastardized fureign word, look it up) in fact did draw upon.. zenchristianity, along with ALL other faiths of old Earth. Its the ultimate Mutt Religion, at least in part. I'm standing by what I wrote about the Butlerian Jihad, however, given the timing.

House Guards:

I'm not really going to put any rules in here, so you can skip it if that's all you want.

I'm going to retread a bit of ground here.  We know that House Corrino commmands Sadukar Legions, and Ten are sent to Dune to support House Harkonen against Atredies. We can presume that Shaddam would not send ALL his legions, or even a majority, so let's say that he has 30 legions of Sadukar. Each Legion is 30,000 men, which is convienent... that gives Corrino almost a Million soldiers.  We know the Sadukar are shock troop primarily, fanatically fearless fighters who rely on brute, overwhelming force in mass charges.  We can presume that many, if not all, are equipped with shields, enough to disuade casual laser use against them, and allowing them to get 'stuck in'. The proud tribal Fremen respect the Sadukar as fighting men, even if they despise their cruelty (Hypocritically, I might add...).

We also know that Ten Legions, along with whatever Harkonen brought to the table, was only enough because Atredies troops were trained for Caladan, were disorganized due to the move and the constant sabotage by Harkonen agents (not to mention the advantage Harkonnen had in knowning the ground better), and because Yueh took down the shield generator.  Due to being the Attackers, the Harkonnen/Sadukar forces had the advantage of air support from their transport ships.

WHich means that 300,000 Sadukar were not quiet the Game Changer they looked like. Look at every thing Harkonnen needed to pull this off.

Of course, we do know that Atredies had gotten some support from the nearby Fremen Tribes, and they had the normal defensive advantage (Strategists call for a 3:1 ratio of attackers to defenders to win, so we'll go with that.)

What does this tell us of House Guards?
They are fucking huge masses of men, that's what.  Sabotage, ground game, air support and Yueh together eliminate the Defensive Advantage, meaning that Sadukar and Harkonnen troops (and because this was a COVERT op for the Sadukar, we can presume at least an equal number of Harkonnen forces. Shaddam basically DOUBLED the Harkonnen army for this one fight), which means that House Guard forces tend to number around a quarter million men, and go up from there. Presumably the 30 legions we assigned House Corinno represents a top end, you get more than that and the Emperor has a vested interest in crushing you like a bug.  We can raise that top end by assuming even more Sadukar Legions exist... since we don't actually know.

We DO know that Millions of Fish Speaker/Fremen warriors left Dune under orders of Emperor Leto, which sounds just about right. The Fremen Jihad didn't win because they were better warriors, but because they had the numbers to overwhelm all opposition, even multiple houses combined, and it still took forever to secure final victory (for example: Shaddam was officially deposed in 10193, but wasn't ACTUALLY deposed for another year, when Kaitan was conquered and Shaddam was exiled to Salusa Secundus and reduced to a single Legion (implying possibly that the rest of the Legions had been more or less wiped out on Kaitan... how do you set about disbanding a million man army who are addicted to Spice, and thus require noble patronage???), and the Great Surrender wasn't held for 5 more years (though let's be honest: fuck the story of the ceremony. Swordmaster Bludd? Seriously? WHy not call him Swordmaster Awesomesauce while you're at it?!). We can presume that in the meantime the other Great Houses were jockeying to see how firm a grip the Atredies had on the Throne. This was the first Dynastic Change in Ten Thousand Years (which, honestly, is dumb. Even with long lives and a hydraulic despotism, that much stability is just bullshit...)

So that gives us a Size for House Guards. Any given noble may only command a tiny handful of trusted bodyguards, but the House as a pretty significant Army.

Now we have to consider how they are used.  House Guards may be used primarily in Static Defense, or in Fast Assaults. There is no need for holding open terrain, battles of manuever and all that jazz. Very little of importance comes from holding pieces of land, there are ten motherfucking thousand worlds to exploit... or rather ten thousand star systems, very few of which have any 'unique' economic value. House Guards defend the CHOAM Share holding Nobles who pay them, and wars are launched to take control of those very nobles and their shares, the true wealth of a House... and more rarely to actually KILL every member of a House.  

This seriously shapes the tenor of the military. A large, powerful, slow moving "manuever" army building and garrisoning Fire Bases in hostile, occupied territory is almost unthinkable (which, oddly, means that they are at a loss on how to deal with the Fremen, who ARE concerned with holding lands, and controlling territory!).  What the Fremen value in war isn't of value to the Nobles of the Empire... except for the fact that the land in question is also the source for their entire economy!  Its a singular, unique battlefield... and no house gets to control Dune long enough to figure out that they need to rethink how they fight wars on Dune.

What this means is that most military equipment we think of today... artillery, armor, air support... is used in ways that seem almost radical to us.  Anything that slows down a raiding force is relegated to defensive use only.

Further, we have to look at the role of technology in two specific fashions:

Space Ships

Shields.

Since an army fighting on their own ground will always be the defender, every attacking force arrives in a large number of space ships by default. Clearly one aspect of a successful defense is control over orbital space (Arrakis, being an Imperial Holding, does not allow a House mastery of Orbit... that privilege belongs to Corrino alone... not that the Spacing Guild would allow any real orbital defenses over Dune! They need that Spice, motherfucker!).

So the defenders don't go out in armor (tanks, man... TANKS...) to meet the enemy, nor can they call up any air support of note... since they already LOST that fight before the infantry even arrives.  So they rely on emplaced artillery and powerful shield generators (presumably large enough and complex enough to prevent Holtzmann bullshit from cracking the fucking planet? Seriously: Its a damn goofy conceit that pretty much renders use of shields pointless and suicidal.  Just send one drugged up fanatic assassin with a lasgun and the entire enemy palace becomes one big nuke. Instant win, no need for armies. I'm going to assume 'emplaced' Shield Generators have some sort of circuit breakers so I don't break canon. Happy?).  This means that attackers don't waste time on big, expensive tanks... space ship fire support is more powerful and useful, and once you get inside the enemy fortress/palace its all about fighting in corridors and halls and shit.

Which brings up shields.  We can presume that Shields make an excellent defense against high explosives. A direct hit might annihilate the guy and his shield, but that's just a really expensive way to kill one guy. The real value is large explosive shockwaves and flying debris (shrapnel, in the common misuse of the word), which sheilds are GREAT at stopping. Sure, the guy may get knocked off his feet, but other than that he's fit to fight.  This also reduces the value of machine guns at crowd control. Once again: On a single target a machine gun can overwhelm the shield (presumably... for game balance if nothing else.  Novel sheilds are impenentrable Magic Tech....)... which merely stresses the value of having lots of guys, on both sides.   Armor tends to be under developed because anything too big gets in teh way of the shield (exceptions are possible), and most of the time you only have to stop a slow knife or sword thrust, which is very easy.

Its not the use of shields so much as the nature of fights that leads to the development of House Guards as 'stab you in the face' guys. Where will they likely be fighting? Inside buildings, in hallways and rooms, often against overwhelming numbers (where one guy with a sword can tie up a large force in tight spaces).  This is what makes the Sadukar so famous: They are trained pimarily as OFFENSIVE troops, which isn't itself unique as it is uncommon... and even more uncommon, its something you don't usually brag about.  

So, House Guards maybe broken down into three 'types'.

Offensive Shock Troops (Sadukar)
Defensive Swordmasters (Ginaz and Ecaz, probably others)
and Balanced (Atredies normal house troops, probably Harkonnen as well).

Any given House Guard will probably have a mix of the three. Again, the Sadukar are unusual in that they are exclusively Shock Troops (Corinno may have other House Guards that are NOT Sadukar, but they've made their money with the Sad, so the Sad get the glory jobs...).  This makes the role of Duncan Idaho interesting. He's clearly from another House (Ginaz)... or is from Atredies but was sent to Ginaz to learn Swordsmanship and brought back to Caladan. Combine this with Shaddam's fear of Leto's "New Army" (in the books all we know is they are supposed to be 'equal' to the Sadukar.. the Movie adds weirding modules and shit), and we can determine that perhaps Leto was actually bolstering his DEFENSIVE forces!  In other words, Shaddam IV was simply being paranoid.  Alternatively, Leto was relying on Duncan to bolster/create a small defensive force while, in fact, the bulk of the Atredies (or the 'new' atredies) were being trained as offensive Shock Troops.  Leto wasn't just growing his House Guard, he was changing its tenor.

Mind you, Leto had in fact presided over Ecaz's destruction of Moritani just a decade or two prior... though Ecaz was a 'defensive' sword force. Maybe he saw the value in trained swordsmasters on the offense?

There are two other considerations: First is available transport ships.  Leto may not have had a big fleet available to him, but Ecaz certainly did.  Second, Shock Troops are usually enhanced in some way, due to the demands of running into enemy guns and the high casualty rate. Training is almost secondary (Sadukar are taken from condemned prisoners and their decendents on a hell-hole deathworld... anything is better than life of SS as chumps, we can assume. Similar to how the Ghurkas can take the cream of the crop out of Nepal... ten thousand potential recruits line up for one or two positions... and that's merely economic incentives). Ecaz produces drugs, including one used to condition Slave Gladiators.  You can see why people might assume, with an alliance between Atredies and Ecaz, and Atredies building up a new army, that they were making Shock Troops.

But lets pull back to generic House Guard organization.

I'm tempted to tie this to the previous bit on altering House 'wealth', and say that every point of Military Strength is Ten Legions, but that's.... not good. Numbers would be all wonky, and its too simple given the number of other factors (troopships, quality of training. Harkonnnen soldiers are probably not very good at the low ranks, but are brutally effective at the leadership level, as rising in Harkonnen society is a matter of ambition and ability... failure tends to equal death.) where Atredies troops are better trained overall, but may lack discipline due to the relaxed attitudes of the Nobles. Loyal, yes, but undisciplined.

Lets leave that be and focus on what we do have already and putting it together.

While any given House may organize their troops as they like (and probably do draw on different cultural biases.  The Sadukar use Turkish ranks, and that is likely to be imitated by those 'close' to Corrino, but there may be a House that uses more Japanese style organization, or british regiments... that sounds Caladan like to me...), but lets assume that a Legion is around 20k men, with SHock Troop legions being bigger (30k) and defensive, well trained legions being smaller (12-15k... or less).  They will all be considered roughly equal when used as intended... most Shock Troops will suffer heavy casualities before coming to grips with the enemy, while Defensive troops will be at full strength when they engage.

Most Houses will have at least a few Legions of all three, but will favor one sort more.  Normal Troops handle most of the tasks the house needs, including 'police' duties, generic garrison forces and public ceremonies (marches and parades), while Defensive Legions are a bit more elitist and tend to provide personal guards and handle more diplomatic force needs, as well as serving in a broader spectrum (Duncan's meeting with the Fremen and working as a sort of junior Spymaster...) of duties. Standing out in the Legion is much more important, and they tend to be flashier sorts.  Shock Troops tend to be less publicly displayed unless a show of absolute force is necessary, and their attitudes will be more gruff and cliquish. You don't prove yourself in a Shock Trooper legion, you Survive, and Survival tends to be what gets you noticed.  

That said, quality and personality (Flavor) will vary from house to house. Even the famed Sadukar proved to be a paper tiger when they started promoting too many leaders, leading to a top heavy force.

Many Nobles will spend time in the House Guard, both in a generic sense of getting trained, and in a more specific sense of taking on leadership duties. This includes Shock Troops. We can presume Rabban was 'enhanced' similarly (though with more care for the long term) to the Harkonnen shock troops he would prefer to serve with.  This is more common among minor nobles (without titles), who may spend their entire lives serving their House in the legions, but even titled Nobles, even Heirs to the House, can serve a span with the Guard.  They are more likely to seek the honors of a Swordmaster's Title if they have access to a famed school, but recall that once they've been properly Seated in the Landsraad, its very risky to put yourself in the hands of another Noble House, even an old Ally. A few more shares in CHOAM, and another Seat in the Landsraad is more than worth tossing aside a few centuries of friendship.

Now, a curious thing comes up: The bland and boring Normal Guard troops are actually the best trained as Soldiers. Shock Troops will rarely be trained in any weapon they can't carry, though some will have training with tripod mounted weapons, and Defensive troops will focus entirely on personal combat (swords and pistols). The guys with the dull job of marching in Parades learn to do jobs like man artillery, work sheild generators, even fly Ornithoper troop ships and a host of other military skills. They are the best rounded troops in a House arsenal.  Some may even make a name for themselves as investigators and police forces, so while if a random 'investigator' is choosen from teh Guard, it will probably be a Swordmaster, if anyone earns a rep randomly for solving criminal mysteries and uncovering enemy agents... its probably that boring guy with the boring job in that boring Guard legion who has been dealing with criminals and agents for most of his Guard Career.

How long does a random joe serve? Life. Some Houses may offer a retirement program, but consider the economic fact: You serve a House you get Spice.  Spice means you don't start getting 'Old' until after your century mark.  YOu don't stop needing Spice just because you are too old to do your job. So House Guards don't get a proper retirement unless they earn one through heroic service... and that usually means a promotion and more prestige, not a farm in the country.  Some Houses may simply dispose of Guards that get too old to serve well, others use them in less demanding positions... loyalty is important in Dune, if only because betrayal and plotting is so prevalent.    Still, Spice does mean that you can serve long and well before anyone has to worry about it, and medical care is top notch, so injuries aren't a concern.... if your House cares, and many do.

That said: Most Houses will have a large number of postings that might be viewed as 'retirement' postings. A handful of official presence guards at some remote village or factory, an honor guard for a guy like Abulard Harkonnen (Feyd's father, who renounced his title and took up farming on Lankiveil), and so forth.  Almost any Noble 'retinue' probably includes a handful of men and women too old and tired to really serve, who are rarely called upon except when their particular wisdom is called for, and mostly totter around the palace at odd hours, and swap stories with the servants about the good old days.  They generally don't decamp to places like Arrakis or follow young vigorous nobles on adventures, unless they pissed someone off, and quietly go about dying peacefully out of the way.  On the other hand, in two or three centuries of useful service, they will be exposed to a lot of lethal threats, from assassins to poison to out and out warfare.  How many Nobles in the Dune series do you know of who died in their beds? Even good old Abulard up there was eventually murdered by Glossu Rabban for 'reasons'. (that being Spice...).

Off the top of my head I can't think of a single one. So yeah, despite involving hundreds of thousands of people, undoubtedly there isn't too much concern for retirement among House Guards. You'll live a long and healthy life, get jiggy with ladies due to your sexy uniform and probably wind up dying violently in some noble spat...hopefully after a good hundred or two years.  Not a bad deal, really.  And your father probably did it, as did his father and so forth.


I was going to talk about Loyalty, Traitors and Agents... and further go one about the importance of being noticed, but I've still got a Bene Gesserit Monster Post to do, and I'm out of time for the night. Places to go, People to See, Songs to Sing and Woo to Pitch.

You're on a roll. Keep doin' that thing you're doin'.

Ok, after a brief night of wine women and song, I am at last ready to tackle the Bene Gesserit, for reals.

The Bene Gesserit is, of course, an All Woman order of concubine and wives and witches. That's what everyone really knows.  What is less obvious is that, despite being one of the smallest factions in the Dune Empire, they are, pound for pound, one of the most powerful.  Only the Bene Tlielaxu are smaller (by some measures), and the Power of the Bene Gesserit is roughly equal to the Emperor, the Entire Landsraad, and greater than the Spacing Guild.  

First lets look at the numbers.  The smallest power player in the Dune Empire is the Bene Tlielaxu. Prior to Ghola Awakening (in the Events of Children of Dune) the HUMAN membership of the Tlielaxu was numbered in the Hundreds, while Ghola slaves and Facedancers numbered in the thousands.  The smallest viable Minor House, by comparison, has a half dozen titled and untitled Noble family members, their spouses and concubines, dozens of elite retainers for each, hundreds of servants and two or three legions (tens of thousands) of House Guard, not to mention a small population of civilian/serf vassals occupying their home territory.  Added up, and the smallest Minor House still can reach something on the order of a hundred thousand loyal members of varying ability.

So how does the Bene Gesserit Order stack up?

Well, there are no more than a dozen or two Reverend Mothers (not counting Missionaria Protectivia offshots, like RM Ramalo among the Fremen), maybe a few hundred lesser Sisters of various ranks and duties, and not more than one full Fledged Bene Gesserit per Noble House... so another two thousand.   In terms of women who would call themselves Bene Gesserit openly?  Not more then three or four thousand... with at most another thousand or two MP sisters, many of whom have nothing to do with the Order during their entire lives.

It gets a little better when you add up all the women Trained by the Order, but who are not actual members. This includes virtually every woman of Noble Birth and a fair number of beautiful and talented women of common or even serf origin that the Order has adopted.  All told, perhaps twenty thousand women at any given time.  A pittance at best.  

So what about power?

Lets start in the Landsraad: Offically the Bene Gesserit have no voice, no Seats, despite the Order owning a fair number of CHOAM Shares.  Unofficially there are more than a few women of noble birth who were trained by the BG and would bring matters to vote if it didn't conflict with their House's alliances. More than that, almost Every Single House has a fully trained Bene Gesserit as an advisor or even wife (or Concubine. Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit, full fledged. The Princesses Irulan and Wenescia are merely Trained, as a comparison), who is fully capable of bending the ear of a Noble, even the Head of House. THis is a soft power, however, and rarely used on a wide basis.  Why? First because it is dangerous. The more the BG try to sway the Landsraad, the more the Nobles distrust them.

Secondly: its actually NOT the most powerful tool in their arsenal.  Just for example, it is MUCH easier to sway the Emperor directly than a voting bloc in the Landsraad, and if that backfires, it is simple enough to sacrifice the woman advising the Emperor and claim she acted alone for personal reasons.

Far more powerful is their silent partnership in CHOAM.  While the BG have no official voice in the Landsraad, they have a large number of CHOAM shares... a number that grows slowly as Noble Houses fall, and the BG are often well placed to pick up some of the Shares that are otherwise lost. They may have shares second only to the Emperor, certainly at least as much as any great house.  They also have a permanent Directorship, and unlike the Noble Houses, they are very willing to use it.

Consider: Helen Mohaim uses the threat of a CHOAM audit of Vladimir Harkonnen's Guild Bank account if he won't breed with her. THis works. Why don't Nobles use this against each other? Well... they do, but a LOT more carefully. If Duke Leto simply tries to order an Audit of Harkonnen's holdings it is in his power to do so... but its also in Harkonnen's power to return the favor, and for all his just and honorable nature, the House Atredies has just as much to hide.  The BG, on the other hand, not only have nothing to hide from a financial audit but they also have a much easier time hiding their actions, as their membership is mostly unknown.  The things that the Sisters hide are kept off the books through any number of tricks... not least of which is getting someone else to do the dirty work.

They also have all the nobles by the balls, literally. Noble houses require heirs, and BG trained wives and concubines, which are nigh universal, can control when they get pregnant and what the sex of the child is. While females can and do inherit noble titles, and there is no law preventing women from heading a noble house, there is a strong tradition of passing inheritance through the male line exclusively. Part of this is a lingering suspicion of Bene Gesserit manipulations, and part of it is simply how political marriages tend to work. A female noble cannot marry without taking her titles to her husband's House, and that is a problem.   The Bene Gesserit actually prefer it this way, as they see direct control as putting a big target on their backs, they much prefer being a power behind the throne.

Lastly, there is their training, which we call (But note that this is almost NEVER used in setting) Psychic powers.  They don't advertise what they can do, beyond truth telling and some fortune telling, but everyone suspects, and the nobles suspect even more.  

History:
The origins of the Bene Gesserit lie in the dark years before the Butlerian Jihad, though they didn't adopt their current name or mission until after it was over. Before the advent of Spice, a large number of cults and covens of primarily women had formed throughout the galaxy, each using whatever local nootropic drugs their environment produced to expand their minds and explore 'magic'.  How and why these groups began forming into one large, galaxy wide group is unknown, but the advent of the Spacing Guild and the discovery of Spice, considered still the ultimate Nootropic drug, must have played a serious part.  As House Corrino took the Throne of Empire, and the other Nobles forms the Landsraad to check his power and preserve their own, the Bene Gesserit announced themselves, demonstrating ownership of a large number of shares of CHOAM (which also predates Spice, but it did not rise in prominance until after the Jihad). Many of the early Sisters in that unveiling were members of various noble houses, some may have already possessed titles which they passed to the Sisters when they cloistered themselves, leading to a rough period in the Imperial History.  Already the BG were seeking the Kwisatz Haderach, which was something of a fad in those early days.

Eventually Seeking became Creating, and over the long centuries of the first Millenium, the Bene Gesserit began training women of noble birth in their social arts, opening schools for the wealthy and privileged, later this would become tutoring and cloistering for a time.  The Bene Gesserit often found their youngest Sisters in high demand as brides and concubines, for they were more often than not lovely and gracious, and so a tradition began to take form.  Well before the close of the second millenium the Bene Gesserit were very well ensconced as the masters of the Distaff branch of the Nobility, and not much has changed since.  

From the First Millennium the Bene Gesserit have implemented the practice of sending Missionaries out to the more primative, savage cultures, each with the aim of seeding certain tenants and dogmas into the local faiths (whatever they were) that the Bene Gesserit could manipulate for their own safety, or more, if the need ever arose.  The most famous example of this is the Fremen adopting Lady Jessica and Paul Atredies, and later accepting that Paul was their Mahdi, their Messiah, based on vague prophecies seeded again and again over thousands of years.

Life in the Order:

THe vast majority of Nobles in Dune, of either sex, are born to a Bene Gesserit trained mother. By habit, most women begin training their daughters in BG arts from infancy, and if the mother in question is a full fledged Sister, the training eventually grows more focused and intense. Either way, by around six or seven years of age the girl will be tested by a Reverend Mother, and if found suitable (most are), will be taken for more training to a local Chapterhouse, or cloister. Prior to the conquest of Kaitan in 10194, there are several small chapterhouses, but after this at some point the chapterhouse on Wenescia (named after the Princess) becomes the central chapterhouse, and eventually the BG consolidate down to a single, hidden Chapterhouse.  This may be viewed as a reaction to being removed from the seat of power by the ascension first of Paul Maud'dib, then later Emperor Leto II.  Having lost the ear of the Emperor, coupled with the loss of the CHOAM veto (as Leto II controlled the spice exporting directly, putting the throne firmly on Arrakis), and the loss of their Kwisatz Haderach program (as how can there be two active Hands of God?), the BG were somewhat at a loss.

But that is all 'after' the setting I'm presenting.  As of 9191, the BG have had a few 'close calls', but there were either too uncontrollable or were simply not as psychically gifted as expected, and the Sisters are not confident that they are all that close to success just yet.  They are worried, as ever, about losing access to genetic lines (and many houses would be SHOCKED to learn how many 'extinct' houses remain within the Bene Gesserit order!).

If a woman is of sufficiently Noble birth... or more importantly was born to a wife or concubine rather than a Bene Gesserit sister... normally she is simply returned to her family before she attains majority, usually with full knowledge of whom she is expected to marry already set.  Many of these women will turn, in later years, back to the Order.

Those bred specifically by the order (such as Lady Jessica), remain with the Order and are fully trained in the Bene Geserit way, learning Prana Bindu (though many fail to master it, all are trained), and Psychic gifts. If they can't master the latter they are generally not released from the order and serve as servants in lesser roles, with the sole exception of women who are vitally important to the breeding programs (and there are a lot more than one!), who are merely more highly trained than most 'trained' women... but not 'sisters'.

A woman will normally remain a Sister of the Order until she is fifty or sixty years old, when her Spice preserved looks begin to fade. They will not neglect their training, but being out in the world and focusing on their, frankly sexual, mission means that they often do not progress very far.  Once her looks fade, or her mission ends (or, as Jessica shows, she is forced to progress by circumstance) she becomes a Mother, a title almost never heard outside a Cloister or Chapterhouse.  Age is not enough, a Mother must master at least the basics of Prana Bindu AND be able to transmute poisons in her body.  Many sisters acheive that level of success, of course.  

To be a Reverend Mother is not only to demonstrate mastery (not just proficiency) with Prana Bindu, but also you must perform the Bene Gesserit version of the Water of Life ceremony, which awakens her Genetic Memories.  An Reverend Mother may seek to be acknowledge as Mother Superior, though this means either the old one is dying, or somewhat less commonly she disagrees with the way the current one is leading the Bene Gesserit.   Typically a challenge would require both political support within the Order AND surviving what amounts to a psychic challenge, with the winner gaining the Ancestral Memories of the now dead loser... including the loser's memories!  

Now a note on the Spice Agony/Water of Life ritual.  The official Canon states that ALL Reverend Mothers use the bile of a drowned worm, since this is the ritual we see on Dune. This must be an error, as at no point did the Imperium, including the Bene Gesserit, have any clue of the role Sandworms played in the life cycle of Spice, nor did they have any reliable access to sandworms to produce it. There is also a confusion about the term Water of Life, some use it for the Bile itself, others say is the product of the Spice Agony ritual, the transformation of the toxic bile into a non-toxic drug.  I'm laying this out so there will be no confusion as to why I am 'wandering' a bit off the reservation.

Spice is a byproduct of Sandworm biology, its exact role appears to be a part of their reproductive cycle. The Sandworms 'lay' a fugisoid Pre-Spice Mass underground, which is shockingly moist, where it 'ferments' and eventually explodes to the surface, where the sun dries the fermented spoor into Spice.  Presumably SandTrout (infant sandworm tadpoles) presumably grow from some portion of the mass, and it is known that the sandtrout sequester water out of the desert, which is necessary for the fermentation of the Pre-spice Mass (too wet an environment and it is rendered sterile), and also for the biology of the Sandworms (as the mass requires internal moisture to 'ferment' and blow).  We know, or can presume, that Sandworms and sandtrout are inedible, as the largest animal on Dune, and yet no mention is made by anyone of trying to eat them.  

Well, Sandworms produce the chemical compounds that make Spice what it is, in vast... toxic quantities, and with lots of toxic impurities to boot. Its happenstance that the drying powder after a Spice Blow (which is a vital part of Sandworm reproduction) happens to be dilute enough, and 'pure' enough to be safe for humans to consume... but Sandworms give of some Spice essence naturally in other ways, as Paul notes the first time he rides one. The blow is simply the largest concentration of 'safe' spice you can gather.  Presumably if someone really wanted to, and knew what the Fremen already know, you could render a dead sandworm down to a large mass of presumably safe Spice... but it would be a lot of work, even for something as valuable as Spice.

So Sandworm Bile, produced usually by drowning a small worm, is simply a very, very concentrated dose of Spice, combined with a bunch of toxic chemicals, in a solution of water.  The Fremen refer to this end of the Process as The Water of Life, as they don't save any of the other end, but they got the term, and mis-use it from the Bene Gesserit.

The Bene Gesserit process is to consume a lethal dose of Spice, usually combined with several ancient hallucinogenic alkaloids from their pre-spice days (and Alkaloids are toxic!).

In both cases the extreme agony of the ritual, requiring a powerful amount of self control to muster the psychic energies to transmute ALL of the poison into something safe (which any Mother can do... the 'test' is if they can do it while suffering a massive Overdose of mind expanding drugs, with multiple active toxins in their system).  The converted toxins, rendered safe, are expelled by the body and collected (the Bene Gesserit vomit it up as a liquid, the Fremen Reverend Mothers may, or may not, vomit, but most is taken from their sweat... and is not collected so much as Used in a massive Spice Orgy by the entire Sietch/Tribe), and the Bene Gesserit call this expelled, safe, drug The Water of Life.  As it is a powerful mind-expander, essentially a highly concentrated form of Spice, it is used to unlock the psychic potential of the Sisters.  In the Fremen system, its used to celebrate life and family in a massive orgy, where everyone loves everyone else, man... like they are all connected. Its a powerful spiritual moment. Usually new Sayadinna are chosen during the Ritual (which always sees the elevation of one Sayadina to Reverend Mother) from the women of the Sietch who responded most powerfully to the drug.  It is a very bad thing for a the ritual to fail for the Fremen, as it means the loss of a Sietch's Reverend Mother, and eventually the loss of that Sietch/tribe.

In the passage of a Mother Superior, the Water of Life is used, but not the full Spice Agony. Officially it is a contest of wills, and if the BG were more spiritual, they'd probably say the loser's soul gets eaten, or something.  Since both potential Mother Superiors have already passed the Spice Agony, there is very little risk of losing both women... and in most cases if the contest is TOO close to call, one will 'give up' rather than risk both dying... which is one reason you need the support of the other Reverend Mothers to even try it.

The Mother Superior rarely leaves the Cloister, and is usually entirely unknown outside the Order.  She is busy guiding the many plots of teh Order, and assigning Sisters and Reverend Mothers as necessary. If she DOES appear in public she uses the title Reverend Mother (if she uses any at all!  Reverend Mother Mohaim was unusual in openly using her BG Title, but she served the Emperor directly, where high faluten Titles are rather mandatory.  Given the secrecy of the Bene Gesserit, we can assume many people believed the Reverend Mother Mohaim WAS the bosslady.  

Either way: The Spice Agony, fundamentally, a Spice Overdose, and its a matter of Canon that it turns the eyes of the Reverend Mother to Blue within Blue, which as noted is a Stigma in the Empire, so contact lenses are commonly used, even in Cloister.  

Oddly, despite reaching the pinnacle of their powers, by the standards of the Bene Gesserit, the Reverend Mothers actually spend less time in contemplation and mediation than the boring old 'Mothers'.  A Reverend Mother holds the Directorship of the Bene Gesserit in CHOAM for the Order, another RM manages the Kwisatz Haderach breeding program, another organizes the teaching of new generations, one is always assigned to House Corrino, others may be assigned to other Great Houses. One may liaise with the Spacing Guild.  Often there will be multiple hats being worn, but in the rare cases of a surfeit of Reverend Mothers, the oldest and least 'useful' Reverend Mothers take a number of acolytes into the wilderness on Missionaria Protectivia missions, reinforcing the ancient programs of social control over the savage heathens of the Galaxy.

So we have the basic Ranks of the Bene Gesserit:
Trained/Initites    (3)
Sisters               (5)
Mothers              (7)
Reverend Mothers (9)
Mother Superior    (11)

You have to be at least a Sister to learn Psi, you have to be a Reverend Mother/are automatically Elevated to Reverend Mother in order to master Other Memory, the final power of the Bene Gesserit.  It is not recommended for most games that a player START as a Mother Superior... and probably doesn't qualify, so the (costs) in Assets of Reverend Mother and Mother Superior are notional rather than actual.  In order to progress to Mother a Sister with a Noble Title must give up her Title (which can mean giving her CHOAM shares to the Bene Gesserit), otherwise the asset rank of a Sister or Initiate is ADDED to her rank to determine her actual social status and Spice allotment.  Sayadina may be considered Mothers or Sisters, and will often undergo the Spice Agony much younger than the Bene Gesserit, as the Fremen consider a young a healthy Reverend Mother a very good thing.  There are no Initiates among the Fremen, however unless you consider the very rawest of Sayadina...

Following the FS format for 'classes':

Suggested Traits:
Characteristics: Perception, Wits
Natural Skills: Charm, Impress
Learned Skills: Etiquette, Empathy, Focus, Lore: Religion,
Stoic Body, Stoic Mind
Blessing/Curses: Beautiful (+2 Charm)/Subtle (-2 Extrovert when Explaining Something)
Benefices/Afflictions:Bene Gesserit Rank, Protection, Obligation

I should do a second one for Fremen Reverend Mothers/Sayadina... but since many are actually full fledged BG's, or at least inherited their memories I don't actually care enough to do it.

The Weirding Way, Bene Gesserit Psychic Path
1- Intuit
2- Strengthen
3- Quicken
4- Truthsaying  (Extrovert+observe, Sight, Temporary, 1W)
5- Heart's Command
6- Convert Poison (Calm+Stoic Body, Instant, 1W)
7- Recovering
8- Other Memory
9- Oracle
10- Prescience! (GM determination)

This is not exhaustive, there are other Powers that can be learned, including cloaking oneself, making oneself sexually addictive (quickly developed after exposure to the Honored Matres, but there is nothing that says a Bene Gesserit can't pick it up on their own), Darksight and more. Most of the powers listed above are in the book, or have been adapted from the FS book, so I won't rewrite them.  Note that the Level 10 power is pretty much off limits, and for Bene Gesserit the Other Memory (requires Spice Agony, but is otherwise the Voice from the Past power) and Oracle can only show them the Female side, past or future.  The GM should be pretty lenient regarding Other Memory use.  Note that powers regarding Mind Linking or Bonding are Canon, but are only every part of the either the Fremen version of the Spice Agony, or used to take the Ancestral Memories of another, usually dying, Reverend Mother/Mother Superior (yes, this means taking the memories of a DIFFERENT genetic line, which is WHY the Bene Gesserit get upset about 'lost genetic lines'. They want their Kwisatz Haderach to have access to the entire sum total of human history, more or less.

On the subject of Psychic powers, the Bene Gesserit don't seem to develop any 'external' powers, like Telekinesis.  That isn't to say it is impossible, only that the only example we have is Maud'dib, the Kwisatz Haderach, which scares the hell out of the Bene Gesserit.  On the other hand, almost all the Soma powers (except grow/shrink?) should be available, not just the ones in my list.

Prana Bindu:
This is the Bene Gesserit art of controlling the body with the Mind, so techniques cannot be learned higher than the Stoic Mind skill. Its use as a martial art is largely secondary to its purpose, so it cannot be used with weapons, but it can be used simultaniously with any Soma Psychic powers in the same action.  Emphasis is on speed and precision, but most techniques are available.  Defensive Moves cost one extra XP to learn, kicks cost one less XP.



That was easier than I'd thought... was afraid I'd have to cherry pick all the manuevers like I did for psychic stuff.  For the record powers two three and six would be Soma powers, but you may wish to expand/alter it to All Bene Gesserit Way powers (the above list), though most of them would be... odd... to use while punching someone. Maybe Intuit?

Huh. I seem to have... finished? Well... good. Enjoy, and I'll be back later to slap together the pertinent details of the setting, maybe (if I'm feeling froggy, I'll do 'templates' for other 'classes'). Heck, if someone sweet talks me, maybe I'll clean it all up into a good and proper manual of some sort, though how to do that without tripping up copyright laws? Probably just collect all the various ideas for benefices and shit into one place. Also I'll have to do up some Dune Specific Items (Shigawire guns, still-suits, slowguns and hunter-seekers and more, oh my!), plus the promised Shai Halud write up.

And yes: A Crysknife is JUST A KNIFE.


Oooh... I forgot the Gom Jabbar! Well, I'll have to do something about rules for various rituals, like the Spice Agony, and I've got plenty of work in drugs and poisons, so just put that on the list. You don't need the Rules for the Gom Jabbar to play a Bene Gesserit, so as far as I'm concerned I've delivered!

Also, if you are still reading this (and if so, why? What are you, a glutten for punishment?? These posts are faaken Yuugge!), I have to add Jews to the post on religions, and should probably update/alter the OC portions a little, as I finally got around to reading the Wiki page for it. Sigh. And I did remember the Jews, once I was reminded. Even Frank had his face-palm moments in writing the books, it seems.  Suddenly, Jews Appear!  sigh.

The Galaxy of Dune is not an equalist sort of place, and if you have a problem with that, take it up with Frank Herbert.  That said it is not a remarkably patriarchal or matriarchal society either.  My take on the setting is going to soften it a bit in areas we didn't see, such as CHOAM Agents and so forth, but that's because I don't like screams of outrage, they really harsh my mellow, and its uncharted territory.

Frank Herbert, rather deliberately, set the Bene Gesserit and Bene Tlielaxu at odds with each other, thematically. I think he personally was more of an equalist than the setting he wrote, perhaps even a feminist, as the existance of the Fish Speakers and the cutting observations of traditional military forces in God Emperor of Dune suggests. Maybe he became one in the long gap between Dune and God Emperor of Dune? Certainly by Chapterhouse: Dune the focus is almost entirely on women.

That is neither here nor there, however, when converting the setting to a Game Setting.  Looking purely at Dune as written we can assume there are plenty of women of Noble birth, but no actual Noblewomen, as in titled rulers. Princess Irulan is relatively strong and proactive, but still has to marry Paul to do anything, and Wenescia (sp? Damn!), is the classic powerless but manipulative aristo mother later on.  Of course, among the Fremen the women fight alongside the men, and in Lynch's film we even see a female Feydakeen being inducted. They aren't in the majority until the Fish Speakers.

So the Era of the Setting matters, and if you want to remain true to the Dune books, then Women are wives, concubines and Bene Gesserit, but never rulers.  They have plenty of ability and agency, but no legal path to power. Even the Fremen only seem to follow men, despite being more open to women in traditional male roles (fighters...). We don't see Female Mentats or Swordsmasters... nor do we see (I won't swear to this...) women in the Spacing Guild, I'm pretty sure at one point all the Navigators were male, but as it would have been a minor point it may have gotten changed. I am thinking specifically about how the Bene Gesserit cannot look into Male Space, but the first thing Paul does as Kwisatz Haderach is to kill a Navigator (in the Lynch Film, at least) in, basically, Astral Space... in the Male Space where the Bene Gesserit cannot look, which I think was a comment about opposed gendered psychics, with the non-psychic (so far as we know) Bene Tlielaxu replacing the SG as the Male Pole in that thematic motif.

Ultimately I try to leave any and all gender politics out of Gaming.  If a fast sweaty hairy dude wants to pretend to be Milla Jovovich, well that's his bag to carry, not mine. If a girl-gamer wants to pretend to be Milla Jovovich, well, why not let her?  If she wants to be Gerard Butler, well... again, that's her bag to carry, not mine.

And if the Setting says that women can conquer the Galaxy by force of arms, and then again with pussy power? Well, I didn't write it, nor did I make it popular... I'm just the fan translating it.  Right, wrong or indifferent, the Setting is the Setting.  

For what it is worth, I don't think that Pre-God Emperor Dune actually allows women to do much of anything at any level, except for the Bene Gesserit, though it varies from world to world, clearly.  But since I can't prove it, and I don't particularly think it makes for a Fun Setting, I plan to change it as we move out of the Noble Houses and into CHOAM and the Spacing Guild.  I still intend to keep Navigators as Male Only, for reasons I've explained above (thematic poles, etc), but not because I don't believe women couldn't do it. Then again: Navigators will not be made playable by me, so it hardly matters, now does it?

This is a reminder to myself, as I've already forgotten once.

I'm going to do a post on the Fraufreleches system, specifically the Sumptory Laws portion of it (Things like Sapho, the Suk brand/hair ring, and so forth)
Then I really want to dive into CHOAM and, thus, CHOAM characters. Less rules focused (as the Bene Gesserit), but more their role in the Game.  I left that out of the Bene Gesserit, since we see so much of them in the books/movies that really I'm not sure anyone who wants to play one would NEED ideas from me on how to fit into a group/campaign.
Obviously, if I do CHOAM, I'll need to do the Spacing Guild, but honestly I'm not feeling it for some reason. Its... kinda a gruntwork job.
I've also got the post where I lay out the setting of 9191, since we can't really use the Wiki/books much. That would include a gloss on a number of example houses. Probably a big job, multiple posts... and should be done as a closer, but probably won't be the last.
I've got to so something more on Smugglers, and thus Starships (and along with it a bunch of Campaign Hooks to spur ideas of how to play mixed groups in Dune without sticking to big picture book plot shit)
Also I promised a gearhead post

So... that's a random order of things to expect over the next few days of posting?  These are rougher than I'd like because I'm usually half brainstorming them out in a crude First Draft. Usually I've got the ideas in mind, but until I start putting them out, they aren't fully jelled yet. Sometimes good ideas are getting lost, but mostly I'm finding more than I'm losing, so I think you guys are getting a good deal out of the process... though I admit its badly organized and wordy as fuck.  

I appreciate the comments, but I'm actually eager to hear Ideas.  Praise just makes me turn into Jimmy Stewart, holding my hat and going 'aw shucks'.  Well, I would hold my hat, but apparently I ate it some time ago... whatever. No pressure, guys... no pressure.  ;)

Fraufreluches and Sumptory Law:

As noted earlier the Fraufreluches system was set up to preserve the power of the Nobility, and predates the Empire itself, and was probably coded into the OCB. We know it predates the Empire, because among its notable 'failures' was that it was used by House Harkonnen to preserve their power after they were banished for cowardice after the Battle of Corrin, almost a century before the official founding of the Empire.  In some ways we can suggest that it also preserves the power of House Corrino in a similar fashion from the Great Houses, as there is a strong cultural tradition of not seeking to raise one's status too far, so only someone with great personal motivations and a functioning Out-group mentality could seriously challenge the Status Quo.  

We could go on about Siridar Fiefs, but I'd rather focus on the curious way the Fraufreluches plays out on a more individual level.

We know that only Suk Doctors have the forehead brand and silver hair-ring, and this is a legally protected status display.
We know that the Mentats are identifiable by stained lips from their use of the Juice of Sapho, and that the use of the Sapho is similarly restricted.
No one ever asks if someone is, or is not, a Bene Gesserit, and they are identified by their robes.
The list goes on, but those are the most readily identifiable examples.  

The point is that almost any identifiable, legitimate political group (not the Bene Tlielaxu, not formally the Fremen), with seek official recognition, probably with a vote in the Landsraad, or an Imperial Decree, to have some easily identifiable Uniform recognized by law. Most, probably ALL Noble Houses have their family heraldry and uniforms legally protected, which means if we accept Green for Atredies, means that one issue they was that their legally protected (and more or less compulsory) Green uniforms were not at all suitable for the desert.  Paul, adopting the clothes of the Fremen became very difficult to identify as an Atredies.

With this legal recognition comes legal protection and a form of security in the very stable (and yes, Stagnant) State, which is why it was sought out.  Note that no one cares who Lady Jessica's parents are, her status as a Bene Gesserit trumps questions of birth (though, of course, she is of Noble birth! Note too that in some ways the secrecy about her parentage works against the goals of the Order AND Lady Jessica, as Duke Leto 'cannot' marry her, in order to keep himself ready for a politically advantageous marriage.)

What this means in a Game is that almost anyone of merit is readily identifiable by title, if not name, on sight.  There is a scene in the Sci-Fi Dune miniseries where a young Paul readily identifies all the guests at a fancy dinner (except a disguised Irulan) by their jobs, to include a prominant Spice Smuggler, and thats the sort of thing that should be possible in game.  Perhaps lore or etiquette checks to nail down details, but the GM should generally not 'surprise' PCs by revealing the man they've been talking down to is actually the Duke Himself, unless he is in disguise. Membership in a House and general social class, as well as membership in well known factions, is just... seen.

It also puts a spin on disguises. Its one thing to hide who you are, thats not necessarily uncommon, but pretending to be someone you are not? That's a very specific and, in the eyes of the Nobility, intolerable crime, on par with Treachery.... and not just the Nobles.  We can imagine that the pacifistic Suk Doctors would readily kill anyone, or at least demand the death, of an Imposter Suk... if only to guard their very very valuable reputation, and the wealth that comes with it.

Which leads me to a minor point about legalities of things like Sapho. Given that the primary Law is the Nobles, through their House Guards, with secondaries from both CHOAM and the Spacing Guild in more specific cases, Nobles can be viewed as being almost entirely above concerns like legality.  They are concerned with propriety, with appearances.  Get to vulgar and you risk a censurious vote in the Landsraad, or the Emperor will take your Siridar Fief (homeworld) and give it to your rivals... and without allies in teh Landsraad to back you up, you can't prevent it.

And no noble would lower himself to taking on the uniform of a lesser caste, even if qualified.  Consider the Mentat Trained Noble. Does he, or does he not, use Sapho?  It depends, but he'd never consent to staining his lips, and risk being mistaken for an actual Mentat.  We can also assume people being trained as Mentats are not allowed to stain their lips until they are fully qualified... as the Mentats wouldn't want all the failures walking around declaring their status (though undoubtedly there are a few 'not quite there' Mentats wandering around with stained (purple? Red? Yellow Polkadotted?) lips, having to tell everyone that yes they are a trained mentat, but no, they can't answer your math problems because they are lame.

So its not just the USE of Sapho, but how its used that stains the lips. Its a CHOICE to drink it in such a way that it stains, and the choice is part of Fraufreluches.

Consider also the case of Gurney Halleck, a man who wears the uniform of House Atredies, but also bears on his face a very painful Inkvine stain, which marks him as a slave from Geidi Prime. Clearly the medical technology exists that could remove the stain, but he (probably) chooses not to remove it as a public declaration of who he was, and of his hate of the Harkonnen. Its possible that even Duke Leto lacks the legal power to allow him to remove it, but that is unlikely.   Or Patrick Stewart just makes everything better... whatever.

As noted, at least on some level there is social mobility, but it is entirely through joining larger organizations, be it a House, the Bene Gesserit order or what have you, and its usually for life.  Lady Jessica throws a thousand years of planning out the window for Love, and is still a member of the Bene Gesserit, and is treated as such by the Bene Gesserit. Not happy with her, certainly, but they don't oust her. They probably can't, not in legally, not in Fraufreluches.

Dis'll be a biggun.

The Combine Honnete Ober/Over Advancer Mercantiles is, simply stated, the ONLY interstellar company in Dune.  Almost everything bought or sold, is through CHOAM. Despite this, CHOAM officially produces nothing at all*

History:
CHOAM predates the Butlerian Jihad, like so many elements of the Empire, and like so many it has changed over the long millennia.  Prior to the Jihad, CHOAM was just a shipping company, probably one of several. I should note that CHOAM still IS a Shipping Company, the Spacing Guild merely owns the Ships.  During the Jihad they rose in prominance for their logistical support of the Jihad forces, and by being on the winning side** proved very beneficial. The discovery and rapid expansion of the Spice Trade made CHOAM absolutely central to the new Empire, and in fact a threat to the newly formed Empire under House Corrino.  The solution was simple, the Nobles simply bought CHOAM at firesale prices, bringing the non-noble shareholders (it was a mixed bunch) into the Houses through marriage and adoption.  At the time House Corrino was merely the first among equals, and consolidating their hold as the First Director of CHOAM was part of their power play to become Emperor. Oddly, the economic battles to control CHOAM were actually more important to the creation of Empire than military might, as all the Nobles still had Jihad era Atomic arsenals at their command.  The Landsraad officially became the Board Meetings of CHOAM, and the seperation between politics and finances disappeared.

Organization:

At the very top of CHOAM is the First Director, which is the Padishah Emperor.  This is essentially the Chief Executive, or the Chairman of the Board, and legally belongs to whomever has the most shares in CHOAM. The rise of Maud'dib was only legally accomplished by divesting Shaddam IV of his shares, which passed them to Irulan, who then married Paul, giving him control over CHOAM.  The First Director's primary power, aside from setting the path of CHOAM as a business, is the ability to remove and assign Directorships.  Usually the power of First Director is held in Proxy, meaning the Emperor doesn't actually DO very much, meaning the only real power is, well, Directorships.

Belong the First Director are all the rest of the Directors, or Shareholders. This includes the Bene Gesserit and Spacing Guild as silent partnerships.  Directorships cover areas of economic activity, which primarily consists of Worlds. There are, obviously, many more Directorships than there are Noble Houses to hold them, more in fact than there are Titled Nobles (who, it should be noted, are Share Holders, and thus eligible for a Directorship) to hold them all.  A lot of this winds up being mere formality, a Noble House manages its Homeworld and Siridar Fief in the fashion of a fuedal lord, as they did before CHOAM, rather than as a corporate manager, and Directorships are merely ways of managing the finances of a House.

Notably, while the Emperor can divest a House of its Directorship, and therefore Siridar Fief, he can't remove their Shares in CHOAM, their Seats in the Landsraad or their Noble status. Even an unpopular house won't be without a Directorship for long, as the Landsraad protects its own.  There are exceptions, however. Houses have bought worlds with piles of Spice from time to time. That could be a bribe for a Directorship, but more often they simply purchase the world. Even if someone else has the Directorship, and the Fief, the owner of the world (and thus the first person to profit from exploiting it) can not be removed, so usually its better to assign a Directorship to the owner in the long run.

A great deal of politicking in the Landsraad govern the trading of Directorships.  Atredies traditionally held only the Directorship of Caladan (though they may have had lesser Directorships over non-planetary interest, we can't know), which meant that when they acquired other Directorships they preferred to trade them away for a political, rather than financial advantage, while Harkonnen, at least as of 10191 held two, Geidi Prime and Lankiveil.  Arrakis was a 'special' case, in that no House could be trusted to hold it for long by House Corrino, and the Landsraad wouldn't let House Corrino hold it personally for the same reason.  We can observe how this system works by looking at Dune (the first book/movie) in isolation.  The Emperor assigns the Directorship to Arrakis to Duke Leto, taking it from Harkonnen (who took it from Richese in turn). Leto knows this is a trap for one very good reason: He loses Caladan to Fenring, while Harkonens never lost Geidi Prime. This forces him to move his personal seat of power to Arrakis, making him vulnerable.  After the trap is sprung, the Emperor restores the Directorship back to Harkonen (again, not taking either Geidi Prime or Lankiveil from them), knowing that their management of Arrakis has been traditionally very poor... and therefor no threat to him.

Again, the Directors of CHOAM don't actually do much with their various and sundry powers, and most Nobles probably consider a Directorship to be simply an empty title that nets them some money, being more traditionally fuedal in their outlook.  They are rather busy with their Noble Duties and don't really want to get into the fusty business of managing a company that seems to be running just fine.

Because, it turns out, underneath the Directors are the Administrators.  These are essentially the Civilian Proxies for the Directors. They rose through the ranks by skill and effort, and are fairly wealthy powerful men, but there is always a sword of damocles over their heads. While very few Nobles care who their proxies are, if they DO take notice, its usually to fire someone.  Oddly, this is one of the few places in Dune where it is better to be forgettable, where success and 'fame' comes from being unnoticed.  

It is the Administrators who manage the various directorates on behalf of the Directors. In most cases this is automatic and doesn't actually involve much power. The Nobles are perfectly happy to manage their own worlds in the Feudal fashion, so the Administrator normally just handles the contractual business of buying goods from the surface industries and finding markets to sell them in.  The Administrators biggest role in planetary 'management' is actually ensuring a constant flow of necessary good TO the planet.  CHOAM tries to sell to the highest bidder, like any good company, its the local Administrator that ensures you don't have your food supplies cut off simply because another Administrator thinks he can get a better price elsewhere.

There are some exceptions. Silent Partner Directors don't have worlds or even industries to manage, and they don't usually require, or want, a Proxy. This gives them more power in CHOAM, as a Director outranks an Administrator, though they do have Administrators under them, handling the grunt work of managing entire departments.

Then there is Dune, Arrakis.  With a constant change of Directors and the sheer importance of the world and its industries, the Administrators of Arrakis are a bit different. First, they serve at the pleasure of the Emperor, not the local lord... though more than a few 'uppity' Administrators have simply been killed since they can't be fired.  Second they are much more focused on the actual production of Spice itself, rather than simply making buy orders, and they have no real authority over selling Spice in the galaxy at large. Their job is to ensure the Spice Flows... and that it Flows through CHOAM.  CHOAM, and CHOAM's Arrakis Administrator are literally the only people who oppose Spice Smuggling.  Even the Emperor tries to get more than his share through Smugglers!  

Regarding Spice Harvesting Operations, CHOAM generally owns all the equipment, and provides training for the House personnel who eventually do the job. There are plenty of small independent (but legitimate) outfits working the surface, so long as they sell their Spice to CHOAM they can do business... and this is where the local Lord's management really takes over.  Nobles prefer to have their own people doing the work, despite often lacking much skill or talent for it. Some houses try to crack down on the independents, others ignore them... smart ones work with them. Independent outfits usually lack the infrastructure, the heavy equipment (such as Carryalls), relying on small vehicles and speed to avoid Sandworms, but they are usually 'native' to Arrakis and very good at what they do.  Many Independents double-deal, selling some of what they gather to Smugglers, and some to CHOAM... and the House gets none of either unless they are smart.

Whenever CHOAM acts, such as joining the Landsraad in deposing Shaddam IV in favor of Maud'dib, this is the Administrators, as a group, declaring what CHOAM needs to keep doing business.  In many ways the Administrators of CHOAM, collectively, have the same power as the Landsraad, with the single ultimate Caveat: The Administrators can be removed by the Nobles, so CHOAM rarely acts unless an overwhelming majority agree it is necessary.  Individual Administrators may make stands on specific issues, risking their careers to do so, but that is a personal choice.  Legally, as proxies, teh Administrators are obliged to obey orders from the Director above them.

CHOAM, it should be noted, is the single largest 'body' in all of human history.  Consider that every world has a full staff of CHOAM administrators, every continent or major Region... or both... has a similar staff, every city has a staff, every noble household has a staff of Liaisons, every Heighliner has a staff who do nothing by coordinate the order in which ships load and unload, every major trade route (and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands) has a staff who coordinates the buying and selling of goods from... everwhere.  The capital, Kaitan, undoubtedly has a suitably epic headquarters staffed with millions of accountants, lawyers, sales people and political analysts... possibly numbering in the millions.  CHOAM is both the beaurocratic arm of the Empire, and the local Walmart, and the local Port authority and... and.. and.

Just about the only major economic activity that CHOAM doesn't manage is Banking, that's managed by the Spacing Guild... and yet CHOAM has the power to audit.

This absolute Monopoly only works, however, because the Nobles, at the very top, profit from both ends of a Transaction.  CHOAM can't deflate prices at one end, or inflate them at the other end, without pissing off the Directors.

So that's CHOAM as a Company. What about CHOAM as a 'players', as individuals.

Well, first of CHOAM is an equal opportunity employer. Just about anyone can seek work in CHOAM and find a job, and that is just is CHOAM is a business, and for the most part they exist outside the Fraufreluches restrictions, which ironically ties them to it.  In order to make money, they need the freedom to be a meritocracy, which means they get special dispensation. In some ways CHOAM is a safety valve... and members of CHOAM wind up displaying the same Sumptory Law status symbols as every else, just to show how above it all they really are.  For the most part you won't find any Titled Nobles working their way up the ranks but you will find plenty of non-inheriting, second son, nobles... trading family connections for lucrative jobs. In fact most Administrators are only a few generations, at most, from belonging to a Noble House themselves, though within CHOAM itself its considered gauche to talk about it.  What matters most in CHOAM is not who you are, but what you can get done, and they can be ruthless and bloodthirsty in the pursuit of higher salaries and bigger Spice allowances and expense accounts.

Given the demonstrated ethical system in Dune, we can guess that CHOAM personnel only worry about the law as a matter of appearances, making money for CHOAM is what is important. Sabotaging a rival in CHOAM is totes legit... so long as that Sabotage doesn't cost CHOAM money.

Beyond that, what CHOAM agents look like, and what their internal culture is like is wide open.

So what sort of work IS there?

I've already pointed out that CHOAM agents are much like the Reeve in Fading Suns, a lot of accountants and lawyerly types, guys who do a lot of work with contracts and spread sheets.  But there are plenty of more hand's on jobs as well in the 'port side' jobs. Considering the value of SPice, their single biggest product, we know that CHOAM has to employ rough and dangerous men (Muster, in  Fading Suns) to guard product, to seek out criminal enterprises from organized theives (who may, or may not, be organized by a Noble trying to squeeze a bit more personal profit), to Spice Smugglers. CHOAM will have investigators, spies, agents and trouble shooters. They'll have technical specialists to handle products from Ix and Richese, and internal specialists in medicine and other service oriented jobs just to take care of their own.

CHOAM is Everywhere... and they are Everything.  Just about the only thing you won't find in CHOAM is allegiance to an outside group. Sure, there is at least one Reverend Mother in CHOAM... she's the Director holding the Bene Gesserit 'seat', not some petty agent solving a problem with a Heighliner crew insisting they travel to Ix instead of Caladan on that next trip.  Sure, Tom in Marketing might have personal family ties to House Ecaz through his second cousin, but its not like he's having dinner in the Ecaz palace or attending Landsraad votes. In fact, CHOAM generally would try to keep Tom, from Marketing, out of Ecaz entanglements unless his boss really thought the 'personal touch' would unstick some thorny negotiation... but then most thorny negotations would involve two or more parties, and that sort of personal favoritism would make things worse.

So, adventures in CHOAM:


Well, first this depends on the group and the GM. Obviously an all, or majority CHOAM group would work well as a band of troubleshooting agents, or the personal staff of an up and coming junior executive. In a more mixed party CHOAM agents can be 'hired' by the party to do specific technical tasks (like fly starships around), or may be part of the retinue of the local noble, or they could be more freelance Agents keeping an eye out for trouble... or opportunity.  Most of CHOAM is workaday stiffs, but Adventurers are not the workaday stiff crowd.  

Another possibility is that the CHOAM characters aren't officially doing their jobs. CHOAM characters can take vacations and sabbaticals... may even be on administrative leave for one reason or another. Depending on what teh party is doing, maybe the CHOAM character is diligently doing his job whenever he's not shooting up the local marketplace defending his good personal friend Sir Goodly Ecaz, the third cousin of the brother of the current Duke Ecaz... and CHOAM will happily overlook that simply because of the potential value of this personal friendship later down the line.  Even without that, how many times have we accepted, in movies and television, the happy coincidence of a character who happens to be travelling to the same place as his friends, only for a different reason?  With teh plotting and back room deals of DUNE, this 'happy coincidence' can be as happy and coincidental as you want... or don't want.

A final possibility is that a character was merely trained by CHOAM, usually on behalf of some patron. This sort of thing happens, and CHOAM will happily take money to train someone, or sell the services of someone in CHOAM to anyone rich enough to make it worth their while.  Given the plotting, its possible to find CHOAM personnel working with, or even running, Spice Smugging operations!  Loyalty to the almighty Profit first and foremost, and at every level, which might be refreshingly different in a Dune game.



EDIT:::  One thing to keep in mind is that Spice Havesting never entirely goes All House, not even when assholes like Harkonnen want it to. This is where Leto's style of leadership, valuing people over product, serves him in good stead by helping earn the personal loyalty of the CHOAM spice miners on Arrakis by valuing their lives and skills over short term gains.  Leto inherited the CHOAM portions of the mining operations and used them over trying to force his own men into the duties, and he also made efforts to work with the independent operations and the Smugglers. Of course, what he SHOULD have been doing was preparing for the Trap. Mismanagement of Arrakis might have been embarrassing, but it would have got him out of the trap faster. His professionalism got him killed.





*The one exception is Spice Production, or rather Gathering and Processing, but I'll deal with that specifically.

** Oh yeah, I am TOTALLY trashing the geocidal Omnious machine-mind syncronized worlds shit and sticking with the 'machines were doing everything and a pampered humanity was dying of apathy' that I got from way back in the 1980 when I was reading the books the first time, and hunting down the extended Allan Smithee versions of Lynch's film.  Fuck you if you think OMNIOUS is somehow better than that.

On the extended name Over/Ober... I recall seeing a more germanized Ober in most expansions of teh name, but the Wiki uses Over... I put both in so I wouldn't have to waste hours arguing about it.

This is a Commentary Post, so if you don't care about anything other that Dune, the Game you can skip it.

It must look to a lot of you, and I know it sometimes feels to me, like I'm just making shit up.   That is not at all my intent. What I am doing, or trying to do, is look at a given set of facts... all of the facts (except the really, really stupid parts of KJA's contributions) and filling in the spaces in between. Normally I do this with my own settings as part of world building, so I'm pretty good at it... its a little weird doing it with someone else's work.

For a lot of Dune we have only a few throw away comments to work with, and if your interpretations of those commments differs from mine... well, you are wrong and I am right, so there! Nyah, nyah!!!

No, but seriously: I've spent enough time around fans of various popular works to know just how entrenched certain ideas can become, even when if its actually contradictory to the facts!  I know, for example, that many many fans think the equatorial belt of the Death Star is where the Trench Run takes place, while the evidence shows that the Trench Run is longitudinal, and the Equator is where teh docks are, and consider the number of fans that are violently certain that Rey is Luke Skywalker's kid... despite Daisy Ridley stating flatly that she is not... well, we'll all know for sure in the coming year.

I don't know, can't know, what YOU personally imagine CHOAM to be like. What I know is that Frank Herbert... and for that matter Brian and Kevin, gave us about five or six lines total, in twenty fucking books.

That.... is not a lot to work with.   The Wiki gives maybe a page, and half of that is talking about Shaddam IV and FaceDancers replacing the Administrators... not exactly the sort of details upon which a major piece of the setting can be built.  

When writing any of this, except for rules specific entries, is twofold
One: Not to contradict anything in the Canon
Two: To make/keep it internally coherent

So far I haven't had to deconflict those two rules, but I HAVE had to do a monstrous amount of work in building the internal coherency where none existed.  I've got a stained glass window with half a dozen pieces, and I've got to make the rest so that the final picture matches what people expect to see.  Its actually kinda fun, and so far you all seem to like it. Maybe I lean to heavily on David Lynch's movie... but that's what really got me interested in Dune in the first place, I didn't read the actual book until 1992, by which point I had seen both cuts of the film dozens of times.  And honestly? Lynch was doing a lot of what I'm doing, only visually instead of structurally.  Sure, he could as Frank questions, as I can't... but Frank didn't exactly fill his books with visual imagary, except for the desert vistas, so Lynch had to make up the visual language himself... and yeah, he took a lot of liberties, as you can see when you compare it with the somewhat more faithful adaption from Sci-fi. They rejected the film from the start, and their visual language is so very different its hard to remember they are both based in the same book.  Stupid questions like Bene Gesserit hair, or how the weirding way works get wildly different treatments, and who was right?

Visually I favor Lynch, but that leads me to risk accidentally contradicting the books in small ways.  And if I have to be honest, not everything Frank wrote, particularly in the later books, was all that good. I could dedicate an entire post to how bizarre the eleventh hour addition of the Jews of Gammu were to Chapterhouse: Dune,  or the constant reliance on Duncan Idaho as a plot device, or the weirdly out of place philosophical musings of Leto II (and the mysterious disappearance of Ghanima) were in God Emperor. The themes and messages of Dune got muddled along the way.   But as I noted in my last commentary post, I'm not here to judge what fits and what doesn't. I'll try to keep my opinions out of it, but I can't pretend they don't exist, or that I won't make mistakes because of them.  I'm no Kwisatz Haderach, after all.

Anyway, that's it for this commentary. Hopefully you guys can see where I'm coming from and understand what I'm trying to do, especially if I've done something that offends your take on the lore.

Somewhere along the line I'm going to talk about the role of Human Perfection, and how that interacts with Fading Suns prejudices against cybernetics, genetic engineering and so forth.  This is one place where Fading Suns and Dune are at complete odds, and I think we need to talk about it. Also, I like words.

Atomics:

I've been trying to avoid talking too much about them, and as a result I think I've been talking TOO much about them, so to correct that I've got to give them even more words in a post of their very own. Sigh.

Mind you, this is actually a very big deal in the setting.  In the original five books, atomics are set off in four of them, and they are central to the continued power of the Noble Houses... or are they?

On the one hand, the military might is entirely in the hands of the Nobles. Sure, Bene Gesserit can kick ass, but they are more like ninja nuns than soldiers, adn sure CHOAM has plenty of armed men, but they don't have a standing, organized army.  And Atomics are pretty much Military Tech in its ultimate expression.

Back in teh days of Jihad Atomics were used pretty freely. YOu could wipe out space fleets, crack fortresses, even destroy worlds... so about a hundred years after the Battle of Corrino, the Great Convention was signed, which more or less fixed the form of the Empire and strictly limited the use and proliferation of Atomics.   There was never a formal statement that Atomics=Nobility, because pretty much only the people with armies (The Nobles) had them, and people without them didn't have armies either. Any Nobles without sufficient military might were destroyed or absorbed along the way, and while the great Causus Belli (Sp? Damn, and I studied latin too...) of the Jihad was probably finished before the Battle of Corrino, it was the signing of the Great Convention that formally ended the Jihad (in that a Jihad is like a Crusade... its not so much a war as a long series of related wars. Easier to pick a start than an end...)

Now, its pretty easy to believe that every Noble House has a cave somewhere with 10,000 year old nukes lying around, and only the Head of the House... and maybe his Heir, know where they are, but that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny at all.  Any house THAT paranoid lost their Atomics long ago. Single points of failure, lack of maintance and more... like some rival House finding that one, unguarded cave.

No, Atomic Arsenals are big complex things. A single bomb, not even a planet cracker, will not get teh attention of the Noble Houses. Oh, they'll happily take it away from you, but they aren't shivvering in their beds at the thought of a single bomb.  Nobles have vast arsenals... growing, dynamic arsenals in fact.  CHOAM probably makes Atomics... yet CHOAM is not a Noble House.

In a sense, if you are openly acknowledged to have Atomics, then you are a Noble and have Atomics... even if you don't have any. And if you aren't formally acknoweldged to have Atomics, you aren't a noble and you Don't Have Atomics.... even if you do.

This is relevant, as the Bene Tlielaxu clearly have Atomics, yet no one acknowledges that they do, and they are clearly not Nobles. (It is a Tlielaxu Stone Burner fired off in Children Of Dune, blinding Paul.)

So, when I say that the Bene Gesserit don't have Atomics... I'm saying we don't actually know. They don't claim to have them, they don't pretend to have them... they never use them.  But they COULD have them. Of course, it would be suicide to use them (disregarding the Honored Matres war against the Bene Gesserit, when the Nobles were shells of who they used to be), since... like Ninjas, teh Bene Gesserit's primary defense is in Not Being Attacked.  Once you assault the Ninja Fortress with an army, the Ninja clan is doomed... even if they 'win'.

Each House will guard their Atomic arsenal in different ways, and very few people will be trusted with every element, but no one person holds any given secret. The Warmaster (often a Mentat. Thufir holds this hat, I believe, along with Master of Assassins) will know the bulk of it, the titled nobles will all know pieces. There will be guards and technicians, nameless nobodies will have keys to the arsenal simply to do their nameless nobody jobs!

Many arsenals will be scattered so that no single cache lost ruins the house.  Undoubtedly many Noble Houses trust at least part of their arsenal to CHOAM, letting the Corporation handle the hard work of storing and maintaining the powerful weapons for them. But only a fool puts all his weapons in the hands of another.  For all we know, somewhere a Duke uses a Stoneburner as his very throne, reminding everyone who visits him in Audience of the power he possesses.  More important than mere physical possession is the means to make more. Perhaps this is why the Bene Tlielaxu and the Bene Gesserit aren't Noble Houses? Maybe the Tlielaxu have Atomics, and try to steal more, but can't make them? Or maybe they can and chose to play a different game. Certainly they didn't sign the Great Convention, though they are still bound by it in many ways.  

Its entirely possible, likely even, that there are Houses, Great or Minor, that have long ago lost their Atomics. Maybe they lost their arsenals to enemy action (or never had very many to begin with), maybe they kept their arsenals, but lost the ability to make more... and don't dare pressure CHOAM for replacements, lest the secret slip out.  Maybe its not nearly as secret as they let on, and trading that secret is a major political tool in the Landsraad?  A Noble with a secret could be a member of just such a House.

Ultimately this lies beyond Rules. An Atomic is a Plot Device, with Plot Powers. If a player has a reasonable chance at owning a nuke (either as Head of House, or because teh GM foolishly put one on the table...) then he can use it as the GM allows.  Remember: Stone Burners can crack planets if configured correctly, and Paul melts a fucking mountain range.  Dune Atomics aren't limited to fucking up mid sized cities.  

The repercussions for misuse are for the GM to use, chuckling evilly and rubbing his hands.   Remember the most important (and only known) provision of teh Great Convention: Thou shalt not use Atomics against Human Targets.

If the Bene Gesserit are business masquerading as a spirital order, the Spacing Guild is a Spiritual Order masquerading as a Business.

It is a common misconception that the Spacing Guild holds a monopoly on Faster than Light spaceships.

Far from it: They have a monopoly on PILOTS.  They ONLY have this monopoly because of the Butlerian Jihad... far more than even they owe it to Spice based Prescience.

Let me explain.

There are actually two forms of Faster than Light travel in Dune.  The first developed was 'conventional' faster than light, or 'outrunning photons' as it is described in the Wiki. This was the norm for a very long time, and was probably the dominant form used for most of the Zensunni Migration, and may still be in use in marginal way (the Bene Tlielaxu may use it, for example, with the Masters and Axotol tanks suffling around the galaxy, disappearing for years at a time between stars while their plots play out on the planets below them).  Don't let the name fool you, this is SLOW.  The Average distance between stars is a little over three light years, so at, say, 5 times lightspeed it would still take 8 months on average, and we don't even know if they ever reached that sort of speed. We just know it was slow.

Folding Space, which is the one we all think about when we think Dune, came much later, not much before the Jihad kicked off.  The problem was, it is highly risky. With human pilots the failure rate was 90%. Only Thinking Machines could manage Fold Ships safely. The Spacing Guild holds that Navigators are even better, but statistically that doesn't really add up (we are talking a difference between 99% and 100%... or well within the margin of error. There is NEVER a Navigator Fold Ship error? Not once? Not even when The Kwisatz Haderach kills a navigator with his mind?).

Enter the Butlerian Jihad, and the idea that Man should not rely on machines.  Houston, we have a problem. Enter the Navigators, and suddenly the last hold out to Jihad, those necessary Fold navigator computers, can be eliminated. And the Spacing Guild suddenly has a monopoly.

The thing is, no one set out to become a Navigator. No one tried spice and thought 'Hey, if I get really, stupidly insane with my abuse of this stuff I'll be able to See Stars with my MIND!'.  The Fremen LIVE on Spice Planet and never developed Navigators! They never got close, and they breath Spice with every breath, eat and drink it with every meal, they sleep in beds made of Spice (and no, I"m not exaggerating). And yet, they never turned into Fish Men of the Stars!

Think about that.

Since I don't want to directly contradict even really really BAD canon, I won't go into the Jihad era origins of Navigators, which means I'll have to tread carefully.

More or less the situation is this: Every day trillions of people take Spice, not just because of the long term benefits, but because they enjoy it. Some of those people like it a lot more than others. Some people just can't get enough.  Among the Fremen, where 'taking a dose' is pretty much unheard of due to the constant exposure, these sorts never got off the ground, but in the broader galaxy, where this super awesome new drug was just coming to market... one that was nearly impossible* to overdose on?  Oh yeah, you better beleive some people began experimenting wildly with just how much they could take.

And what, exactly, did they find? Well they started having Visions. Precognitive visions at that.  The more they took, the more heavy their regular consumption, the stronger and more reliable the visions were.  At some point, while still finding the value of Spice as a commodity, someone figured out that some dude tripping balls on Spice could navigate a space fold without a computer, and this while the Butlerian Jihad was going on, or winding down.  All of a sudden there was a REASON to suck down as much spice as you could get your hands on. Then the mutations started... but that was ok, because they were accompanied by even better visions.

Navigators aren't trying to learn to Fold Ships, they Fold Ships to pursue their religious drug ecstacy.   Its the Timothy Leary School of LSD writ on the Epic scale of Dune... and I don't doubt that some of that is deliberate.

Note that the Navigators are the only major faction that is not only NOT following the Cult of the Kwisatz Haderach, but are actively trying to prevent it!  They may even see becoming a Navigator as becoming a personal KH themselves, and why share that with people who don't see Spice use the way that they do, as a means of communing with the godhead?

And sure as shit if they aren't right.  Keep in mind that they have very very good prescience, they know for a fact that the KH will cut off their Spice Supplies, both in the long and short terms. Why would they allow that? How COULD they allow it, even if they could see the Golden Path?  A Navigator without Spice isn't racing to find a supply before it kills him... he's just dead. He can't cut back, he can't tighten his belt... he's just dead.

And their more human followers? The ones not yet Fishmen of the Stars? They aren't that far behind. They are, every one of them, already massive addicts, in teh Blue-in-blue state.

We are talking about a group that could very well have members who would willingly be eaten by Sandworms if they thought that it would bring them closer to the Spice.

And why would the Navigators allow even their lowly servants to consume such massive doses of Spice daily if it weren't a religon? They can't deny anyone Spice because its their Faith. Otherwise, why not embargo Spice Shipments, and keep it all for themselves?

So, lets take it from there. That's the secret truth behind the Spacing Guild, but its not terribly useful by itself.

Lets talk Heighliners: It is not at all necessary for a Fold Ship to be the size of a small moon. The problem is that there just aren't enough Navigators to go around... and no one really wants to grow the number of Navigators (on account of them hoovering up enough spice to feed a legion) too high... except the Guild itself... so the solution is to ship massive amounts of things in one go, rather than using more smaller ships.  CHOAM builds the Heighliners for the Spacing Guild, and handles most of the messy business of loading and planning, the Guild reaps a profit that they mostly spend on MOAR SPICE.   The 'crew' area of a Heighliner is pretty much off limits to non-guild personnel, secret squirrel stuff, and most people... even NObles like Duke Leto and Paul... have no idea what a Navigator looks like.  Even the Emperor is shocked at the personal visit of a Navigator to his court.

Lets talk Guild Banking:  this is almost an accident.  There is no Faster than Light communication, just Heighliner Courier services, and it takes days to prep for a jump due to the size of the ships.  There is one exception, and that is the Navigators themselves.  In other words, the Guild controls both forms of communication between planets.  Only the Guild can pay out an account on one world (Arrakis, say), and debit the actual vault on, oh, Caladan with any reliability.  No one NEEDS to bank with the Guild, but if you do any travelling at all, the Guild is the only way to get your money... or official Spice Stockpiles**... without carrying it with you.  The Guild probably only relucantly got involved with Banking until the began to see the Profit in it (MOAR SPICE!!!), and may have originally got started taking possession of Collateral for various services, which eventually lead to actual banking.  Combine that with their close association with CHOAM, and you begin to see how all the pieces of Banking, and expertise in business could grow.  The Guild Bank undoubtedly does loans to the Nobles and even to local (planetary scale) businesses and has collected quite a few assets over the years. The one place that they have no real power at all is Arrakis... and really, would YOU trust a bunch of junkies with Drug Central?

So that's the overview, lets talk some details, shall we?

Structure:
At the very top are the Navigators themselves, rated by how many stages of enlightenment (Mutation) they've gone through, up to Three***. Navigators have extraordinarily long lives, but are not Immortal, and often the causes of death are quite mysterious.  While an exact number of Navigators is unknown, we can suppose they number in the very low hundreds, counting all three stages. A first Stage Navigator is probably not driving Heighliners around, but is serving as an assistant to second and third stage Navigators to learn the ropes.  The Third Stage Navigators largely commmune with one another telepathically, and make decisions about the Spacing Guild, as a whole, by democratic consensus.  Once a decision has been made the dissenters go along with it.   Second Stage Navigators may or may not be able to Commune, but are probably the bulk of the Ship Drivers, while First Stage Navigators communicate the will of the higher orders down to the rest of the Guild.  Most discussions are not about politics or business, but are about their prescient visions and what to do about them, discussions that will often have a religious, or at least spiritual, nature.  The Navigators are more Gurus than priests, guides on the spiritual journey than authorities.  Chances are when the question of banking came up the answer was likely 'sure, whatever'.

Underneath the Navigators lies two separate branches of still human followers, the Spiritual branch and the Administrative branch, which is itself divided between ship duties and banking duties.  Every member of the Guild will have a foot in both branches, and often gains in one area will result in slippage in another. The more 'spiritual' members wind up with a lot of temporal authority by directly communing with the navigators, but this often corresponds to not really knowing HOW the Guild actually runs, while those who find flying a starship or managing a bank interesting often neglect their spiritual side, though they still get high on Spice as much as possible.

**** The Spacing Guild is open to any man who wishes to join. The Guild itself doesn't have much of an opinion regarding women, its just that while they can undergo mutation, they don't develop a Navigator's particular form of Prescience or telepathy, making it sort of a waste of Spice. There are women as lay members, families and the like, as the Guild is quite insular and prefers to recruit 'in house' so to speak, but they don't serve any particular role in the duties of the Guild. There is an animosity between Navigators and Bene Gesserit, but its not gender so much as religious. The Bene Gesserit are on a different path, and are pursuing a very dangerous goal, that makes them 'bad'.  Most members grow up in the Guild, but Nobles, even Titled Nobles have joined...giving up their titles and duties to pursue God through Spice.  

New members are carefully watched and kept on a minimal Spice diet while they learn the duties of the Guild. The Guild is very protective about their Spice, and if you aren't buying their spirituality, you just like Spice, then you probably won't make it in the Guild. Depending on who you were before you joined, they may just space you, otherwise its probably a drudge job in a dank basement. Of course, some start out just liking the Spice and convert to true believers later, so there is plenty of slack.  There is competition to join, and while the Guild would love to take everyone, they simply can't afford it, so they can be pretty picky, taking on only people that have the right combination of attitude and aptitude.

Full membership comes with formal recognition and a quiet, but intense ceremony where the Initiate is given a massive dose of very pure Spice. Whenever possible this is overseen by a full Navigator, failing that a senior member who will also take a massive dose of Spice (which by this point won't be seen as Massive by the senior member!!!). During this ritual the Initiate (or Initiates... as preferred) will experience his first precognitive visions, and will literally touch minds with those undergoing the ritual with him, not unlike a Spice Orgy, only with less sexytime.  This is why the ritual is overseen by Navigators when possible, to guide the Initiates through their first holy ecstasy.  These sorts of group rituals are very common for the rest of the Guild member's career, but there isn't a formal schedule of them. Normally when a ship will Fold Space, every Guilder on board who can be spared joins in a ritual, trying to see if they can witness the navigator's work.  ONly rarely do they get a mere glimpse, though as they get closer (Psi raises higher), those will come more often.

Not surprisingly the members of the Guild tend to be very close knit, and tight lipped. Mutations are quite common, including the loss of normal speech (yes, Lynch stealing), and Guilders are among the few people in the galaxy that tend to look more unhealthy than slaves.  

[Rule time: Spacing Guild Administrative Rank/Membership is handled just as for the CHOAM and other organizations. Spiritual Rank is measured solely by Psi rating (not powers, though that helps).]

As a general rule, the Spacing Guild tends to assign the least spiritual, least mutated members to duties involving other people, namely Banking and other planetside duties (diplomacy).  The more spiritual/mutated members prefer to stay aboard ships and often fight for ship-side duties to be closer to the Navigators, who prefer to stay out of Gravity Wells.  The most desired duties for the faithful (if least fulfilling for the more ambitious/worldly) is, of course, serving as assistants and adjuncts to a Navigator, the higher stage/older Navigators the better.   Cybernetics to offset the debilitating effects of mutation are surprisingly common, though during the change to First Stage Navigator, most will be shed by the process.  Given the lack of aesthetic concern, not only are cybernetics common, no effort at al is made to conceal their nature.  Crude but functional mechanical limbs, external lung-boxes with hoses feeding air punched through flesh and more are found among the faithful.

[ no rule. Players are encouraged to take curses based on appearance, or cybernetics to cover mutation, the higher their Psi, the more common, but that's up to the player]

Spacing Guild in Play:
Much like the Bene Gesserit and CHOAM, the Spacing Guild needs people out doing stuff, wether its trying to manipulate a Noble House by supplying advice, or cutting deals with Smugglers for MOAR SPICE, the Guild is busy.  With less concern for business than CHOAM, and guided by often cryptic precognitive visions, the Guild may be even more active than CHOAM, if less omnipresent.  Spacing Guild members fly ships, do maintenance on ships, run banks, cut deals with Smugglers, and... though often outsourced to 'lay members'... guard Spice stores and ships.  They make personal deals with nobles as well as grander deals with Houses.  With less emphasis on business, it is quite possible for a trusted, ranking member of the Guild to leave official duties behind and pursue personal goals, even pursuing his spiritual growth through exploring where his Spice Visions take him.

Characters:
If you want to be a Dude and have Psychic powers (but not risk triggering a holy war as a Kwisatz Haderach!), playing a member of the Spacing Guild is right up your alley.  I've given all sorts of detail already on them, and I've already shown ya how its done with the Bene Gesserit, so I'm not going to lay out a proper psychic path here.  The SG have more 'external' focus to their powers. They can't tell if you are lying, can't use 'The Voice', but they can sure as shit slap a mental beating on a Bene Gesserit when called up to do it. They do a  lot of mind-to-mind and spiritual bonding stuff, and thats all Core in Fading Suns.

One thing they don't do is 'Other Memory'. They have a better, clearer picture of the future than the Bene Gesserit, and don't spend a lot of time looking at the past or worrying about things like Genetics or even physical perfection. No Soma powers for the SG.  However, the Spacing Guild, even the Navigators (who blow our Psi 10 right out of the water) do have blind spots. The Bene Gesserit have a sort of vague view of the whole of the future, while the Spacing Guild gets very clear pictures... but only of their own immediate future. They don't see options, so once they change their path they have to 'look again' to see if they did it right.  One metaphysical fact in Dune is that Precognition doesn't see other precognitives, the mere presence of a powerful psychic shields all around him from other psychics, including Paul Atredies, the Kwisatz Haderach.  In theory the point of breeding Siona and Duncan Idaho was to create a race of low level precognitives that were, by their nature, invisible to prescient manipulation and control, the 'Golden Path' was as much a trap as it was a solution, and as far as Dune is concerned, it worked.

This is one reason the Navigators spend so much time communing mentally, as their shared vision is not just more powerful and wider ranging, but also gets less static from 'stray' Navigator precognition. This personal and immediate 'blindspot' however, leads the Navigators to screw up badly in the matter of Paul Atredies, the second one cost the life of Navigator Edric, which was probably a surprise...


If you want a player to 'own' a ship, the Spacing Guild clearly does maintain a fleet of smaller, non-fold ships, and will be very experienced Spacers, so that is an option. While the ship would actually belong to the Guild, the player character would have fairly free use of it, and it does solve the problems of how to pay for Heighliner travel.  Out of the busom of teh Guild, however, a Guilder will have to make do with survival level rations of Spice, according to their spiritual rank, which may make them cranky.  Any Guild psychic will have the Blue-in-Blue eyes from frequent 'overdosing', only an Initiate will have naturally colored eyes. Obviously artificial eyes are a solution.





* Yes, the Spice Agony ritual is an Overdose, but it requires deliberate and elaborate preparations to actually do it. I doubt anyone cuts their spice with battery acid just to see if they can provoke an OD.

** Yes, most stock piles are secrets, and most are gained by illegal means and can't stand a proper audit. But smaller stocks, and legal stocks are possible or it wouldn't be possible to buy planets with it, would it?  So if you're sitting on a few thousand doses that you can claim are completely legit, why NOT store them with the Guild bank rather than stuff them under a mattress somewhere?  It makes it a LOT easier on you if you don't need to travel for a week or two to get your emergency stash when you find out your rival has put poison in your regular doses.  Or, for that matter, buying a planet. Just transfer the account, that way no one accuses you of 'cutting' your Spice. The Guild guarantees it when they take the deposit.

*** THis is a Lynch creation, but Frank Herbert used it himself in the later books, so it is pretty much canon.

**** keeping in mind my older post on gender roles and the thematic use of polarity, this is entirely optional if it doesn't meet your standards of Dune! If you say "Norma Cenva" to me, I will stab you in the face.

One interesting Note regarding the Cult of the Kwisatz Haderach is that the Bene Gesserit, despite their oraclular powers, have gotten deeply cynical about 'superstition', including religion.  So, despite they themselves have many prophetic visions in their history about the Kwisatz Haderach, and the Krazilec(armaggedon), they actually don't believe it, so they blindly pursue creating the KH with 'science!', thinking its a good idea. The Navigators may not have any clearer prophecies or visions in this regard, but the DO believe... and that is what makes them scared.

Bene Tlielaxu:

This should be a short one, just to keep everyone up to speed.

What we know about the Bene Tleilaxu is that they are Buddislamics, who seem to have syncretized the schismatic break between zensunni and zenshite (don't blame me for Zen being linked to everyone), way way way back before the Butlerian Jihad.   They have no worlds, maintain no obvious central power base, don't really participate in the galactic politics of the day, be in Jihad or the posturings of the Great Houses. They are immoral and unlikeable but get by selling goods and services no one else can provide... or maybe 'will' provide. They are slavers (and I have to do a post on Slavery...), and masters of Genetics.

If the Spacing Guild has no role for women, the Bene Tlielaxu abhor them.  

The best known, to US, the readers, of BT genetics is the shape changing Face Dancers, who are treated as slaves, but have such an important role to play as teh Face of the BT, are often very powerful individually, autonomous Slaves, but we can presume that the Facedancers are but one of many, many creations of the BT.

I've postulated that the BT's spend their lives in space, as Nomads of a sort, which makes sense if they are unreformed Buddislamics (Zensunni migration and all that).  Their cultural isolation and seperation more or less demands that the body of the BT organization be physically isolated from the greater Empire, or else there would be cultural contamination. That makes further sense when we see that the Masters see all outsiders as unclean.  However, I was wrong, they apparently do have a planet, Tlielax, orbiting Thalim.  

The Masters, of course, are the humans running the show, specifically the 9 Mashiekhs. Once the Gholas are awakened the sitting Mashiekhs, who are a combination spiritual and political leader, use the practice of awakening Gholas to remain as immortal rulers.  The rest of the Ruling class are Masters, and we have no good idea how many there are, or should be... but again, once Ghola Awakening is practiced, some lesser caste slaves (Face Dancers in particular) are elevated to Master after several lifetimes of service, despite being subhuman.

For the most part Masters refuse to interact with anyone Unclean (all outsiders) at least as of Dune, and we can surmise that all of Tlielax is as closed to non-BT as Saudi Arabia is closed to non-muslims.... mostly, with some areas (Bandalong (city) being most notable) being entirely 'clean'.  The BT prefer to come to you to do business rather than the other way 'round.  That's not to say Masters can't be found out and about in the galaxy, but they are rare and overseeing very big complex missions.  The Dwarf, Bijaz oversees the Paul Atredies/Duncan Ghola affair by means of the facedancer Scytal.

As noted, from what we can tell ALL BT women are Aoxotl Tanks, which would be a good reason to keep outsiders from visiting.  Masters don't do manual labor, they grow slaves for that. What we don't really know is about the teeming masses, but we can guess that if something needs a personal touch but not a Master, a less 'pure' ordinary BT does the job, and there are plenty of examples scattered about, including diplomats and liaisons and what have you.  Given their attitudes towards the outside galaxy, we can suppose one reason for trying to create a Spice substituite is resentment at having to sell their wares to outsiders in order to afford Spice.

Tlielaxu is, from what we can tell, a very peaceful and probably attractive, bucolic planet to live on.  No women and a persistant pressure to pray constantly, but peaceful and pleasant.

The Tlielaxu people are, by galactic standards, short and ugly and most of their products are unappealing even when otherwise useful.  Part of this is that the Tlielaxu have no part in the Orange Catholic faith and its constant demand to improve humanity. The BTs aren't trying to make humanity, not even themselves, better.  They couldn't care less, so they are missing ten thousand and more years of eager eugenic improvements, tweaking and even study. Sure, they'll train twisted mentats, just to prove they can, and sell them to the unscrupulous... but they see no reason to do it to THEMSELVES. That would be unclean!

Mind you, this isn't just a minor disregard for the Orange Catholic teachings, but a deliberate rejection and snubbing on principle. The OCB says not to make thinking machines? The BT make thinking machines in secret just because.  No, they really do make computers and robots, and they'll happily sell them to Outsiders who are willing to commit the worst mortal sins in the galaxy.  That is why nobody likes the Bene Tlielaxu. They are assholes, elitists and more: They rub your noses in it, even as you pay them for stuff.

They aren't completely out of the mainstream, they do seem interested in creating their own KH, and they always avoid drawing just a bit too much attention to themselves, so no one tries to conquer or destroy them... which honestly doesn't make sense (see: Nomadic works here, planet? Not so much.) They use spice like everyone else, though unlike everyone else they seem to resent the need. They manage to remain just slightly more useful than they are obnoxious, and so they keep on going.

I wouldn't be surprised if they have a number of smaller Foldships with Pre-Jihad style computer interfaces installed, allowing them to move around in secret, spreading Facedancers and Stoneburners (well, that one time, anyway), without anyone being the wiser. Probably one of their single greatest secrets, in fact.  

What are the long term plans of the Bene Tlielaxu? The usual: Total conversion of the galaxy to their brand of Buddislam, with absolute rule of the Mashiekhs.  Clearly they lack the military force to do this, and they hate the unclean outsiders too much to convert people the usual way, so they spread degeneracy and disorder, hoping to win the Krazilec, by God's will (and they are explicitely monotheists, so that's appropriate to say here).

Its not a brilliant plan, but don't tell them that. Ironically, they are almost accidentally heroic.  The stagnant Empire is strangling humanity to death slowly, but will never end as long as the Monopoly on Spice remains.  The constant efforts to shatter the Empire may be done selfishly (to create it under their rule), but is vital to breaking the Spice Monopoly and saving humanity.

A recurring theme in Dune, linked explicitly to the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible, is the idea that Man needs to improve, to be improved. No one seems to be certain (until Leto II) how exactly this should be done, and there are a lot of paths being explored.  

This puts Dune at odds in the first very real way with Fading Suns, in which the Purity of Man is assumed, that the current state/shape of Man is divine, and any changes are suspect and heretical. In this sense the settings, but not the rules, are at exact odds with one another... and curious the fact that Second Edition (which I'm using) did away with the Human/Alien split actually works in our favor.   Amusingly, Fading Suns seems to include rules for things like Cybernetics and genetic engineering to allow this concept of Heresy to carry weight, while for Dune those same rules can be, should be, used to reinforce the idea that people are trying to find a path of Human Perfection.  This is explicitly the impetus... more even than the BJ... behind the formation of the Mentat School and the development of Prana Bindu... even as it was also part of the cause of the Jihad that made Mentats (at least) an absolute necessity.

A part of this is that people love to test themselves and their limits. Feyd-Ruatha fights drug crazed gladiators in the arena for the fun of it. Sure: He cheats, but that's not the point. He does it, and is admired for it. Paul is tested, his Self Control is tested to prove his Humanity, and that is NORMAL.  Think about it: a Duke's HEIR is subjected to a test that could KILL him without a second thought, and without asking permission as if it were expected.  Maybe the Gom Jabbar is a bluff, but I sorta doubt it.

The thing is: In Dune, almost any path to human improvement is permissable, even laudible. Everyone does Spice because it makes you 'better', and other drugs are freely used. Cybernetics, provide you confine yourself to the human form/scale, is acceptable, despite a lot of cultural baggage getting in the way. Becoming a Machine is wrong, becoming a better human is good... cybernetics drift a bit too close to Machine for people to be too comfortable with.  Genetic engineering and tweaking is peachy keen, however... though the people of Dune would probably object to chimeric splicing, which limits what they can do. They have to stick with what is already within human potential rather than trying to add 'otherness' to it, though chimerical splicing of slaves for the fun of it? That's cool, bro.



Psychic advancement is very popular, but unlike simply better breeding is also personally demanding. Its one thing to have great parents, maybe pop in for a quick genetic tweak, get a few wires threaded through your nervous system and pop some good drugs... its another thing entirely to spend years in meditation, suffer agonizing and mind bending rituals and god knows what else just to START learning to expand your mind, so it only appeals to a few of the most dedicated adherents, and even there people disagree.  Psychic powers are rare and often pretty tame, but people who have mastered them, no matter the cost, are respected even admired.  Even Fish Men of the Stars.

So what is the Kwisatz Haderach, in this particular Scheme?  Its the way forward, the person (usually a man, at least this time around) who opens the door to the next step. Its proof that you are on the right path, the scion of the Perfected Human (of this time), who sweeps away the old orders and tells us our new goals, seperates the wheat from the Chaff.  

With just a little License we can see the LAST Kwisatz Haderach brought about the Butlerian Jihad and destroyed the machines that were holding Men Back.  Paul... or perhaps Leto II, set us on the Golden Path, sweeping away our dependence on Spice, on old fashioned ideas about Machines that were no longer Relavent... and made all of the human race Psychic through the bloodline of Siona and Duncan, enabling the scattering. We can keep going: Murbella, and/or Duncan again may have been a KH, reuniting the Scattering of humanity, bringing the intensely Physical development of the Honored Matre society together with the Old Empire Psychics, and if we allow for KJA to have a say, Duncan is explicitly the True Kwisatz Haderach, uniting the Logic of teh Machine with the emotion of the Human on the only explicitly stated Day of Krazilec in the entire expanded series.

Each time Humanity's Path was altered, usually in extremely violent ways (ironically the ascencion of Leto II was probably the LEAST violent named....).

 Dune was written to refute the Great Man of History theory, demonstrating that most Great Men are actually quite bad for people. You could almost say Paul Maud'dib is Hitler, and not have a bit of snark when you do.  But the Series of Dune takes on a much different Theme, perhaps by accident.  I have no doubt that Frank Herbert intended for the Butlerian Jihad to be a Very Bad Idea, or at least an idea that went way to far. We aren't supposed to be inspired by it, its a warning, if a small one.  We aren't supposed to root for Paul Maud'dib but be appalled by the destruction he wreaks in his own society... which, of course, is a writing failure, and is why the tone of the following books (written a decade later!) are so different.  We need to have our noses rubbed into the bitterly cynical and manipulative methods Lady Jessica uses, we need to see Paul driven to his own destruction by his great deeds, and we need the bloviating philosophy of a giant worm-man to explain to us how very, very bad it is to let one 'great man' decide our fate.

None of that really needs to matter at the game table.  There are no Great Men in 9191, merely small men with great power. Men like Shaddam IV, who is the closest character to an actual moron we see, or a Count Fenring, who for all his many gifts is far more interested in Serving than Doing.

But what does matter is that the characters, the Players, be allowed to explore their paths to human perfection. The rules exist, they are balanced enough (it's a nineties game, the autistic obsession with balance was another half decade away...), don't be afraid to let them use them. Trust me, you won't be breaking Canon if you do.  Let players develop their own psychic path or school, let them explore power through faith and ritual (the Theurgy rites that I haven't been using). Let them become clanking machine-men, or start out as inhuman genetic freaks.  Believe it or not: That's DUNE!

Or do I need to remind you that the Honored Matres literally fuck their way into owning armies?   Dune ain't exactly dignified.

I added an edit to teh Spice Revisit Post, regarding Gurney Halleck's non-use of spice, and generally bad-assery.  It may be of interest to those of you who have been reading.

Hmm... well, I'm almost done with my self appointed checklist, but for some reason I don't feel like I'm all that done.  The end is NOT Nigh, which... I dunno how i feel about that? Disappointed? Depressed? Bored? Meh?


Whatever.  I guess Spice Smugglers are up, but I've kinda got an Urge to talk about House Novebruns. Who? House Novebruns. You know, the guys who bought Half of Planet Novebruns from House Mutelli for 320 liters of Spice?  You remember them, don't you?

No? Well, now you know exactly as much as anyone does, and yet, I want to talk about them. Luckily I can sort of tie that together with Spice Smugglers... somewhere along the way.   Actually, I guess its sort of two short(ish? :rolleyes: ) posts rolled into one.  

So, House Novebruns bought half of Planet Novebruns from House Mutelli.  You know what I see there? I see a House that is named for their home fief, that's what I see, and that tells me Novebruns is not some old Noble House from back in the day.  Mind you, I think this happend 'back in teh day', but let me lay it out like its accepted fact, since I've well established that it is not... it'll be easier to write (and read) if I do, m'kay?

Based on how Spice works... and the way the pieces of the Empire were assembled in the wake of the Jihad, we can guess that the price of Spice initially started fairly low... maybe it was sold at a very high purity compared to today, with a similar price, maybe it was selling just well enough to justify the expense of shipping it.  Eventually, as its popularity spread AND people learned the problems with withdrawl the price undoubtedly spikes. One, because Demand was so very, very high. What price is your life?  Also, the Supply would have been low, as wide spread gathering operations would not have been in place, so deals with friendly Fremen Tribes would have been the usual source.  Also, every supplier was a unique entity, almost like the Smugglers are today, guys who load up a ship with a few hundred, or thousand liters of Spice of unknown quality and make stops all around the Galaxy selling it before returning to get another load, so very little infrastructure.

The rise of mining operations and operators, and the business of refining the Spice, and then an exceptable standard for diluting the Spice, were decades away, and CHOAM control over Spice Flows even further.   Spice Gathering would be a very lucrative business, maybe even moreso than shipping and selling, but it came with the risk of Sandworms and hostile Fremen attacks.

CHOAM didn't just show up in orbit one day and declare all of Dune their personal bitch, that wouldn't have done much but trigger another war, and in the worst place in the Galaxy to fight one (as Paul showed). No, they showed up and set up their own mining operations and slowly but surely bought out, or squeezed out all the independents. They probably started by squeezing the independent shippers... at the one place they knew they'd find them: Arrakis. The end of Machine Navigators was very useful to this end, as CHOAM could work with the Spacing Guild to shut down small shippers, and if you can only Sell to CHOAM, they can put you out of business by simply refusing to buy.

All of that is simply a historical back drop.  It probably took centuries for CHOAM to really truly get a stranglehold on the Spice Flow, and even now there are still some independent operators. There are a huge mess of laws that keep independents in their place, but those laws took centuries, maybe millennia to draft and implement.

Enter Some Random Guy. He's an independent, maybe his father was an Independent, and his father's father. He's not 'rich beyond the dreams of avarice', but what he does have is a very substantial stockpile of Spice, as pure as it gets, that he's gathered perfectly legally. And he sees the writing on the wall. Or maybe he just gets lucky and wants to retire before he gets shut out.  So he takes his big huge pile of Spice and gets the hell off Arrakis.

So what to do? Maybe his family was from Novebruns, maybe he just liked the look of the place, or Maybe, just Maybe, he realized it was one of the few planets outright owned by a noble house that didn't actually live there, and thus didn't care much about it.  So he makes them an offer. The value of Spice is about as high as it can get, the Nobles are screaming for more, and CHOAM is still decades away from working out the kinks in their distribution chain. So Mutelli bites, sells half of Novebruns to this random guy. They arent' worried about it, they've got a directorship, so this isn't cutting into their profits, right?

And so our Guy, who probably has a lot more spice than that (after all, he's an addict himself!), sets up shop. And then he starts doing business, maybe he starts building up profitable ventures where Mutelli let the land go to waste, simply because they had no good ideas on how to exploit it, and he's selling stuff to CHOAM, because there is a market for it (thus Profit!), and suddenly Mutelli isn't so happy with their deal, because they are getting crap profits compared to the guy on the ground.  Push comes to shove and Mutelli gets hot under the collar and decides to take the industries by force (because: Nobles), only... with his profits and Spice stash, Mr Novebruns can hired enough mercenaries to keep them at bay, and the only solution is to destroy the very industries that are making the planet profitable in the first place. Now, PRIDE would demand Mutelli push ahead anyway, but the other Nobles like to keep their profits no matter how slim their slice of the pie, so that's nixed. So, instead of waiting him out, Mutelli goes to the Emperor to, basically, give them their land back, seeing how they are the director and all.

Now the Landsraad HAS to get involved. Too many Noble Houses actually own lands, as a hedge against the Emperor removing their Siridar Fiefs, if nothing else. If the Emperor can undo a contract and simply seize lands legally sold... well, that would put the whole galaxy up for grabs, and that would be Bad, so the Landsraad, with their hands tied by Mutelli's petition, Votes.  The exact way it plays out is unimportant, what IS important is that Our Random Guy winds up with the Directorship of the whole Planet, a Formal Title (possibly taken legally by marriage from a Mutelli daughter), and Shares in CHOAM, and possibly the biggest legal stockpile of Spice in the Galaxy at that time, which may have been seriously shrunk by heavy bribes.  

Boom. New Minor House. That was thousands of years ago, and sure: There is a long standing Kanly between Mutelli and Novebruns as a result, but its been pretty cold for a while.  Novebruns probably got a few Atomics from CHOAM along the way, once they had the right to them, and probably alternated between keeping their heads down and playing Hardball Politics for a few generations, winding up with a few more shares of CHOAM along the way. They may have even taken a turn or two, in the early days, as Director of Arrakis, given the history.  That is the story of the only House to use the symbol for Spice in their heraldry.   These days its just a good story, a part of the ancient family lore, but once upon a time the Novebruns fought and scrapped like their very existance depended on it for acceptance among the Nobles. Once a great way to provoke a Novebruns was to point out they were jumped up commoners, now it just provokes amused chuckles.  Too many ancient bloodlines have married into the family, through the Bene Gesserit if nothing else, for that to have much sting.  Everyone's got a bit of common in them if you go back far enough.

House Novebruns:
Status: Minor House, 12 Votes in the Landsraad
Symbol: The Spice Melange in Gold on a 'cinnamon' background.
Army: Shock Troopers, heavy use of Mercenaries
Uniform: stylized version of Arrakeen Mining wear, in Grey and Cinnamon
Homeworld: Novebruns. House Novebruns has a curious tendency to trade the directorship of this world to other Houses for political favor. This has become something of a cautionary proverb among the Landsraad, Beware the Novebruns bearing Gifts.   Due to the uncertainty of their status in the early days of the House, and their frequent moves and wars, House Novebruns maintains the family fortress on an otherwise unoccupied moon in the system, one with no exploitable value.
Ruling Title: Count. There are two Counts in House Novebruns, the Head of House is always the older of the two, though may be 'unseated' by the family in favor of the other. Novebruns commonly splits their vote in the Landsraad over minor intrahouse disputes, and members are well known for being easy to bribe for votes.
Family: In 9191, House Novebruns has fully 17 members of the 'prime' family, using the Family Name of Tabor (apparently taken from their time on Arrakis, and unrelated to the House Tabor), with an expansive network of related nobles, many running family owned businesses on Novebruns itself. Related Family Names include Novebrunner, Zlade, and Gofikker.
Head of House: Count Elam Tabor (formerly Gofikker), aged 126, a genial and easy going man who seems to rule his House with a gentle touch. Known among his rivals as a shockingly canny and even brutal negotiator.  Count Elam is unmarried, but has three children by two different Bene Gesserit concubines.  Rumor has it that if he doesn't find a politically advantageous marriage soon he plans to request a third concubine from the Bene Gesserit. So far they have refused.


I borrowed most of that format from the Wiki entry for Atredies, obviously with new entries. I should probably try a workup using a FS format, but I don't see the value in it.


Now, Spice Smuggling/Smugglers, and the ships they Love.

Spice Smuggling is a fact of life in Dune. Pretty much everyone wants more spice, except CHOAM... and that includes the people who own CHOAM.  There has never been a time in the history of SPice that small independent ships have not cut deals with Fremen, loaded spice into their holds, and headed out to the stars to make their fortunes. The only thing that has changed in more than ten thousand years, is the legality... or if you prefer the process.

Once upon a time, a Spice Merchant travelled to half a dozen planets, selling raw, unrefined Spice acquired from friendly Fremen, for modest amounts.  Later he'd deal with independent operators who could gather and even refine the stuff on planet, and his profits grew and his risks fell. Sure, it cost more to buy it... Fremen would work for Water, for god's sake... but refined Spice was worth so much more.  Eventually the merchants got smart about cutting their spice with various substances, usually inert, but sometimes with cheap but useful catalysts. This was always done at the market end, stretching a cargo hold as far as possible.

Then CHOAM came, and with them came the end of independent operators. Supposedly.  

Well, it didn't take long for the Merchants to become Smugglers. At first their only obstacle was the Spacing Guild (and for Smugglers who maintained the now priceless Fold Ships and Think Machine Navigators, even that wasn't a problem!), but the Guild could be bought off easily enough for a cut of the cargo.  This was painful, of course: the bribes were brutal, up to half the tonnage, but could be offset a bit by overloading the ship... and for the daring, cutting some of the spice before they left planet.  To ease the pain however, was the simple fact that the market was drier than ever, and the profits were not only higher per liter, but much faster and easier to get! Now a Smuggler could unload his entire cargo in one stop! In fact, most Smugglers already had their buyer lined up before they ever landed on Arrakis to load up!

CHOAM didn't like this, of course, and as their power and monopoly grew, they started hunting Smugglers.  A few were killed, their cargo seized and ships destroyed. So the Smugglers fought back the best way they could... by destroying CHOAM mining operations and seizing the Spice for 'free'.  Slowly a detente formed. CHOAM would still seize illegal cargos, but they wouldn't kill the Smugglers, and the Smugglers, for their part, would only take the occasional cargo from a Mining Crew, leaving the men and equipment intact to keep working.  The other option was a total shutdown of Spice Production, and that wasn't going to happen.

Mind you, its not like the Smugglers are hurting CHOAM's production or sales, far from it. The Smugglers form relationships with the Deep Desert Seitches, often have their own mining and refining operations, and generally cause a net increase in the production of Spice by getting it where CHOAM can't or won't.   Well, when a more aggressive, or vengeful, Smuggler starts hitting CHOAM mining operations it hurts, but those guys tend to come to bad ends.

The process is simple: make contact with someone on the surface who has Spice, which is probably the single hardest barrier to entry in the smuggling field, drop down as far from Arrakeen and the CHOAM port as you can manage, load up  before CHOAM notices you (and sensors over most of Arrakis are spotty despite CHOAM's best efforts. Smugglers and the Guild have something to do with that...), and get out with a full cargo load. Most Smuggler Ships don't spend more than a day on the surface, usually its measured in hours.  This window changes wildly depending on politics. Angry Fremen in revolt (such as during House Harkonnen's administration) makes for much longer windows, while Harkonnen's brutal anti-smuggling policies (which resemble superficially the original and still official CHOAM policies) mean that getting caught is much more dangerous, making Smugglers cautious, and thus less likely to stay... but more likely to keep personnel on the surface overseeing gathering operations in the Deep Desert, camping out of small, abandoned Seitches (or ones their contacts among the Fremen let them use.)  Smugglers do take other risks, bringing weapons to the Fremen and other aid to this rebelious population, which is a crime that can get them shot far more reliably than taking Spice offworld can, and many Nobles would be happy to 'catch' a Smuggler they haven't cut a deal with and seize his Spice Cargo for themselves.

Modern Smugglers don't waste any time or energy cutting their cargo. Their new favorite customers all know the score. Most of this spice goes to reserve stockpiles, the purer the better, and thanks to Millennia of CHOAM management, the process for cutting Spice to a useable amount is pretty standard. Every once in a while someone gets bold with the Spacing Guild (who still takes far too large a cut, though maybe not quite half...), but you don't pull that trick twice unless you like living on Dune with the Fremen.  

Becoming a Smuggler is pretty simple, if you are bold. All you need is a starship. Literally. A single man with a flying box capable of hitting orbit can land on Dune, shovel spice into his hold as long as his nerves hold out (or his muscles), fly up and cut a deal with the Heighliner that is always in orbit.  He'll find a buyer even for his crap sand-spice, and he'll make a profit.  As with any business, the more effort you put into it, the more planning, the better off you are, both financially and health wise.  Our idiot with a shovel is very likely to wind up wormfood, or dying of dehydration... the Fremen might not bother shooting him, simply because it wouldn't be worth the bullet... but it's possible. Undoubtedly in ten thousand years more than a small handful of hopeful idiots have simply stepped on a Spice Blow and died with a stupid look on their faces, their ships slowly sinking into the sands and disappearing.

To increase your profits, bring a crew. The faster you shovel, the likely worms get you, and most ships have weighted shares, so the captain still comes out ahead.  Find an Arrakis veteran and you'll waste less time looking for Spice, and lose less men to desert problems.  Find someone with Spice experience, maybe a former miner, and you'll be even better off. The Real point of seperation between pro smugglers and amateurs is having 'ground game', some guy planetside cutting deals with locals... be they Fremen or Independents... or even CHOAM miners willing to cut their quotas for something on the side.  The cheaper your supplier the better. Fremen often will work for almost trivial amounts of water, and local miners want luxury goods that are hard to get on Arrakis, espeically in teh desert. To a spice miner, a bottle of decent booze and an ugly but friendly girl is worth days of work. They've already got money.  

The very best Smugglers have their own mining operations, contacts with teh deep desert Fremen Seitchs, and several ships at their command. There are famous Smugglers who haven't set foot in a starship for decades.... though if you get too hands off, one of your subordinates will undoubtedly cut you out of the business.  Of course, by that point a forced retirement isn't necessarily unwelcome.  Smugglers may never be the equal of Nobles, but you'd be surprised at the number of Smugglers and ex-smugglers who have dined at the Emperor's table, swapping tales, or even pleasant evenings, with the mightiest people in the Galaxy.  The best thing is: Most Nobles prefer their Smuggler guests to be a bit rough around the edges, with just a hint of danger, so you don't even have to be polite! Entertaining? Only if you want to be invited back. But polite?  Hell no! In fact, its BETTER if you find some excuse to threaten someone's life before the night is through.

Mileage may vary depending on whose table and how the threat is delivered, of course.

But no matter what, you need a ship.

There are millions of ships in the galaxy. Most of them are dirt cheap, CHOAM mass produced cargo boxes, capable of making orbit and docking in a Heighliner and not much else. They are a box with a cockpit and a shitty engine. For curious reasons the vast majority look a bit like stepped diamonds, the important thing is that you can stack them hull to hull in a Heighliner like cordwood.  Even the Emperor uses one of these boxes to get around. Sure, his is Gold Plated, and most of the Cargo area is sumptuous living quarters, a spare travelling throne room. The engines are upgraded and its got some guns and a shield generator... and it is gold plated, but the hull is the exact same as every damn other ship.  These things are easy to fly, most Nobles prefer to fly themselves, or have a trusted retainer do it, though 'docking' is usually controlled by the CHOAM reps on the Heighliner via remote.

Its pretty easy to get a job flying one of the millions of cargo boxes CHOAM uses... and frankly for an old enough ship the cargo is almost always worth more than the ship... so wait until its been unloaded before you steal it!  Trust me, CHOAM isn't going to waste time tracking down an old beat up Cargo Box... but they sure as hell will for someone stealing cargo!  

Of course, you'd rather do it when you're already at Arrakis, but luckily there is always cargo going to Arrakis. Food, water, men... sometimes even just empty cargo boxes going to pick up loads of Spice. Otherwise we have to talk about Getting To Arrakis, without the money for a Heighliner trip.

Sure, every year dozens, maybe hundreds of idiots try it. Most are caught, shovel in hand within hours. The bulk of the rest die in the attempt... and half the guys leaving the surface with their shitty load of Sand-Spice are caught by CHOAM, usually smirking CHOAM agents. But that one guy... well, chances are he's got a taste for the good life now, and not surprisingly the Spacing Guild will be more than happy to give him some sound advice, even connect him with other Smugglers.  That one sand run may have put coin in his pocket, but more importantly it showed he could do it, that he wasn't all talk... that he was either lucky, smart or both.    His next run will be much better, and by the year's end he'll be swaggering and boasting like he was born to the life.

Not that every smuggler starts like that. Even if you start with a disposable cargo box, almost every smuggler will upgrade the engines right away. Nobles sometimes outfit new, or at least destitute, Smugglers with decent ships.    By decent, we mean 'A box with real engines'.

Lets talk a bit about that: All starships, regardless of design, use a cheap, crude but powerful repulsor field to lift off of a planet.  The more power, the faster you lift.  Most 'cargo boxes' only have enough power to get into orbit, flying directly to the Heighliner and coasting on Inertia, their flight calculated by a CHOAM Mentat based on this load.  In places were there is less infrastructure, or where the Heighliner's orbit is, for whatever reason, too far out from the surface for this to work, more powerful lift engines can be fitted, or the power to the existing engine boosted by various means.  If THAT doesn't work, or you need military support (or its a House ship), then manuever engines are also fitted. These can be pretty crappy too, but even having an ancient Ion Drive (using 15k year old technology) is better than floating dead in space once you run out of boost. At least with a drive, no matter how pitiful (and most do not rely on old fashioned reaction thrust), you can at least go back down to try again.

Provided you reach the Heighliner you're golden... if one of two things is true: A: You arrived on an official, planned route, on time, or b:no one happens to be docking when you arrive. Since 'boxes' are drifting into the hold, arriving at a bad time, without manuever, is bad. No collision (and not too much crowding of the arrival window of another ship), and you get grabbed by, basically, a tractor beam and shoved into a berth.  Since you won't have an assigned berth the ship's CHOAM rep, and the Spacing Guild crew WILL come check you out. There are a LOT of reasons for an unassigned ship, including Nobles travelling incognito/emergencies.  On Arrakis it is, almost universally, Smuggling. Here's the thing: The Heighliner's CHOAM Rep may be loyal to CHOAM, which hates Smugglers, but he's got to live with the Spacing Guild. His bosses know the score too... most of THEM were in his shoes for years. Basically, once the ship is inside the Heighliner's hull, the Guild takes precedence. And the Guild takes their cut.

So, if you hop in a random Box and try to lift off Arrakis without knowing what you are in for, chances are you are going to wind up floating dead in space, no where near the heighliner. Making the heighliner means you're probably a pretty damn good pilot*, or at least understood what you were in for. Not Crashing on your way in matters too, but that's almost secondary. The Crash probably won't kill you, but it might wreck your ship.

So a lot of established Smuggling operations hand out in Arrakeen near the port, looking for fresh faced young pilots who look like they just touched a sandtrout by accident, and gently try to nudge them along with some helpful advice.... or better yet, recruit them. More ships means more profits, and its actually better to take teh kid and leave the ship, and usually the 'kid' will be grateful he didn't have to shovel sand into his box by hand for several hours.  Plenty get to Arrakis and their nerve fails them, others get good advice but do dumb shit anyway, and life goes on.   For anyone who makes it, they either retire with enviable levels of wealth, at a young age, or they die violently.  Its about even, and one of the biggest dangers is rival smugglers, followed right after by hostile Fremen, then the desert itself, and lastly the forces of what can be laughably called 'law and order', CHOAM, the Nobles who buy the stuff or their rivals, or local organized crime looking for a big score they can't get on their own.... in that order.


Starships:

Now that we've covered the basics, lets talk starships. THere are three ways for a smuggler to get a starship, Steal One, find a patron, or inherit one.  The first and last are the most common, and a lot of the basics have been discussed.

In Dune there are two main classes of ships, which we will call Starships and Heighliners. Heighliners pretty much only have a Fold Space drive, and maybe a minimal emergency manuever drive to correct a bad orbit. They don't really go anywhere, taking days to load hundreds of starships in their bellies, then an instant Fold, followed by days of unloading hundreds of starships. The exact number is unimportant... and difficult to predict, as not every stop has the sort of traffic to fill up a hold and despite their best efforts, not every starship is the same size or shape.

Starships are much smaller, generally about the size of a large house, which is actually pretty modest for Dune. They are designed to go from the surface to orbit, at a minimum, and back.  Despite this, most don't have any landing equipment of note, they are designed to mate with landing pylons, allowing most of the 'floor' of the starship to be used as a cargo elevator, loading and unloading very rapidly. Crew and passengers can go down the pylon by a smaller exerior elevator or simply walk down a ramp to a raised platform. The pylons have guidance systems to ease ships to the correct platform and ensure a smooth docking. Turn around for a full box of cargo can be well under an hour, though prepping the Pylon for another ship may take much longer, depending on the world. That, however, is not true of every starship. Troopships can use the same system, but it is not terribly efficient for them to do so for many reasons, not least of which is that men cannot be stacked like boxes, not if you want them to fight.

CHOAM designed Flying Boxes can land directly on the surface and unload via the ramp quite well, and many Houses train their troops for just such a deployment, including Atredies. This is still slow, so such unloading is usually done out of range from any hostile fire.  CHOAM ships are built on industrial worlds all over the galaxy, and many houses that produce them use the same design basic design for their own House Ships. Houses without industry simply buy them through CHOAM (to prevent sabotage by another House).

Harkonnen is an example of a House that doesn't use CHOAM ships for their fleet, though they undoubtedly make Boxes (there is no formal name for this design, other than CHOAM Model (fill in the blank with Dune speak)).  Geidi-Prime makes ships for House Harkonnen, both for Cargo/fleet duties and for War, and will happily sell them to anyone who wants to buy one. These ships are rarely used by smugglers, despite being ideal for the job, both because of price and because of Harkonnen's reputation among Smugglers for being right bastards to deal with.  In 9191, however, this may be different.  Harkonnen ships have slightly better lift engines, very reasonable manuever drives, they are sturdy enough for a fight and armed, and they can land on cargo pylons or on the surface... in fact, they can 'airdrop' troops during a flyby, making them ideal troop ships, though very few forces can take advantage of that (the Sadukar can, Harkonnen boasts that his troops can, but they have a very high casualty rate when they try. Still, it is effective at getting troops inside enemy guns quickly! Its even better when a saboteur lets you drop troops behind the guns!)

If Harkonnen ships have a design flaw its that they don't stack very well in Heighliners, which means it costs more to fly them, theoretically. Actually that's what CHOAM would like, but the Guild doesn't really care... certainly not for a skilled Smuggler.  They are slightly too big for their cargo capacity, and were laid out 'oddly', meaning they take up almost twice as much space as they should. Their Cargo, compared to the Box is slightly smaller.

At any given time there may be twenty or thirty designs being made in the Empire, but many will conform to CHOAM standards for sizes and/or stackability. Many designs are much smaller, designed to fit within a CHOAM standard berth without filling it entirely, others... as the Harkonnen do, simply ignore CHOAM. Many such designs will almost never travel by Heighliner anyway, being used for various system duties, defense...or simply on standby for an invasion that may never launch.

All ships, however, are built to last. For CHOAM, its almost an accident. The Box they favor is so simply designed, and so common, that it is easy to keep running. For others, its opportunity costs. Warships that need to remain ready for decades or centuries are better than ships that are not there because they broke down, or spending to rebuild them over and over without using them.  The hulls can last millennia, and the fact that almost no automation exists, even in the design phase, means that tolerances are loose, designs are adaptable, and everything is as sturdy as a ten pound lug nut.  Everything has to be done by hand, and the people doing it are expensive to employ in every sense of the word... so its best to keep crews to a minimum, so Sturdy, Simple and Reliable are watchwords for Ship designers.  

Warships, and many Smugglers, will equip Shield generators, with sufficient cutouts to prevent Holtzmann explosions (Grrrr!!!), as do heavy laser turret weapons, though they remain unpopular for ships due to the possibility of failure of the cutouts. Harkonnen ships generally DO equip lasers, simply because the House doesn't care about a few easily replacable losses.

Ships are made using Fading Suns rules. Almost all starships are size 4, which is a painful limit. Boxes can get by with just a pilot, in fact most ships can do with just one pilot if all they are doing is going to a heighliner and back. Smugglers will generally keep an engineer of some sort on hand.   Boxes are almost entirely Cargo space by default, so double the available cargo. Special ships (noble ships) will have the standard cargo.   For ship to ship combat, Indirect fire weapons are preferred ( that'sa me,), while direct fire weapons are used for ground support.  Most of the direct fire weapons may not fit your idea of Dune, in which case stick to the Lasers and the Slug guns (Lasers, if hitting a shielded target, explode on a Critical failure at the GMs whim. Damage is either equal to a hit or it just blows the ship entirely the fuck up, depending again on the GM's preference, though this should remain constant across the campaign.).

There ARE a few larger 'starships' floating around, mostly old dedicated warships... or newer copies of old designs... maintained by a tiny handful of Houses (Corrino having the most), left over from Jihad era. These monsters can still travel by Heighliner (and officially they all need to), but take up so much space that even the Guild notices and charges for the privilege, making them almost purely defensive weapons.  When they do exist you damn betcha they have access to space-to-space Atomics, among their other weapons.  This is one reason why no one messes with Tlielax, despite everyone hating the bastards.  


While normally we stick with the official line, there is plenty of wiggle room to suggest that Jihad Era mechanical navigators, and smaller Fold Engines, may remain in the margins of space. Smugglers with access to that sort of technology are legends, almost mythic... seeing as they operate entirely outside of the usual Spacing Guild affiliated Smugglers. Houses with any remanants of this tech treat it like they do their Atomics, with great secrecy and care.

Much less impressive, but still very useful for the patient Smuggler is an old fashioned Photon Drive.  The profit saved in not handing over half the cargo to the Spacing Guild may make a journey of months to the nearest star system (which is?) worth it. Once there they buy a standard jump contract (or transfer their cargo to a waiting Box, which then carries it 'officially' to the waiting purchaser), while they 'jump' their ship back.  The question of the hour would be...how many months is too many compared to simply making two trips?   Of course, the added level of secrecy might make the Spice that much more valuable to the right buyer... or perhaps there is something else worth Smuggling that even the Guild wouldn't appreciate. No one wants to travel in a Heighliner with a ship loaded with Atomics, you know...  and there are few better places to hide things than the vast depths of space between stars.

Looking over the Starships made me realize I really should ponder the use of Mentats in any role where Think Machines are normally called for, which aren't many in Fading Suns, but certainly ARE in Space Ships, even in Fading Suns.  I'll sleep on it and get back to ya.




* in this case being a 'good pilot' means several things. If you realized the risk, you'll plan your liftoff accordingly. Since most first timers won't have anywhere near a full cargo load, they've got plenty of power, but not much mass... so calculating a non-standard lift is pretty simple, and if you didn't crash, it means you probably timed it well too.  That's really just being smart, rather than good. If you DIDN'T do any of that, then probably at some point in your lift you started to realize what you were in for. Most Box-Jockeys really only know how to land with any skill, so if you find yourself on the way up with no Heighliner in sight and no Mentat calculated plan to get there... what do you do? Good pilots will figure it out faster and will goose the hell out of their lift engines and do pilot-y stuff like changing their approach vector to maximize their thrust time... and find a slot in the load order that doesn't cause a crash. Bad pilots react late, panic, and wind up boosting weakly for the stars, if at all. The worst either lift blindly and god help them, or change their minds at the last minute, cutting thrust too late to come back down, and just late enough that they run out of inertia right around the time they break atmo.

Bah, I realized I may have been misleading with the use of the term Berth in the above post.

Most starships berthed in a Heighliner's vast and cavernous cargo bay are simply floating in space. Not alone... they'll be gently 'shoved' right up next to another ship, or rather shipS above, beside and eventually below them by repulsor fields inside the hull of the Heighliner, making an entire giant lego wall inside the ship. Some space will be left between any two walls, CHOAM would prefer none at all, but that hasn't worked out in the past (despite the cost savings), so usually enough space is left to allow a small runabout to dock with the ship (in back, usually, the front 'airlock' being a ramp.) in case of emergencies, say have the thickness of a 'wall' of ships. Using the repulsor beams to move the walls back and forth means this can be significantly narrowed to pack ships, though this does mean slower response times to emergencies in any given 'wall'. The first and last "Walls" are double thick, as there is always a buffer between the 'Wall' of ships and the inner Hull of the Heighliner.

Ships with VIPs (and Smugglers), or who will need to transfer cargo or passengers between jumps, but not land, are Berthed in actual docks, with clamps and airlocks, on the inner hull. This is probably much less than 1% of all available Berths, so its not used just to squeeze a few more ships in under normal circumstances.

These Hard Berths allows passengers to enter the 'common' area, or one of several common areas of the Heighliner, though this feature is rarely used. It allows CHOAM inspectors, or Spacing Guild representatives, to easily meet the passengers in a controlled fashion. Also it's "Special", so while many (titled) Nobles would rather not leave leave the safety of their own ship and risk assassins or kidnappers (seriously: Thats how you steal CHOAM shares from another House. Kidnap a Titled Noble with no heir and 'force' him to marry into your House, or otherwise sign over the shares. Risky but not unheard of), they would be upset if they didn't have the option. Because Privilege.

Of course, Smugglers may be docked in a specific area, either to meet with specific patrons, or to hobknob with other smuggler crews... and of course, to pay the toll to the Spacing Guild.

So, when I say "Berth" recall that there are two different sorts of Berths.  On the rare occasions when a Heighliner needs to manuever (rather than Fold), any floating Berths are kept 'secure' by the same docking Repressors... being so tightly fitted (when possible... note the existance of non-CHOAM ship hulls) means that fewer beams can manage more ships... push the walls together and hold them away from the hull.  This is... unpleasant... for the people in those walls, making hard berths even more popular.


An option for Ship Design using Fading Suns, is to up the size usable as Landers, say to Six. This gives a few more options in ship design, and allows for suitably Dune-esque granduer. Hell, you could go bigger. Heighliners are arbitrarily large as it is.

I've been thinking of going over the major problems with the Bene Gesserit "Plan" for the Kwisatz Haderach, and then covering the weakness of Mentats, as demonstrated in the books/movies... but that won't really help me push this beast forward, now will it?

I'll probably do a better, FS style 'class' for Mentats and Twisted Mentats, coming up soon, and then its what? Gearhead post, rituals and laying out the state of the Galaxy in the nine thousand one ninety one?  I think that will be it, unless I get a crazy hair to clean it up and make it presentable.

Any comments on IX?

They are the "current" source of thinking machines, and I believe that they have some sort of alliance with the Bene Tleilax. They've kept to themselves, and are pretty distant from the Empire, so they escaped the jihad. However, I think that the Guild NAvigators haven't crushed them yet is because of IX's isolationism. While they could be a threat to the FTL monopoly, they wisely continue hiding.

My general thought is that IX is just the siridar fief and great House combo. They are mentioned right up in the intro to the Dune setting, where the Bene Tlielaxu are all but absent (except for Piter) from the first book.

Their research into Think Machines is secret, though God-Emperor Leto forsees them accidentally wiping out all life with sentient Hunter-Seekers (averted, of course, by the Golden Path).

They clearly have their own genetic engineers, but we never see comments regarding the revulsion toward Ixian products, as we do with the Bene Tlielaxu, but I believe the Prequels had Ix conquered for twenty years by the BT.

Openly, everyone prefers Ixian Solido (hologram) projectors, and Ix makes Heighliners, putting them pretty firmly into 'officially part of the Empire' territory.  That said, they clearly aren't 'conventional', ignoring the commandments of Jihad in secret, and the world is ruled by a Confederation, which we can presume is at odds with the Noble House (which... KJA... is House Vernius). The Confederation would have no political power OFF of Ix, in the Landsraad or in CHOAM, but what are you going to do? Conquer the planet, smashing all the factories and labs and killing all the smart guys?  

I'm inclined to ditch the KJA invasion of Ix, simply because its a bald retread of the political plot of Dune. The Emperor secretly allows someone to conquer planet X for personal reasons, and uses his Sadukar to do it?  But for 9191 (our notional 'Playable' timeframe) that's really not necessary.  

But since I got a special request, I'll give them a closer, and 'setting' look after I've had some coffee...

The world of Ix* is unusual, though not unique, in the Empire of Dune in that the world itself is far more interesting than the Ruling House. In all of Dune, only Arrakis holds to the same standard.

History:
In the ancient past, long before the Butlerian Jihad, the men of old used powerful engines to warp and change the cold ninth planet** of a distant star, digging their machines deep into the rock, seeding the atmosphere with strange substances to filter the light, to hold the atmosphere and warm the world.   When they were done, they settled, burying their industries deep in the crust and core of their world, leaving the surface pleasant and pastoral.  In time they, and the mighty works that had been performed to transform this otherwise worthless rock, were all but forgotten by the galaxy at large.

When the fire of Jihad swept the Galaxy, it found little purchase on the World of Ix. The settlers of the surface dutifully destroyed their labor saving machines, their robots and think machines, but they never mentioned the industries and labs beneath the surface, the mighty machines that didn't make their lives easier... it made them possible.  At first the Ixians thought that the war would pass them over, but in time they began to realize that the passions of the Jihad would not be quenched until every vestige of machine dominance over man was expunged.

As the wars began to die down, and Spice began to become the new passion of the Age, the Ixians noticed that their isolation from the rest of the Galaxy was coming to an end. Powerful Noble Houses were looking for worlds to conquer, vying for their own slices of power in the new order.  The Ixians cut a deal with the shipping concerns, with their new Fold Drives to manufacture ships, and this in turn led to making Heighliners for the Spacing Guild. When the newly crowned Padishah Emperor,  Hassrak I***, offered House Vernius the Siridar Fief, the House leapt at the opportunity, seeing the possibilities in the profits.

In the beginning, however, there was a lot of friction between the Nobles of House Vernius and their new subjects. The Ixians had lived quite independently for centuries, had cut deals with the Spacing Guild and CHOAM for technological products, and they weren't about to let some strangers tell them how to run things... then there was the matter of the very forbidden machines hidden in the crust of their world, machines necessary to keep Ix habitable.  At first House Vernius threatened the locals militarily, only to be reminded that without their skills, the Heighliners would not be built.

A peace was formed, with the House quietly accepting the independence of their subjects. There were plenty of profits, and creature comforts which few other Nobles could claim, thanks to Ix's technological infrastructure, and the place of prestige with the Spacing Guild and CHOAM.  It wasn't long before the youths of the House were studying in Ixian schools, rather than from Bene Gesserit and Mentat tutors. Oh, the Vernius took Bene Gesserit wives... from time to time, and employed Mentats as any House would... indeed, for a time House Vernius had more Mentat Trained members than any other except Richese, their growing rivals in the tech industry.  The Vernius began to see themselves as Ixian, and eventually demanded, and received, a voice in the Ixian Confederacy.   They frequently neglected their other holdings, and lost them to other Houses, but Vernius maintained its status as a Great House, simply because no one else could keep the goods coming from Ix.

It has long been held that no one can conquer Ix. The Spacing Guild and CHOAM both protect the world, and its Heighliners, and its accepted fact that much, if not all, of its value as a Fief would be lost. House Vernius has been removed several times from its Siridar fief, once taking control over spice production on Arrakis, but it is always returned to them quickly, as production of Heighliners and other goods drops procipitously, and Vernius is quickly restored to their rightful place.  Only once has this not played out, when Richese, long rivals (though never to the point of Kanly), somehow convinced the Landsraad that they were the proper choice to replace Vernius as masters of Ix.  In this one instance the House simply refused to remove themselves from Ix, creating a crisis in the Landsraad until Richese's claim was rescinded.

Geography:
Ix is a small, pastoral world.  There are few conurbations on the surface, one surrounding the primary port and a second one on the opposite side of the planet.  It has low rolling hills instead of mountains, and shallow seas.  However, the orbit is cluttered with stations, satellites and dockyards, where much of the heaviest industry is managed, forcing incoming Heighliners to park much farther from the world than usual, and Ix sees almost as much traffic as Arrakis or Kaitain, though few people.  The Spacing Guild maintains a very large presence in Ix, holding an entire station made from a captured asteroidal moon as their own personal domain, though they allow CHOAM to maintain a large presence. Most of the Empire's business with Ix is conducted in Orbit, with much smaller presences in the port city of Albedo.

There are many spies in Albedo, fewer in the capital city of Vernius City, home to House Vernius.  Richese especially would love to know many of Ix's trade secrets, for the Heighliners of both worlds, despite using the same technologies, are quite different, and Albedo can be an interesting place to visit.  Non-locals are discouraged from leaving, though it is not forbidden, and many of the nearby communities are quite pleasant places to stay for a few days.  The farther from Albedo you get, however, the less pleasant the locals.  Curiously, despite their reputation for technology, outside the two main cities there is no signs of the technology of Ix, no Ornithopers flitting about, no major vehicles. There are farms and ranches, animals and pleasant, if not friendly, people living quiet lives.

It is not well known, though not entirely secret, that there are tunnels leading deep into the planet.  What is a secret is just how extensive those tunnels are. It is fair to say that Ix is a hollow shell of a world, carved all the way down to the core with layers upon layers of tunnels and massive caverns, factories, labs and great machines that maintain the world.   The Ixians have never lost the knowledge of machines, though they regret that they were not experts on Thinking Machines before the Jihad, for that knowledge has been largely lost to them.  Many of the components of Heighliners are made in vast subterranian labs, loaded directly onto cargo lifters at the starport, the pylons leading down into the crust, to be taken and installed in orbit.  A great number of spies have died in those tunnels, for the machines of Ix are difficult to fool, even for the Richese.

Vernius City is much nicer, cleaner than Albedo, but unlike the port, the entire city is dug into the crust, at one with the tunnels and caverns. It is here that the might fortress-palace of House Vernius rises to touch the heavens, taller perhaps than that of House Corrino on Kaitian, but nowhere near as elegant or impressive.  House Vernius maintains its own private fleet of starships, and they use the palace to dock, rather than the port in Albedo.  It is here that you may find the universities of Ix, not as famed as the Mentat schools elsewhere, but capable of finding those with the potential and training them. Mentats**** trained on Ix rarely serve elsewhere, and often do not use Sapho, simple due to the fact that Ix produces other Nootropic drugs locally in their labs that are cheaper and easier to acquire... and less addictive. Ix trained mentats who serve elsewhere in the Galaxy usually use Sapho instead, and develop the distinctive stained lips.

Industries:
Ix is famed for their Solido Projectors, and they produce Heighliners.  
In fact, Ix is well known for producing almost every form of high technology used in the galaxy, though their reliance on importing Shigawire means that they don't do much with datareels and other Shigawire technologies, relying on standardized interfaces.  Ixian Shields are among the best in the galaxy,though less well known than their Solido, as are their lasguns.   Ixians also have extensive capabilities in genetic engineering, though this is less well known and not something they offer on the open market. Those with extensive contacts with Ix have purchased their services in a variety of ways, including making minor improvements in their own Genome, and curing otherwise fatal diseases.  The Ixians are heavy spice users, and have long sought a way to produce it themselves, to no avail.

Ixian technology is robust and reliable, but not as small or elegant as Richese.  Ixian Heighliners are notable for being faster and smoother to load and unload, and the Navigators are rumored to favor them for the smoothness of the 'Fold Engines', though what that might mean is a mystery. Ix builds to last, and their equipment is favored for military applications as well as Industrial.  During Vernius's turns with the Arrakis directorship, Ixian engineers spent years studying the environment and redesigning the standard Carryalls and mining equipment. Many of the Ixian Carryalls remain in service to this day, and wise Houses with control of Arrakis often contract with Ix directly for replacements.  

Politics:
Ix is governed by a loose confederacy, the largest and most powerful faction is that of House Vernius itself.  The city of Albedo is a comparatively small faction, with various labs and industrial concerns having a say in the local government equal to their impact, thus the second most important faction is the one that controls the great terraforming engines buried deep in the planet, near the core, and behind them is the Heighliner industry.  There are a handful of ancient laws that cover this Confederacy, chief among them protecting the surface from exploitation... in fact the building of Albedo was very hotly contested for this very reason.    House Vernius is the primary go-between for Ix and the rest of the Galaxy, and while they do reap the vast profits of Ix's industry, they are also responsible for buying the raw materials that Ix needs for its very survival, including the food necessary to maintain the shockingly large subterranian population!

There is quite a lot of freedom of movement between the surface communities and the underground industries of Ix, though constantly shuffling between the two is not good for one's career.  The surface farms do produce a surplus of food, if the surface population is all that is being counted, and in the underground eating 'local' is a privilege afforded only to the very elite or successful. Success is measured in a variety of ways, but almost all are intellectual in nature. Improvements in designs, efficiency or productivity for the industrial concerns, research and development for the exploratory labs, or finding a new and improved way of maintaining the great machines...  Simply working for a long time without screwing up is worthy of note for some areas. Its not quite a meritocracy, but it gets close.  Those with Mentat training are favored in the underground world in all sectors.

Ix and Richese have a long standing rivalry based on competing in the marketplace, so trying to reverse engineer the other's designs is a major coup. Ix has a neutral policy towards the Bene Tlielax, as both factions reject the tenets of the Jihad, but they are by no means friendly.  The Ixians find the Tlielax choice to be deliberately grating and obnoxious, and to deliberately design their genetic creations to be as offensive as they are useful, to be as abhorrent as anyone.  The Ixians do not trust the Bene Gesserit 'mysticism', though this is only a concern for Vernius itself, but they have whole heartedly embraced the ideal of improving man. Many Ixians proudly sport cybernetic or genetic alterations, viewing themselves as testing new frontiers. They are far less interested in chemical enhancement, the Ixians were among the first to discover the downsides of Spice withdrawl (ie death), and have come to resent their addictions, though they value the longer life and greater health it brings.

Ix has close ties to the Spacing Guild, and somewhat weaker ties to CHOAM, while having only a handful of allies in the Landsraad (for Vernius) and a cool relationship with Kaitain.  The empire is a great customer, but the House Corrino is often grasping and suspicious, and every few generations it seems the Emperor makes another ploy to wrest control of yet another piece of the Space monopoly.  Unknown to the public at large, including the Noble Houses... though their spymasters may have an inkling... Ix is not above creating genetically perfect honeytraps to sway politics in their favor*****, which puts them in heavy contention with the Bene Gesserit!

The Ixians have a long standing policy of deliberately pushing the envelope of what people will accept, making and selling new and experimental technologies that are right at teh very edge of what is tolerable in the wake of the Jihad. Usually, when done right, the technology is a useful and desirable one and over a few thousand years the limits of the original Butlerian Jihad have been stretched in small ways, but every so often the Ixians, who are culturally far removed from the attitudes of the rest of the Galaxy, make a mistake and offer something far more harmful... either to the people they are trying to pursuade, or to their own cause... something that is perfectly helpful but is to far over the line, and inevitably there is a backlash. Twice the Ixians have tried to offer up a weak copy of the old Think Navigators, both times to find their world quickly and ruthlessly interdicted by the Spacing Guild until all copies and research notes have been turned over to the Guild for destruction... along with the researchers.  This inevitably causes a problem, as there are no research notes to be handed over... the Ixians were producing deliberately poor copies of the superior older machines they can easily build... and so they suffer under the interdiction until they can produce the necessary sacrifices.  

House Vernius: ******
Status: House Major (Great House) 27 votes in the Landsraad
Symbol: Helix/DNA
Army: Regular Great House.  12 Legions. 2 Legions of Cybernetic Shock Troops geared for Underground Defense
Uniform:Silver and White. Long Coat resembles traditional labcoat
Colors: Silver, White, Copper and Purple
Homeworld/Holdings:  Directorship of Ix, owned lands and minor directorships scattered on several other planets
Ruling Title: Earl
Family Members: Head of House: Earl Honorius Vernius, 43 years of age. Severe burn scars on face neck and arms, moves stiffly (cybernetic spine), from an accident in his youth, details unknow. A gruff and contemplative man, rarely attends the Landsraad personally, preferring to send his cousin, Baronet Julian Vernius in his stead. Julian is viewed as something of a dilettant, a drinker and gambler, and has been known to make promises on behalf of the House he cannot deliver, though some suspect this is deliberate, as Ix often seems to gain more than they lose in these 'broken' deals.   Julian is a large man and is a very good shield-fighter, with several duelling scars, many earned over fights in the Landsraad itself.  Baron Yrplies Bonat, of a cadet branch often attends with Julian. Baron Bonat was once kidnapped and hard pressed to ransom away his CHOAM shares by House Moritani, and has a personal Kanly against them.  He is the only Titled member of Vernius who currently has an heir, by his Bene Gesserit wife, who is rumored to be from Moritani, though the Bene Gesserit have not confirmed the connection. Lady Isabelle does have the look, however.  She frequently attends the Landsraad herself and has been known to conduct 'distaff side' negotiations on behalf of Vernius, and is rumored to be responsible for the Chaumurky death of Lady Graia Moritani five years ago.   She is a known witch.  Duke Elgin Bonat, despite formally outrnaking Earl Honorious, holds the title of Duke of Ix, and is never seen offworld. He represents the House in the Confederacy of Ix.  Rumored to have fathered several bastards in Albedo, one of whom is now in the Spacing Guild.  There are several lesser titles in Vernius, along with a double dozen or more untitled nobles who claim one of the three or four family names attached to the House. Technically the Vernius family is no more, Honorious Vernius is the fourth member of his line to bear the name after the primary Vernius family died out several centuries ago. The current Vernius Family used to be the Gelgin's, until they took control of the House and changed their name, and this is still something of a sore point in the House, as some of those still using the name Gelgin thought the House name should be changed.  Those Gelgins are primarily based on Grumman, where the Vernius hold a small parcel, a particularly poor holding of the House.




Again: Most of the details and format comes from the wiki. I made up the entire family portion, leaving a number of unknown titles and names affiliated with the House for playability. None of THAT entry is Canon, as the details on the state of Empire in 9191 is entirely unknown, which is partly why I picked it, to give people playing with it as much freedom as they want.  No one alive in the Dune era, with the possible exception of some Navigators you will probably never meet, are alive... their great grandfathers haven't quite been born yet!














* For the record, given that Ix means 9th, representing the 'ninth planet in its orbit', I've always taken Ix to be a coded reference to Pluto. However, some asshole... Herbert himself maybe, potentially ruined that by giving the star system a name, and KJA for certain claimed that it was named Rodale IX prior to the Jihad, so I'll just leave this here...

**Even if you reject the Pluto hypothosis, the ninth planet of any star system is going to be, or is at least very highly likely to be well outside the Habital Zone.  That's just how Orbital Math works.

*** I've been unable to find who the first Corrino Emperor was. Hassrak III is listed as the fifth Padishah Emperor, making it at least... 50%... likely that Hassrak I was the first. That's how I roll.

**** All this time I've been writing, absolutely certain that I'd read, just recently on the wiki, that there were only two Mentat Schools, and when I try to find the 'other' one?  Fuck me if half the damn galaxy doesn't train mentats!  The BG, the SG... and of course, other mentats can all train them, which I sort of gathered, but still.  So, sure: Ix can train their own.

***** Hwi Noree is a canon example of this.

****** KJA(only) Canon states that Vernius is only a few centuries old as a Great House, but that a:contradicts the stagnation of Dune's Empire (a major theme), and b:would force me to create an entire Great House out of whole cloth to replace them.  So, in this rare case I'm not just ignoring KJA canon where I can, I'm flat contradicting it.   Better that than I make up my own shit.  Seriously: Least bad choices.

Here I'm going to go a bit off the path from world building, which is really a misfire on my part, since the idea is to play in Dune, not to play in Spike's Galaxy that Looks a Lot Like Dune, and try to get into some of the more arcane aspects of playing in Dune, using the Fading Suns rules as a basis. I'll comment here that this project is winding down a bit, and it's been keeping me from another interesting, and involved gaming project I've had on my plate, but I don't mind.

Lets get started with Rituals, shall we?
Dune is a rather epic setting, with grander than life... everything, and quite a lot of symbolism and mysticism, yet for all that we only see a tiny handful of ritual behaviors. I'm going to detail the Spice Agony/Orgy rituals, the Gom Jabbar testing, the use of the Juice of Sapho, along with litanies, and then I'm going to detail a bit of the more or less unknown Spacing Guild rituals that eventually produce full Navigators, not because there is any canon support for them, but because it reinforces some of the work I've already done.  Maybe in another post I'll remember to talk about Stealing a Heighliner, what with Players being Players...

Spice Agony/The Water of Life:

This is the big one. We see it twice in the first book and film, and every Reverend Mother, be she a Bene Gesserit or a primative Missionaria Protectivia inheritor, seems to practice this, as does every would be Kwisatz Haderach.  For all that it is probably one of the less common rituals in the setting, but it is the biggest. I'm going to discuss all the variants at one time.

The starting point is the preparation of the overdose. For those with access to small sandworms, that is as easy as drowning the sonofabitch, and collecting the bile, which produces sufficient 'doses' for dozens of Spice Agony rituals.  For those not working with the Fremen, however, the process is somewhat different.

As normal spice is too heavily adulterated, one must first acquire very pure spice. For the Bene Gesserit and others with deep pockets and a regular need, this is as simply as buying it uncut. For everyone else there is the use of the alchemy skill to distill the pure essence down.  This is a normal test of the skill, and the aspirant will want at least one hundred doses, though more is better, for reasons that will become obvious.

Once the pure Spice has been obtained it is then mixed with a number of powerful but dangerous mind expanding drugs, many based on exotic alkaloids.  If the preparer is working from a known recepie then this is as simple as acquiring the right chemicals (which can be obtained in sufficient quantities for 20-30 firebirds, though finding a supplier, or suppliers, may be difficult) and making the preparation with a second Alchemy check. If attempting to create ones own mixture then the character must make either a hard Alchemy check, or a hard Lore:Spice check to determine which chemicals to mix, then acquire those (prices will vary wildly). It is possible to use nothing more than Pure Spice, but unless you are willing to significantly up the dosage (x10) then you risk dying for very little, and recall that larger dosages will be harder to consume in the ritual.  The user of a larger Pure Spice should still make an Alchemy check to properly mix the Spice into a drinkable solution, usually of water but alcohol can be used.

At this point the exact nature of the ritual is largely up to the user, as only one's will to survive and psychic gifts actually matters.  Usually a group will surround the person undergoing the ritual, offering prayers and support, and for the Fremen preparing for the coming Spice Orgy.  For Fremen, and rarely for a Bene Gesserit supplicant in extreme circumstances, a second participant, an old Reverend Mother, will also participate. This second participant will consume a small amount of the preparation, though usually not a full dose.  For Bene Gesserit and others the exact amount consumed is well measured, while the Fremen 'water of life' ritual involves taking a healthy swig of liquid, nothing more.

At this point if the ritual consumer does NOT have the Pyschic Gift: Convert Poison and several Wyrd points, they are simply dead after a prolonged period of agony and there isn't much anyone can do for them except put them out of their misery.

At this point the consumer is wracked with pain, inflicting a -4 penalty to all actions and begins suffering 3 Vitality a round of damage.  Every round they may take a Convert Poison check (at the penalty), which, if successful, reduces the damage taken by 1 point for that round. The consumer must accumulate 20 victory points (margins of success), or a critical success, before they die while also eliminating the damage.

If the user's has access to Other Memory... either due to having enough Psi Rating and xp to purchase it, or to having an assistant with Other Memory (who, in this case, will die during the ritual), the ancestral memories can reduce the agony on a successful check (performed simultaniously, including Wyrd cost) to -2 penalty.  This only needs to be done once, and the assistant usually pays the wyrd cost.

The Fremen Water of Life is particularly potent, inflicting 4 points of Vitality damage, but only inflicts a -3 penalty (reduced to -1), and is always done with an assistant Reverend Mother except for when Men attempt it.  Most men do not have access to Other Memory, and cannot reduce the penalty, and in fact suffer an additional -2 penalty AND an additional point of Vitality Damage per round, making only the most powerful and determined psychics capable of withstanding the ritual.  It is believed that any man who does will awaken his Other Memory, and will be the KH.  

The GM should adjust the difficulty based on the mixes for non-standard use. An unenhanced Pure Spice dose is easier to survive, but does not awaken Other Memory. Only inflict half the penalties and damage. For every doubling of the dose (2, 4, 8) increase the penalities by one each, at an 8 times dose the use of Pure Spice can awaken Other Memory, but not during the ritual, giving no benefit to survival. Larger doses simply cannot be naturally consumed, and the excess spice is wasted.

Even without accessing Other Memory, the Spice Agony has two notable effects:

First, those who enact the Ritual undergo profound spiritual awakenings, often having prophetic visions.  The GM may explain any missed connections in the Character's past, possibly identifying those who have been secret allies or enemies as such or significant clues that may have been overlooked, and for the future setting the character on a path that will lead them to... something, usually something they are already seeking.

The second is that the conversion process turns all the unused portions of the mixture consumed into an Awareness Spectrum Narcotic that is expelled from teh body.  This is what the Bene Gesserit consider the "Water of Life", and is collected.  Assume that the person undergoing the Ritual 'consumes' ten 'doses' of Spice consumed every round until the ritual is complete, and yes Pure Spice Ritual can produce more than a normal Spice Agony with larger doses.

For the Fremen ritual, this excess is not collected so much but consumed by the collected members of the Seitch in a Spice Orgy, so the exact amount produced is unknown.

Provided the ritual ended before reaching the penalty portion of the Vitality track, the Ritual takes roughly an hour and leaves the user exausted and wrung out.  If the damage reaches the penalty track, then they enter a prolonged healing coma, remaining insensate until fully healed (Paul Atredies slept for three weeks as if dead after his ritual... assuming here that he barely made it), but they will awake fully healed, feeling fresh, alive and energized. (full Vitality and Wyrd).

If an assistant provided help with Other Memory she dies during the ritual, having transferred all her memories, Ancestral or otherwise, to the new Reverend Mother.  This requires an Ego check, or the new Reverend Mother will gain a curse reflecting her nascent split personality.  A simple failure simply means that too much of the personality of the old Reverend Mother crossed over and is a nuisance voice in her head, and her personality may shift slightly... A critical Failure means that the two personalities merge entirely, fundamentally altering the new Reverend Mother. It could also mean that an older Memory 'possesses' the Reverend Mother. This is the problem with Abominations, as small children have no Ego* to check...

Spice Orgy:
During a Spice Agony among the Fremen, the new Reverend Mother begins secreting, mostly as sweat, an Awareness Spectrum Narcotic (only if she is succeeding...),  The Sayaddina around her touch her frequently, absorbing some of the drug, and sharing it through touch and taste with the assembled seitch adults.  This leads to what is called a Spice Orgy, as the assembled adults enter simultaniously into a psychic fugue, aware of the feelings and surface thoughts of those around them, and a sexual frenzy.  The Spice Orgy only truly begins after the Spice Agony is over, as the ASN is passed through the tribe from the Sayaddina to the leaders of the Seitch, to the adults and at last to the young adults (many of whom will be formally recognized as Adults for the first time by being allowed to participate. This is an auspicious sign, entering adulthood through a Spice Orgy, though for all males, and females who wish to fight, they will still need to ride a Worm. Usually riding the worm is done the day of the Spice Agony for those members).

Many Seitches track generations from those born as a result of Spice Orgies, so Fremen Generations are quite variable in length.  All those born after the transfer of one Reverend Mother to the next are part of the new generation. If the Spice Agony is a failure, resulting in the loss of a Reverend Mother, then the Sietch will not have Spice Orgy, nor will they deliberately conceive new children. Younger adults hoping to form families will attempt to join other seitches instead, through marriage.

Provided a participant gives into the sexual frenzy of the tribe, and the consequent lowering of ego barriers through the drug, they will find that all passion, extrovert and faith spirit attribute checks for their Seitch is are increased by one. It is a great honor, a formal adoption in fact, to be allowed to participate in a Spice Orgy of another Seitch.  It is very common to select one's mate at a Spice Orgy, if one is not already married, and a widow or widower is expected to set aside any mourning they have and remarry after a Spice Orgy.  While Fremen generally practice monogamous marital practices, it is not unheard of for a Fremen to have multiple (rarely more than two, both because of the difficulty of getting adopted into multiple tribes, and the infrequency of Spice Agony rituals) spouses from Orgies in different Sietches.  How such a Fremen organizes their own house in such a case is not covered by Fremen culture, owing to its rarity.

The Gom Jabbar:

This is a uniquely Dune form of Destructive Testing, where the goal is not to find out the point where a person or object breaks, but to see if they can survive a minimum threshold of stress. The phrase is used, frequently to refer to someone failing such a test. Paul might have said that the Emperor Failed his Gom Jabbar after the Spice War, though this would have been a misuse of the term, it would have been commonly understood.  

For our purposes, we will refer specifically to the presented, typical Bene Gesserit test of 'humanity'.

The testing components are a psychically resonant box, which produces a feeling of pain when fed Wyrd points by an trained psychic, and a poisoned needle, which is the Gom Jabbar itself.  For our purposes, the Gom Jabbar poison is automatically lethal in three turns to anyone who can't Convert Poison, or doesn't have a specially prepared antidote available in that time. It is quite irregular to try and have a doctor or antidote present, so what the BG tester might think of this level of foresight and cheating is unknown, though it fundamentally alters the test.  When conducted, the Gom Jabbar is held ready, only an exceptional  Dex+Fighting check can avoid being stabbed by it... assume the Bene Gesserit has a Goal of 18 to stab the subject.

Once the subject has put his or her hand into the box, the tester pays one point of Wyrd per turn.  This inflicts a phantom sense of agony and a sure awareness of destruction of the affected hand. Each turn the test continues the agony and sense of destruction gets worse.  To avoid removing one's hand from the box requires a Stoic Mind check, and awareness that the pain is illusory does not help.  The subject Calm+Focus for this test. It does not work on trained psychics, who will feel the pain, but will automatically attempt to block it with their mental training. Each turn the test is conducted, starting with the very first, inflicts a cumulative -1 penalty.

The test runs until either the Tester is out of wyrd or the subject faints. Either the tester or the subject may end the test at any time, the Tester by simply ceasing to spend Wyrd, the subject by removing his hand and risking the Gom Jabbar at his neck.

Reciting the Litany Against Fear or calling upon one's faith can help.  The tester may roll Calm+Stoic Mind, or Faith+Impress at the current penalty. If successful they may apply their victory points/margin of success, to the actual test (Ego+Stoic Mind) that round.  Any blessings or curses related to pain (including masochism!) or willpower will apply to both tests.

Typically the test only goes for two or three turns at most, some tests are for a single turn, as the purpose of the test is to see if awareness of death is enough to control the instinct to remove one's hand.  Testing beyond four turns is rarely done, as the penalty does not cap and the chance for failure rises dramatically. Most test subjects are young and untried.

Bene Gesserit training provides a +1 to all Ego and Calm tests during the ritual, double for women who have been more formally trained. You do not need to have the Asset:Bene Gesserit training, which assumes you have already taken the Gom Jabbar, or a reasonable facsimile of it.

There is no official benefit to passing the Gom Jabbar, or failing but being left alive (Tester's option). However, usually success, especially for longer more grueling tests, does tend to result in respect from the Bene Gesserit, which leads to additional training.  Women who fail are not usually killed if they are of noble birth, but are denied further BG training. All BG trained Mentats (mostly, but not exclusively men) have been tested and succeeded, the BG will simply not train someone who lacks the self control necessary.  

Bluffing: Generally speaking the BG do not bluff, the Gom Jabbar is always poisoned, as any deceit may be detected. Unless the tester deliberately choses to cheat the test, anyone who fails the first turn is killed, regardless of who they are, which is why testing is done only with some caution with the better born children... usually after they've been well prepared.  If the tester keeps the test going failure becomes increasingly inevitable, and it is the tester's choice when to end the test, or to kill the failure. As most testers are full Reverend Mothers, they have plenty of wyrd to spend, and could draw the test out for an hour or more if they chose.

The Juice of Sapho:
Many Mentats drink the Juice of Sapho, which is a drug produced on Ecaz.  Simple consumption of the drug requires no ritual or test, and provides the regular benefits which will be listed below.  Mentats normally take measured amounts of the drug while reciting a litany which allows them to empty their minds of preconceptions and emotional baggage. This not only extends the normal benefits of the drug, but also enables the Mentat to gain a +1 to calm and Introvert tests, and to test Introvert when normally Extrovert is called upon.

Sapho, the drug:
Costing 2 firebirds for a normal dose, when consumed provides the user additional mental clarity and speed of thought, providing a +1 to all Wits checks for one hour (double for Mentat Trained users), and allowing them to think exceptionally quickly. Reduce all intellectual tasks to half the usual time, or one quarter if it is mathematical calculation or sorting raw data (most Dune data devices can display infomation at speeds calibrated for Mentats).


The Litany against Fear: **

Anyone who has been trained by the Bene Gesserit, including any number of men with Bene Gesserit mothers, many Mentats and others... as well as anyone with Lore: Bene Gesserit, is probably familiar with this simple litany. Reciting the litany over and over again, either outloud or in one's head, allows a Calm+Focus check, which if successful can reduce a penalty to any check caused by fear by one point. The penalty also applies to the Calm+Focus check, unmodified, however.  This will not help if the person testing must speak or otherwise think things that would interfere with reciting the litany, making it more useful when performing more physical tasks.

Similarly, reciting the OCB injuctions against Thinking Machines may strengthen one to fight against any machine or heretic, though that would be a Faith check, and may provide a specific bonus to passion checks.








EDIT::: Crap. I forgot I've got to cover specifically Poisons and Drugs. Next post, I guess. Damnit!



*I am not implying that small children are not selfish little monsters. Ego represents a strong sense of self and an awareness of 'Other', which children tend to lack. I could work up complex rules for Abomination, as Alia didn't begin truly suffering until adulthood, and Leto and Ghanima came out just fine, but frankly I think allowing characters to be built without complex frameworks, and simple labels, works fine.

** I shouldn't need to say it, but this is all brainstorming ideas. There is no reason to include this in your game if its too intrusive or you simply disagree... and if you've got a better mechanism in Fading Suns, by all means share it

So, last time I promised to talk about some poisons and drugs, but other that squeezing in a bit on ODing on SPice, which frankly i"m getting tired of talking about, I didn't really do much with either. Well there was the Sapho.

Now, I'm not going to make up anything here but rules.  There's not much in the way of known poisons, but there are plenty of drugs. Since Poisons are the smaller catagory, we're gonna start there.

Poisons:
One thing to recall is that Dune has different ethics and morals than our world. One of the reflections of that is their differing attitudes towards poisons, which have been enshrined in the rules of Kanly, the Wars of Assassins and so forth.   One of the main rules is that innocents should not be harmed during Kanly, though you will see that this is not always quite followed.  There are three legal classes of poisons, Chaumas, which is poison in food, Chaumurky, which is poison in drink, and then there are poisons that are applied by weapon, either a blade or a hunter-seeker... which do not have a name known to us, but is probably something like chaumaury.

On thing to keep in mind is that anyone of importance uses poison snoopers constantly.  Every member of a noble's entourage will carry a small hand held poison snooper and any or several of them may wave it over any food or drink en route to their master or his guests, and almost certainly someone will check, if not the noble himself, before taking the first drink.  This is especially true when Kanly has been declared, and when out among rival houses... such as at meetings of the Landsraad.

A poison sniffer costs 500 firebirds (or whatever the money is called), and allows a Perception+Alchemy test to detect poison, even in food and drink. Some poisons are harder or easier to detect.

Basilia:
Poison placed on a knife, it is identical to the poison Vorox Killer from the Ur-Ukar portion of the aliens book.  Frequently used in Shield Duels and some of the more dangerous gladitorial contests. Probably what Feyd-Ruatha had on his hidden blade during his duel with Paul Maud'dib.

Kriminon:
This is the poison gas given by Doctor Yueh to Duke Leto. Said to be able to kill everyone in an auditorium from such a small dose, this is clearly an exaggeration. It is also against the rules of poison set down in the laws of Kanly, which is probably why Duke Leto tried to refuse it, though he used it anyway.

Kriminon cannot be bought legally, but may be made by anyone with Lore:Poisons with a standard Alchemy check. It may be bought illegally from various suppliers as any illegal substance, and costs 50 firebirds for a 'dose'.  When used in a small and midsized room, anyone in the room without their own air supply will take a dose automatically, while in larger room those farther away may roll a vigor+endurance check to hold their breath long enough to get away. The gas is heavy and tends to sink (assumed from only evidence of its use).  

Those who have inhaled the poison find they cannot breathe as their lungs lock up (In addition to paralysis of the diaphram, it also interferes with oxygen uptake, meaning forcing air into the lungs is useless) and they begin suffocating.  Without medical intervention they will die of suffocation at the usual rate. Unconsciousness usually follows within thirty seconds and death within five to ten minutes.

Meta-Cyanide:

This is the poison most frequently used on the Gom Jabbar. It is a fast and effective killer and may be used by injection or in food or drink, where it is difficult to detect without a sniffer, unlike old fashioned cyanide. It is less useful on a blade, as it is difficult to apply to the edge. Any weapon 'coated' with a Meta-Cyanide paste as a 50% chance of not having any enter the bloodstream on a successful strike, and the more attempts you make before striking, the less likely there is to be any left (assume the chance of no cyanide remaining increases by 10% per unsuccessful attack). It is frequently used in Hunter-Seekers, however.  Meta-Cyanide is fairly cheap, costing 10 firebirds a dose.

Meta cyanide does 5 points of damage every round until the user is dead. Only some form of blood flush can save them, or a psychic conversion of the poison.

Residual Poison:

While Piter de Vries claims to have invented this, it seems likely that he simply repurposed an older form of drug or chemical.  Residual poison requires a very heavy dose to be administered directly, and cannot be used as a weapon, you need control over your victim to apply it.  This requires first an Alchemy check to properly configure the poison, and a physicks check to apply it, which takes about an hour.  It costs 500 firebirds to concoct it.  When properly applied the poison bonds with the cells and in the organs of the victim but remains dormant. Every day the victim must take an antidote, which can be bought for 5 firebirds, or a gene-engineered creature can be made to provide the antidote via milking, though the cost of such a creature is actually greater than the poison, costing 1000 firebirds from a group such as the Bene Tlielaxu, and 2000 firebirds from groups such as the Ixians.  A Bene Gesserit may synthesize the antidote in her own body if she is the victim with a convert poison check, or with a hard convert poison check to concoct an antidote for another. Purging it using conventional medicine is impossible, but psychics can purge it by accumulating 20 victory points with Convert Poison, with one check per day to purge, and losing all VPs on a critical failure.

Any day (24 hour period) without the antidote, and the victim suffers one vitality point of damage that will not heal even if they resume taking the antidote.

Zenobia:
Also known as the Throat of Hell, this is traditionally a Chaumas poison.  In food it is relatively easy to detect unless the food is particularly pungent or spicy to mask it, and it is easy to detect with sniffers (+2 to sniffer checks), making it rarely used in traditional Wars of Assassins. What keeps it in use is that it inflicts dreadful pain on the victim, killing them over several agonizing hours.  The victim is wracked with such pain as to be paralyzed by it, unable to do much but scream in agony and writhe helplessly. Every hour the victim suffers one point of damage. Due to the pain it is difficult even to purge with psychic gifts, if the victim does not act successfully the moment they realize what has happened to them then all checks to focus the mind are penalized by -6. This may be partially offset by a Stoic Mind check (every VP, up to 3, reduces the penalty by one. A critical success negates the penalty for an entire turn).  Zenobia costs 10 firebirds a dose.

N'kee:
Named after its creator, N'kee is considered the very worst legal poison by the Handbook of Assassins, and its use may require petitioning the Judge of Change in a Kanly, though this is risky. N'kee is a catalyst poison, the poison bonds with the victim's liver and stays there for life. Thereafter every time the victim consumes spice, particularly in alcohols such as Spice Beer (very common throughout the Empire and on Arrakis), it converts some of the Spice into a special toxin that targets the brain, slowly robbing the victim of his mind over several years before killing him. It is exceptionally subtle, and due to the non-toxic nature of the compound is impossible to detect with sniffers, and even psychic purging will not work unless the psychic knows they have been poisoned with N'kee, and how it works... otherwise they would merely purge the brain destroying toxins produced in teh body at that moment.  Only a detailed autopsy, far more detailed that usual and focusing on the compounds in the liver or the unique destruction of the brain (which actually just points knowledgable doctors to the liver...) will discover the poison.  Treatment is as simple as removing portions of the liver and replacing them or letting the liver grow back around the targeted portions.  N'kee is 100 firebirds for the dose, and 1000 firebirds, minimum to bribe a Judge of Change to make it legal... though many chose to skip credit for a Kanly kill and save their money.

Provided the victim is regularly consuming Spice Beer (assume yes unless otherwise noted, such as people who do not take Spice) they will lose one point off of a mental attribute each year, Wits the first, Perception the second, Tech the third, then back to Wits... etc... until one reaches zero, when they die.  If the are consuming spice raw and avoiding beer then the process is a little slower, happening every year and a half.  When Wits reaches three the victim will begin acting as if they have dementia, Perception dropping shows as general innattention and absent mindedness, and Tech dropping shows as a general dullness of thought, unable to reason through simple ideas and problems.

N'kee was used to kill Shaddam IV's father, Elrood, though this is not known at large.


Drugs:
Aside from Spice itself, which has had way too much talk here, other than maybe to suggest that the players can divide out their doses per day for a bonus to stats for half-hour/hour at a time? I got nothing more.  That makes the third suggestion for how to handle the damn stuff... you work it out for your game how you like.  Also, I'm going to not try and price things in drugs. Assume most of these are reasonably cheap at 1-5 firebirds a dose, or less. Many are common among the lower classes and should cost even less, but that's your game.  This will cover only some drugs. Things like Shere (preventing exotic devices from reading the brains of dead folks) won't get any attention here.

Elacca Drug:
One of many derived from Ecaz, Elacca is commonly used on slave-gladiators and ,very rarely, drug fueled shock troops. It gently eliminates the will to live without provoking depression, creating fearless, if often careless, warriors.  Those using the Drug take on a carrot shade to their skin.   Anyone taking Elacca Drug cannot take defensive actions and is utterly immune to fear or the sense of self preservation.
Elacca Drug lasts four to six hours per dose, and the carrot stain grows deeper with repeating doses, taking weeks to fade.  Users find their wits and reflexes slightly dulled (-1 to both), but their lack of self preservation means they can ignore all wound penalties (though obviously missing or mangled limbs will still hinder them).

Semuta:

A narcotic taken from teh same Ecaz tree as Elacca. Semuta is essentially an opiate and can use the rules for Selchakah, except that when high on Semuta, if the peculiar atonal Semuta Music is played, anyone on the drug gains teh benefit of the Insight psychic power.  Semuta addicts are very easy to spot, making it much less useful for blackmail than Selchakah, however. Semuta is a resin that is burned as an incense and inhaled, leaving a sooty resin on the faces of users that is difficult to wash off.*

Verite:

Another Ecaz special, it is listed as a will destroying narcotic, users are unable to lie.  Verite is injected and after about ten minutes they are unable to use any of their passions for rolls. This generally makes them unable to lie, or for that matter to disobey orders of any sort, for about fifeteen to twenty minutes. It also prevents psychic power use once it has taken full effect, and once worn off the victim has no wyrd.  Someone on the drug cannot lie, but proper questioning is important, as neither can they pay attention to topics and will tend to answer in rambling and unfocused fashion.  the questioner can make a wits+charm roll to keep the victim focused on his questions, and a Tech+Inquiry to guide the victim to answer without either feeding them answers (which they will faithfully regurgitate) or asking questions that prompt long rambles on other subjects. A victim on verite does not gain knowledge they do not have, of course, but that won't stop them from answering questions on subjects about which they know little or nothing...  if a victim says 'I don't know', the wise interrogator doesn't press.

To be honest, having already covered Sapho and Spice, we've got a fair amount here. Fading Suns doesn't get deep into drugs or poisons... I think there are three paralytic poisons and one bleeding poisons in teh book, the only Lethal poison I recall was on a critter... though I guess I could look at Lifeweb for ideas.  All you need is some simple effects and a price and you've got a FS drug... and while Dune sort of implies a lot of drug use for 'mind expansion' and the like, its not really all that well detailed.

Awareness Spectrum Narcotic:

Produced by the conversion of toxic levels of Spice in the body during a Spice Agony, this would be one of the rarest and most prized drugs on the market, if it was on the market. Usually found in a liquid form, which the Bene Gesserit call the Water of Life, it has never been properly analyzed or studied.  Cost: Unavailable.

Effect: A single dose acts on the body as Spice without the addictive effects, for Spice Addicts short of Navigators, it sooths all their addictive needs for a single day. It restores all spent Wyrd and restores a point of Vitality (these effects are not available to the one to makes it during the Agony, but they may later consume it for full effect).  During the hours long 'high' the user has access to the Insight psi power for free, and the ASN is used by the Bene Gesserit (and in a strictly informal way the Fremen) to help train and awaken their psychic gifts, or for those who already have it, to expand them.  If taken by two people with Other Memory it can unlock a shared trance state where they one may pass over their memories, current and ancestral, to another, which is fatal to the giver.  The two may engage in a contest of wills to determine who survives (Ego+Focus opposed test, winner takes all).

Note that the term Awareness Spectrum Narcotic is used for any drug that expands the mind and opens the 'third eye' of the user. The Water of Life is merely the most potent and safest.  





Next on my list is gearheading, since Fading Suns doesn't have anything like a Dune style Stunner (it DOES have a taser, however...), so that's for tomorrow unless someone asks for something else first.

Then it's an overview of the setting circa 9191, which is of course all made up bullshit and utterly forgettable for the canon-fanwank nazis, and that will close this project up.  All faaking week, its been, though if I'd only been focusing on specific rules Ida been done in a day.





*To be honest, I only recall how easily people could notice semuta addicts, and I'm not going to go digging for reference to how they looked... if that's too inaccurate for you, you probably have a better idea than I do, anyway.

Bah, I had some points about Stealing a Heighliner to make, and seeing David Johansson's thread in development, I thought of a point to make regarding 'star routes' and stuff that fits in.

Regarding 'routes', we don't know the absolute range of a Fold Drive, but for the purposes of our 'game' we can simply assume a Heighliner can reach anywhere in the Empire in a single 'jump'.  Folding Space is functionally instantanious, the time delay between jumps is loading and unloading hundreds of ships, during which time maintenance will be done.  Its possible a very few heighliners are kept on standby in certain places for those super important, must be there right fucking now moments, but its probably cheaper and easier to just co-opt one that is ready to be loaded.   For ten thousand worlds (which may be a poetic license?) there probably are only a few hundred active heighliners, the real limit being navigators.

These heighliners probably follow routes, but the routes aren't determined by spatial concerns, but logistical.  The percentage of ships loading and unloading at any given stop is something handled by CHOAM, and is normally well known in advance.


So you've got some stupidly crazy PCs who are determined to steal a Heighliner?

Well, the good news is they don't have to worry about the cargo area normally, if they can move quickly enough. Even if legions of Sadukar are packed into troop ships like sardines, they can't get aboard the Heighliner unless someone docks that ship in a hard berth.  Speaking of: if the players want to hijack the ship, they'll need to get a hard berth themselves. With a skilled pilot they might be able to force the issue, fighting repulsor/tractor beams, but we'll assume for now that they were clever and set themselves up as VIPs, which is good because it gives them access to CHOAM's portion of the ship (and all those tractor beam controls necessary to lock down the cargo bay!)

THe good news is here that despite the sheer size of a Heighliner, the vast overwhelming majority of it is nothing more than empty space and hull.  SUre, we can assume the hull itself is full of tuning arrays, sensors and other jazz, but not much need to secure those areas, or for that matter 'engines', which we can assume are both too big and too complex to really be secured by a handful of crazy people... I mean PCs.  That also means the number of people on board is relatively small for its size, and most of THEM are essentially non-combatants.  Sure, the Spacing Guild is full of drugged up fanatics, but most of them aren't trained or equipped for a fight, and the CHOAM personnel would probably be forbidden all but the smallest of weapons, a Slip Knife or Kindjal (short sword).

That said; Even as non-combatants the SG folks will have plenty of psychics, to include precognitives. If the party doesn't have a psychic of their own, then they'll have to fight carefully laid ambushes from the moment they try to dock, so we'll assume for the moment they did bring their own.

Not counting the Navigators, the number of Spacing Guild and CHOAM personnel numbers in the low to middle hundreds, though many of them will be tripping balls, and others simply won't get the word in time to react. The Spacing Guild will have marines of some sort, with shields, guns and maybe a few low level psychics. Say ten percent of the overall crew, with another ten to twenty percent able to be armed as augmentees, but poorly trained.

The good news is that you'll see a breakdown of some 50% guarding the spice stores, 20% scattered in key locations of the ship (such as holding the corridors leading from the VIP area to the main crew area, locking down engine compartments and other vital services, and the other 30% guarding the Navigators.  The downside is the volunteers will probably not be guarding the spice, so they get a straight 50/50 split, and depending on how fast the party moves, more will be at the bridge/navigators, making for a big tough fight to take the bridge.

And they WILL have time to arm up, since the party may very well be sprinting through miles of corridors... and if they didn't try to get any hard intel on the layout first? Well, they are proper fucked now, aren't they?  The inside of a heighliner is small D&D esque Dungeon, and there could well be armed men in ships sharing Hard Berths who will take exception to the interruption of their ride.

Luckily, its unlikely the ship will Jump while armed men are shooting the place up. Too disruptive.  They might, but that may actually work in the parties favor, as it will delay communications with the ground for a relief force...

Depending on the world and the cargo, the reaction from outside the ship will be as fast as possible. However, getting a group of armed men, hundreds or thousands of them, briefing them, loadign them and flying them up, will take a good day at least, and if the party controls primary communications it will take longer, as good intelligence is necessary. The reinforcements will probably dock someplace unexpected, an exterior airlock or they'll just cut into the hull as close to the action as they can get... and they can come in multiple points.  A day maybe two at the outside, since Heighliner jacking is probably not a common occurrance.   Once they start arriving, however, things are essentially over.

Other problems is that ships 'locked down' in the cargo area might still interfere with smaller shuttle craft moving between them to ferry people into the ship, though again; leaving someone on tractorbeam duties can solve this problem, and does suggest a shorter route to the main areas of the ship.

So the players shot their way through a hundred or so armed men and have captured the Navigators, maybe killed a few (dunno, those tanks look pretty tough, did they bring any-armor weapons? maybe a lasgun to threaten people with?) now what?  I'm going to assume they don't mean to die honorably, so they probably want to leave. Great, if the Navigators will co-operate... and chances are they won't wind up where they expect to if they do trust the Navigators... they'll wind up someplace like Junction (or A Junction), with the Spacing Guild waiting for them.

So... trust the Navigator or do what?

Well, the Navigator isn't actually moving the ship. That's why he's call the Navigator and not the 'jump drive'.  It turns out we have a pretty solid number for blind jumps: 10%. Not good.

If they've got a think machine navigator (HOW?? never mind, it IS possible, these are things that do exist. Maybe its old and unreliable, maybe its a 'prototype' Ixian or Tlielaxu device) then you can pretty much just assign a value to how good it is, up to 99% if its a well maintained real-deal pre-Jihad wizzbang. It should only go below 10% if its deliberately aiming at stars or planets or some shit... deliberate suicide.

Well, they do have other options. There are Mentats, who actually do calculate and sort data at absurdly high rates of speed and are meant to replace computers.  Up to two mentats can coordinate, breaking down the project between them, and may add their Tech+Academia:Astrogation to the percentage chance to succeed (don't roll the skill, just add, save a step. If they roll, add their VP, or double for a Critical success, so yes, it might (5%) do them some good, but its more likely to hurt them by reducing their total).  Less capable Think Machines might be used instead, if someone has bothered to program them for the task (again: Who?), for that the GM determines the success.

A non-navigator psychic can use whatever presicent power they possess to improve their chances.  It has to be an actual future or present looking power. Assume every point of the power is worth 5%, and additional wyrd spent adds 1% per wyrd point.  This might be used in conjunction with Mentat Calculations.

Now they have a new problem. The Navigators use psychic technologies to tell the ship where to jump, so you probably don't have a psychic trained to pilot the ship. You can reroute controls through a more conventional interface... if you thought of the problem ahead of time, but that will take precious hours that you can ill afford.  

On the other hand, if you pull it off, especially if you are leaving Arrakis with a load of Spice, depending on where you "land", you have billions, perhaps trillions in cargo.  Hell, if you're that bold you can try and ransom the Heighliner (cargo or no cargo) back to CHOAM. You won't get its full value, but you can get enough to live the life of your dreams.  Living to spend it is another thing, but there are worse options than taking the ransom at Tupile or some other sanctuary world, or splitting your ill gotten gains with a Great House thats had some bad centuries... they'll happily take the cash influx to turn their fortune around, and their power to tell everyone else to fuck off. They still might kill you, just on principle, but they probably won't.

Because you know some player is going to want to try it.

Well... shit, I just lost about two hours of work due to my fancy mouse deciding to 'page back' me just as I was finishing up the gearhead post.  I'm so depressed I'm going to go sulk in a corner and listen to teh cure the rest of the weekend.

Interesting find on the youtubes, during a 2003 documentary about the Lynch film, Kyle Maclaughlin states that Frank Herbert was on set (of course) and gave advice constantly on pronunciation.  Thereby, whenever something is pronounced in Lynch, we can assume that is the canon way to say... whatever.  Not that its a big deal, but still...  'cause I be so faithful to canon, yo!

Yeah that doc is on the Dune blu ray and I noticed that bit. Luckily I've memorized most of the dialogue from the film so I guess I have the pronunciation down pat.

Quote from: Spike;945316Well... shit, I just lost about two hours of work due to my fancy mouse deciding to 'page back' me just as I was finishing up the gearhead post.  I'm so depressed I'm going to go sulk in a corner and listen to teh cure the rest of the weekend.

You should be writing it into a word doc at this word count.

Regarding the ships and Navigators. This is probably expanded on in a later book or even explained in the first book and I've forgotten, but isn't the folding of space also accomplished with psychic power not technology? That was my impression.

No, the folding of space is technology. The Navigators... Navigate. The Ixians, in God Emperor (the third book) reveal a mechanical navigation device which is part of what enables the scattering, along with a synthetic spice, its actually a major plot point of the setting.

The Navigators use prescience to see if the fold is going to land the ship in the middle of a star, making folds much safer.

Having done, and lost, a gearhead post I've somewhat lost steam on this, but I shall soldier on simply to complete it at last.  

I'm not going to replace the gearhead post, but I will explain WHY.  You see, as I went through some of the few canon Dune items I started to realize that I was sort of barking up the wrong tree.  You don't want me to create rules for Slip-tips when you've got knives, and its probably fine for a GM to determine for himself if a Kindjal is a large dagger or a small sword without me writing up some rules, nor do you need me to explain that if you think Fading Suns sheilds are too fragile for Dune, that you can change that until they fit your expectations better.

Not that I wasted time on knives, but even the Dune Stunner, which is just a low powered gun, doesn't really call for a huge write up with fancy rules, though I did just that... when in the end it was a fiddly version of light firearms, which already do low enough damage to bypass shields, only with less internet forum warrior rules.  Just about the only real value I think I added was Hunter-Seekers, and again... nothing I did rules wise will beat a GM's houseruling this unlikely piece of adventuring gear.

In short, as I worked and brainstormed I realized that I was drilling in way to far, doing way too much work for... not just too little pay off, but actively going down the wrong path.  Fading Suns is fairly airy and rules light at the end of the day, and here I was trying to make complex and detailed 'things' for it, which I'd already caught myself doing for poisons and drugs.

So, this is the replacement: Very little needs to be written for equipment for Dune. Adjust what's in the book to fit your ideas of Dune's technology as you need it.

Now, to spend four hours  (I keed! I hope!!!) typing up some vaguely dune-esque names for important personages (emperor adn shit), and to figure out which house holds arrakis and a few likely wheels-within-wheels plots that may be useful jumping off points for a campaign set in 9191....

Hell, boy, this is some good shit. Frank Herbert was a cool dude. Had a couple of beers with him once and I still have the copy of Dune he autographed.

Thanks. I've been letting this sit while I've been busy with other, time wasting, shit, but I'm about due to put in some work, so I called the wiki back up to get me rolling. I'll probably start posting the bare bones of the setting, along with my reasoning, in a few hours, swear!

Seeing as this has no rules attached to it, I suppose the first thing I should address is that eternal question 'Why?'.

Why do it at all, when every GM should feel free to make up his own?

Why set it a thousand years before the first film?

Why should anyone listen to me make up a Dune setting when I badmouth Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson so much?

I'll answer in reverse.

Because, Fuck You, I'm awesome as shit.

Because I want to address a simple solution to enjoying a setting without tripping over someone else's plot, and because there would be nothing to do if I set it in the books.

Because sometimes its helpful or even fun to have a jumping off point, a place to start making your changes from? I dunno, because some fuckers are lazy, like me.

Y'know? It sort of feels like I wrote all that just to brag about how awesome I am.. but I'm much to humble for that, so clearly that ain't it.

Anyway, the next big question is what am I doing, exactly?

Well, I'm not going to list out all the Great Houses or all the important planets. There's a damn Wiki on the internet that only covers a tiny portion of the unknowns, and planets don't change much, bro.  No, all I've got to do is present a credible take on the important players and locations that any fan of Dune will want to know about while making it FEEL authentic, as best I can, and dropping in some plots and major political factors for those people who really, really, like C-SPAN.

So, I can't just pop up a name for the current Padishah Emperor, like Emprah Bob, that just won't feel authentic or Dune, but I also can't just slap on a Shaddam the III (or hilariously, Shaddam the VI) and call it a day. Its tempting, mind.  One thing to keep in mind, and weirdly something I think gets missed, espeically in the Prequel novels, is that the Spice extends live fairly significantly. Not a decade here or there, but by 4 freaking TIMES.  Sure, a lot of nobles die to plots, machinations and poisons, but those who live out their lives?  They can reign for a long goddamn time. A thousand years ago today the world was a radically different place, almost thirty generations have passed, but in Dune its more like 8 generations. Its the difference between knowing what life was like in the Court of Charlemange and knowing what life was like in the American Revolutionary War.  


So, to continue my brainstorming for the Padishah Emprah, we've got some sample names from House Corrino. Shaddam (IV, current 10191, obviously), his father Elrood (IX), his nephew? Farad'n (no number, but that isn't an indicator. Assuming a Number is only assigned for the Ruler, either Emperor or Head of House), and a Hassak III, the fifth Padashah Emperor, from way back in what? the first millennium? Going from there we have a Vutier II (Elrood's grandpop), and a Fafnir and an Elliot (who were Shaddam's older brothers I guess), and a Fondil III, Elrood's dad.

Which gives me no good pattern, but plenty of names to draw from to start. Now, What's interesting is that we've actually gotten not quite half way back. Fondil was born in 9843, which means we can put Vutier on the throne as far back as 9600 or so, though that may be pushing it.  Seeing names don't repeat too quickly, we can easily take any of our names and put that, with a single or double place reduction as our Emprah. I'm not too fond of Shaddam III, simply because it LOOKS lazy, even if I can reason it all the way out like this, and I don't really think pulling a Hassak XC or whatever is a good call. Faradn' seems like a good call. It's a canon name from the original books, without being so big and in your face that it looks like a sloppy patch job.  I don't think we know how many Farad'n Emperors there have been, so we'll give him a nice modest number like... VII.  

Now to whip up a personality and some plots and minor characters around him, then to repeat that sort of process with House Atredies, House Harkonnen, the Bene Gesserit and so forth, and to put a House on Arrakis (I already decided on Ordos. Yes, Ordos, from the video game. Because I fucking can. )

So, see you guys in the next post!

Ok, so in the years 9191, the Padishah Emperor Farad'n the VII reigns from the Golden Lion Throne on Kaitain.  He has held the throne for just over twenty years and has gotten comfortable in the years since the rather ugly little dynastic spat involving his brothers and a cousin, Fafnir, the count of Giblaz, who currently commands three legions of the Sadukar assigned to Arrakis... to keep him out of trouble.  Farad'n is currently unmarried, which has created something of a scramble among the Houses of the Landsraad to marry into House Corrino.  He is playing a very dangerous game by waiting, however, as he still has relatives with strong claims to the throne alive and with political support. Without an heir it is far more tempting to try and kill him and take a chance on the dynastic chips falling in their favor.

Farad'n is proving to be a competent and fair minded Emperor, though with a hard ruthless streak. He seems very interested in weakening the hold the Spacing Guild has on, well, space as well as breaking the power of the Landsraad, preferrably by setting the Great Houses against one another.  Among the Great Houses he has no friends or allies, only... as he sees it... future victims, though he can smile as he stabs his would be allies in the back, when the time comes.   He is still looking for an angle on the Spacing Guild, thus far his only 'plan' is to allow Spice Production to fall low enough that they will demand his intervention... at which point he will squeeze concessions from them, preferrably concessions that they will not realize are traps.

He is advised in part by his brother Venius, who supported him in his bid for the throne, and who has been a loyal ally since they were young, though they have different mothers. Venius was trained by the Bene Gesserit as a Mentat, though he still holds titles.  THe Emperor's spymaster and greatest asset is Count Logan Halfrung, though the Count has his own ambitions.  The Emperor prefers not to keep Bene Gesserit advisors nearby, and relies on his sister Juliana Halfrung (count Halfrung's wife) as a go between with the Order. She is reputed to be a truthsayer herself.


Arrakis:

Currently the Siridar Fief of House Ordos. Duke Elian Ordos had not intention of moving his seat to Arrakis, or himself... in part because Ordos is the third House to control Arrakis since Emperor Farad'n took the throne. He had intended to place his nephew, Baron Gousce Vantia, a dull but exceedingly capable administrator, in full charge of the spice planet.  However, Emperor Farad'n gave the traditional Ordos seat of Hamydrya to House Belacosa to hold, forcing Ordos off world for the time.  This especially irritates Duke Elian, as he has a personal vendetta, a Kanly claim against Duke Hassik Belacosa over piracy against Ordos goods.

Compounding the issue for Duke Elian is the presence of Prince Fafnir Corrino, leading three legions of Sadukar.  The prince is in exile and regularly spends his days hunting Fremen for sport in the deep desert with his Legions, which drives the nomads to attack the Spice Miners and processing outposts.  Duke Elian has been forced to begin recalling all operations and running them entirely from Arakeen in order to maintain spice production at all.

Duke Elian is a robust man of almost 300 years, though he has only ruled his house for the last century due to the exceedingly long reign of his grandfather.  Duke Elian has been married twice and buried both his wives, the second after she attempted to poison him to put her favorite son in his seat, and now he maintains only a single concubine, the Lady Valentina.  Elian has three grown sons who are not on Arrakis, serving various house interests in the Galaxy, but his second oldest, Tarco Ordos, and heir is frequently by his side.   Duke Elian has some cybernetics, including his eyes which are obviously mechanical, some say he had them torn out when they turned blue-in-blue.  


House Atredies:

Currently held by Dmetrios Atreides, a young and vigorous duke in his middle fifties.  Dmetrios is a patron of the bull fighting arenas on Caladan, and has fought a few times to the delight of the crowds, though he currently is focused on other things.  Dmetrios is much beloved of his people, but is at odds with his advisors and Household, most of whom served his recently assassinated father.  Dmetrios believes that the Harkonnen are responsible, which is reasonable (and in this case, wrong...), and is considering luring the Harkonnen into attacking more openly, treating the Kanly as he would a bullfight. His own Master of Assassins, the Mentat Ramio Luzon consistently advises a slower, subtler approach and has his suspicions about the death of Duke Io Atreides.   Dmetrios is betrothed to Dame Uwei Ecaz, though the two have never met, they have exchanged polite letters.  This is a matter of some difficulty, as both Duke Dmetrios and Dame Uwei have given their hearts to others.  Dmetrios has, for at least the last decade, carried on a rather passionate affair... in small doses during Landsraad meetings, with the Baroness Helena Richese, a woman several years his senior, while the Dame Ecaz is reputedly carrying on with a member of her Household staff...

House Harkonnen:

Count Hyram Rabban, who prefers to use his original title and, defying the normal expectations of his house, his family name rather than the House Name, is a svelte vicious man, a very well preserved 130 years or so of age.  He is, of course, an inheritor of his House's ancient Kanly against the Atreides, but is currently unconcerned... he rather thinks old Duke Io Atreides did him a favor by killing his cousin, the Baron Ivan Harkonnen, twenty years ago in a duel at the Landsraad, and allowing him to take control over the House.  Hyram is a sybarite in the worst senses of the word, indulging in every whim and passion that pleases him. Indeed, he is a widower, having murdered his Bene Gesserit wife shortly after she bore him a son just to see what it would feel like, strangling her to death during sex.  He has raised his own son to be as vile as he is.

Despite this he is a very capable administrator.  He demands loyalty from his Household, from his advisors and underlinings, even over competence. Those who are loyal but incompetent are found positions where their lack of ability is not a hindrance, while those who prove disloyal in any way, even down to the humblest of lies to cover a minor failing, are killed, usually in some inventive fashion.   For all this, he seems to despise Geidi Prime, preferring Lankiveil, though it is rumored that his main entertainment on his trips to that world are watching the fur-whales being slaughtered and skinned.  

Still, under his guidance, the fortunes of the House have risen, and with it his political fortunes.  House Harkonnen, and its bloody Count, may not be well liked in the Landsraad, but he can command votes and allies in a way few Harkonnen in history have.  Whatever demons drive him, they have not robbed him of his wits or ability.

Bene Gesserit:
Current Mother Superior, unknown. It is believed by outsiders who are aware of the inner workings of the BG that the current Mother Superior is quite old, possibly even dying, and they expect a brief period of confusion from the order as the torch passes.  The BG are currently in a sort of retreat in the public sphere, and fewer Reverend Mothers are working as advisors in the Noble Houses than at any time in the last thousand years or more... something they are surely keen to rectify.  The current passivity is believed by some to be a result of some ancient prophecy or perhaps a plot that is occupying all their attentions.

The Spacing Guild:

To begin with the Spacing Guild is well aware of what the Emperor's plans are, thanks to their prescience.  You might say it amuses them more than anything else, but they've been making an extra effort to secure additional spice against the expected drop in supply, even going so far as to prepare their own 'smuggler fleets', rather than simply taxing the existing smugglers.  They'd rather see the Landsraad bring Emperor Farad'n to heel than do it themselves, as they foresee future difficulties, where too many abuses of their monopoly will begin causing them trouble with the Nobles, to include future Emperors.  

The Spacing Guild has placed a capable man in charge of their operations in this matter,  Fourth Class Pilot's Mate Jaimes Wolfram, only a low level psychic himself, but one very familiar with the Spice Smugglers (he was on a Smuggler's crew before joining the Guild).  Jaimes Wolfram is as pale and sickly as most Spacing Guild members, with a massive cybernetic arm. He always keeps a pistol under his robes and is a remarkably dangerous man with gun or blade.   Despite his rough origins, he is a fanatic and is willing to die for the Guild, to ensure the Spice Flows, as he himself feels that he is not worthy/capable of becoming a navigator himself.



Howzat for a start?  I took a few ideas from the Qing dynasty of china for the dynastic struggles of the Padishah Emperor, and I'm thinking I went a bit too far with the 'evil' of the Harkonnen, but as i was deliberately reversing the aggressor in this ancient Kanly for this era, I almost felt obliged to stiffen him up a bit.  Actually, I'm thinking I covered what I said I was going to cover... but I can expand some things if anyone's got requests.

This is all very inspiring to me. Not that I want to run a Dune setting, but as tweaks and ideas for Fading Suns and Dark Heresy it's a great little vein of ore to mine. Thanks for writing it.

Oh sure. I'll probably never make use of it either, I'd actually rather just play Fading Suns as is, and of my gaming friends I don't know anyone who geeks out on Dune as much as I do.  

I'm thinking this is done, and I may probably put a link to the thread in mah sticky over in design.  Lord knows I put enough time into it to justify keeping track of it!

This is fantastic, Spike. Thank you for sharing.

Quote from: Majus;980045This is fantastic, Spike. Thank you for sharing.

Thanks, I enjoy the work

I'm rather shocked at how I just let this die... I thought I'd done more work on it?  Anyway, I was recently reading through the archived 'FATAL and Friends' threads, specifically for Fading Suns and Dune:Chronicles of Imperium, and so I thought I'd give this another look. Having re-read the posts I'm feeling about 50/50 on what I did.  I think my approach was backwards, especially early on, and based on Chronicles of the Imperium, my attitude on Minor Houses and the Faufreleches system was... glib and misguided.

I've got some personal business that will be taking up most of my time this weekend, but my intent is to do up an actual revamping of the Fading Suns rules, perhaps even hosted on Google Docs, and to set this as a campaign to actually be run (provided I get off my ass and put a group together again...), with an actual set of coded documents, which is what I should have done in the first place.    That will probably take some serious time/work and I may not get it up 'quickly', so I'll probably try to squeeze in some lighter, fluffy work in the meantime.  I'm still liking what I said about the military and the choice of setting period, along with the much more limited than I remember listing of Houses, so I'll mostly try to expand on that.

One problem that anyone should expect is that Herbert obviously stuck in something 'neat' like the Swordmasters of Ginaz, and left them at that because that was all he needed for his story. As a living setting for a game (as I covered before on a different topic (spice logistics, which, (sigh), will be revamped again I'm sure....), that's utterly inadequet, especially as seeing that in 10191, the Swordmasters of Ginaz are no more, or at least the school is no more.  Does that mean there are no other swordmaster schools in the galaxy?  Of course not, but Fandom being what it is, any non-canon swordmaster schools I create out of necessity (since i'm not Herbert, telling a single story of a single limited group of characters) will be viewed as some sort of fan-wankery bullshit non-canon wannabes.  The truth is that even in five books, covering thousands of years, we never even saw 1% of the setting, and thats an awful lot of gaps to fill.

Anyway. In the short term I expect to put up most of an improved coverage of Faufreleches and Houses Great And Minor, which will perforce touch upon the Landsraad as well, if only 'gently'.  That should be up in a few hours (maybe faster? I'm padding for time because even my 'short' posts tend to go on for hours and hours...), which will include some possible future mechanics to be adapted from Chronicles (the Last Unicorn Dune Game...).

As noted in the previous post, the Dune:Chronicles of Imperium game covered the Faufreleches system in a way that made me realize, in part, that I'd undersold the idea, and that I'd also been too conservative in my treatment of titles/ranks in Fading Suns.

I'll briefly sum up the Dune:CotI concept, then cover what it means for us here in Fading Suns land.

At the top is the Great Houses, to include House Corrino, they are ranked at 5
Under them are the Minor Houses and the Entourages of the Great Houses, ranked at 4
Under them are the various unaffiliated powers, the CHOAM administrators (To crib my own work), and such at 3
Under them are the freemen castes, merchants and common citizens, at 2*
Under them are the slaves, outlaws, and serfs 'non-citizens' at 1

What does that mean, aside from the fact that I handled minor houses all wrong?  Well, among other things it greatly simplifies titles and such. In fact, completely ditching the common F/S european style noble titles (British edition?), which is really only accurate to itself anyways, is actually a good idea. Characters should be buying their rank in the Faufreleches system directly, though perhaps with a few additional steps.  Baron Harkonnen and Duke Leto, and for that matter Emperor Shaddam IV are all social equals under Faufreleches, more or less, their actual titles are (Nearly) meaningless, or rather... aside from Emperor... only really have meaning within the Siridar Fief they originated in, and are utterly unrepresentative of power within the Landsraad and CHOAM.  For all we know, Shaddam IV is the Siridar Marquis of Salusa Secundus!

We can continue with the assumption that Kings and Emperors of various Siridar Fiefs may exist, but that simple Etiquette prevents the public use of such titles in the Landsraad, so you'll never hear them. Likewise, even in cases like Ix, where noble titles and fuedal rankings are rather passe, something that 'passes' for a noble title is still used by House Vernius for the same reason, though they may dress it up with Ixian titles (Comptroller-General?), as any given title is essentially nothing more than an Honorific saying 'Yup, I'ma Noble!'.  Depending on the House and Homeworld (Siridar Fief, anyway), the actual titles can be fairly exotic, though we can expect that a semi-standard ranking system is common (Count Rabban is beneath Baron Harkonnen, but Baron Harkonnen is equal to Duke Atredies, different Siridar, different  weight on the titles). One commonality however, is that a title comes with actual holdings. Paul Atredies has no title, but is only called 'the Dukes Son', because he has no holding of his own within the Siridar Fuedal system.  These are Mostly hereditary.

So lets address a mistake, and that being the role of Minor Houses. I'm going to disagree with CotI here, in that they weight the 'known' (depicted in the books/movies) Houses of the Landsrad as being somehow greater than others.  Wealth and power come from CHOAM holdings, as well as military might, but power in the Landsraad is purely political, and thus highly influenced by social abilities and alliances. All houses in the Landsraad are major houses, and any is capable of rising to be a threat or a player, depending on the capabilities of those holding the seats.

In keeping with CotI (and presumably greater canon), MINOR houses are houses that serve beneath the Great Houses, within the Siridar system, and lack seats of their own in the Landsraad. My own inclination is to suggest that they HAVE seats (and CHOAM holdings...), but are held in proxy state by vassalage, but I believe that contradicts the intent.  Minor Houses are related to their  Greater House, and in some cases may even become the Great House, and can work against their Lord towards that end, a dangerous game.  Minor Houses exist entirely within their own Siridar Fief, while Great Houses operate on the scale of Empire, if that makes sense.

Note that I am also contradicting CotI on the subject of Noble Titles, simply because Dune, the book, simply doesn't work that way.  Duke Leto only holds Caliban OR Arakis, while BARON (four steps below him on the political scale, at the very bottom of the Siridar Lords chart) not only holds more worlds (Geidi Prime, Lankiveil AND Arakis (at times), but is otherwise his complete equal in almost every measure.  If the classic feudal system implied in CotI existed, then we are missing, at the very least, another (presumably rival) Duke, whom Harkonnen would be in Vassalage to.   If CotI were correct then the entire Kanly between Harkonnen and Atredies is as relevant as the Mayor of Omaha being in a pissing match with the Governor of California, with the President of the United States using said Mayor to unseat the Governor....  its a fucking goofy analogy for a fucking goofy situation, so clearly Chronicles is wrong. Never mind that Count Rabban outranks Baron Harkonnen in this scheme!   (For those unaware: Count Rabban is, for much of the first book, the heir to the Baron, and is in all ways that count (and don't count) his junior, his vassal, his pet thug. In the CotI scheme, a Count is two full rungs up from Baron, halfway to being a Duke.

The reason this works out, title wise, is that titles are tied to planetary fiefdoms, while rank is tied to one's place in the Faufreleches, with very little mobility up or down.  House Harkonnen was all but exiled for their cowardice at the Battle of Corrino (the source of their Kanly with Atredies), but could not be removed from their place in the Faufreleches system, nor their Siridar Holdings, and so survived until they regained a measure of power.

Siridar essentially means 'planetary', by the way.  Baron Harkonnen is the Siridar Baron of Geidi Prime, while Duke Atredies may, or may not, be the Siridar Duke of Caliban. Seeing as Leto had to give up Caliban (even temporarily) for Arakis, we can presume his ties to Caliban are... politically/legally... less than the Harkonnen ties to Geidi Prime.  Again, disregarding the new stuff (which, in this case, I haven't read this portion anyway...), we can assume that Atredies received Caliban as a reward (possibly taken from Harkonnen) after the Battle of Corrino, so even after ten thousand years they only hold it at the sufferance of the Padishah Emperor, even though their titles, political power, and CHOAM holdings are inviolate.

This further follows, not just as a matter of tradition but actual Landsraad Law, that despite the complete destruction of House Atredies, Paul is still Rank 5, a Duke, and once he's proven his heritage, can claim legally everything that belongs to the House.  Even the utter destruction of the House, and the personal enemity of the Padishah Emperor cannot change that, so far as the Landsraad (and the rest of the legal structures of the Empire at that) are concerned.

For all that, there is some Upward Mobility in the system. No real 'downward' mobility, as we've demonstrated (and note that any healthy society needs both. Sparta famously only had downward mobility, and ran out of 'elites', which is a big faaking deal in pre-modern military terms.  In Dune the problem eventually becomes a top-heavy society too full of 'powerful' people with no real purpose or even ability, choking the life out of the system. As I noted in the earlier posts, the Emperor Shaddam is in fact the only observable moron in the entire setting (with Rabban being his closest intellectual peer... Rabban is less 'stupid' than 'thuggish', however)

We can assume that anyone may raise someone of a lower Caste to their own caste (within the five ranks observed) with little difficulty. A Landed Peasant may make a Serf on his land into a fellow peasant, a peasant may be raised to the Guilds, etc.  This sort of raising tends to default to hereditary, so when Gurney Halleck is raised from Slave (rank 1) to Householder (Rank 4), his children will be rank 4 automatically, even if they never serve (though what they will do for MONEY becomes an issue, thus 'solving' that problem in the short term).  Having been so raised, even if Halleck were to fall into the hands of the Harkonnen, or when he serves with Smugglers after the fall of Atriedes, as he does), he doesn't legally fall back to the Maula Caste (rank 1), though that would mean very little to Harkonnen.

The other element of Faufreleches is that power flows downwards absolutely. A Caste 5 can straight up murder anyone of a lesser caste without question, barring only patronage and so forth.  We can assume that it continues down, so that our hypothetical landed peasant can straight up murder a serf on his farm, only subject to oversight from those above him. Law exists only between members of the same caste.

This, in fact, is part of what makes those sumptory laws I discussed earlier so very important. You NEED people to understand your position so they understand the legal and political implications of killing you, or otherwise abusing their perceived power. If someone mistakes you for a member of a lower caste they might very well kill you over a perceived slight, and the legal fallout of that is small comfort to the dead.

Many organizations 'cross' lines. The Suk Doctors are generally all Rank 3, but the Suk Medical School itself is Rank 4, as are its most senior members.  Doctor Yueh is 'effectively' Rank 4 because he serves Duke Leto (Rank 5) personally, but in this case its probably not hereditary per se (that is, his children, if they took up doctoring, would be first choice for future Atreides dukes... or not, but would otherwise be treated as Rank 3, as befitting the children of a Suk Doctor).   You might say there is a formal and informal element to the system, based on Patronage (Again with Halleck: Due to the fact he was born a slave, in order for him to serve as Master of Arms his actual Caste has to be raised. A Slave in the House Harkonnen is still a Slave, though anyone outside of the House would treat them better than they would a Slave out in some random cornfield out of respect for the Baron at the least. Obviously this also has something to do with HOW the person serves. Yueh is a "hired hand", Halleck is full fledged member of the Household).


If that all sounds muddled, understand that the Faufreleches system was barely touched on in the twenty or so books that are out. It exists, its hereditary and restrictive, moving up is somewhat easy (Halleck), moving down is not (Harkonnen)... almost everything else is me patching the holes. (the actual ranks, and their names, I'm pulling from Chronicles of the Imperium, which has some official recognition from Brian Herbert)

For the purposes of Game, the Rank system is 'unified' for the purposes of Faufreleches, so you need to have the minimum Rank for your position, and a maximum set to your actual duties (that is, under the rank of your patron). A secondary system covering 'internal rankings' remains, but in many cases will be unimportant (such as Suk Doctors and Mentats, but not Bene Gesserit).

On potential element is that one's place in the system is not entirely set by birth.  If Paul Atreides goes off an joins the Navigators, he actually can lose his place in the Faufreleches.  Of course, he also removes himself from the potential role as Duke Atreides, which leads me into my next bit.


Something I touched on earlier was the role of Gender. I've gone a bit more gender neutral that CotI does, but mostly by suggestion.   One significant reason you only see male inheritance of titles in the Landsraad is actually the Bene Gesserit, who collectively are held as a non-competitive rival House in terms of political power and role.  The Empire doesn't really go in for 'serving two masters', what with all the treachery and backstabbing that goes on, and the Bene Gesserit teach all the noblewomen their ways... its mostly as a check on Bene Gesserit power that the nobility actively works to prevent women from taking political seats of their own, rather than out of a sense of patriarchal oppression.  Likewise if a noble signs up for service in CHOAM directly (not a Directorate Seat, but actually full service 'work') or joins the Spacing Guild or any other organization, they are generally treated as having voluntarily abdicated their noble titles and such... and on the rare cases they are brought back must formally renounce their duties and obligations to their former organization before they can inherit. Its a big deal, which is one reason why most nobles prefer to work within their own House... just in case.

This is also the reason why so many marrigable women (Princess Irulan) are merely trained to the standards of a Full Bene Gesserit, but are not actually 'robed', so to speak.  If Irulan 'joins' the Bene Gesserit fully before she is married, she cannot pass the titles and CHOAM holdings of House Corrino to her Husband (she is disenfranchised, and lowered to Rank 4, or even 3), though it is not uncommon for married women, particularly in stable poltical positions (IE no contest for heirs) to join the order later in life, donning the robes and 'resting' their Faufreleches caste on their Husband.

Beyond that, however, Dune's Imperium can be pretty open for women, as demonstrated in earlier examples.


Houses and Families:

Most Houses, Great and Minor, are made up of multiple families and bloodlines, in fact Atreides collapsing to only one small bloodline (for generations at that!) was part and parcel of what allowed Corinno/Harkonnen to destroy them!  Note that Harkonnen have at a minimum the Harkonnen, Rabban and Ruatha lines at that time, any one of which may control the Siridar Barony (the Great House itself), depending on any number of factors. Yet, as observed, even House Harkonnen, with its three families, tends to be small.    Traditions of inheritance tend to be near inviolable, which is why Leto doesn't marry and Paul refuses to bang Irulan, but its not that clear cut.  Loyalty to the House is generally a virtue even among the Harkonnen, and a weak heir may chose, for the good of their House, to forfeit (or alternatively be 'strongly encouraged and/or murdered' to forfeit) in favor of a more capable cousin.   Due to the possibility of vicious infighting Houses are always trying to balance the security of multiple possible heirs vs stability of one single heir. The answer is generally to spin off 'distaff' lines of non-inheriting families into the Minor Houses.

This is the great unspoken element of Dune (and is strongly supported in CotI, for the curious), that House Atreides wasn't destroyed on Arakis, per se. Count Fenring on Caladan was there in part to keep the Minor Houses under control (as well as forcing Leto to Arakis personally), so that when a 'new' Atredies assumed control it would be weak and unsteady for generations, no threat to House Corrino. THis also means that in many ways Baron Harkonnen was accepting a personal victory in the endless Kanly (killing Leto) over a permanent, but unacheivable, victory over the House... and no doubt Shaddam preferred that, as he could use the 'new' House to keep Harkonnen in check for generations to come.   Of course, the exchange here is that a new, weak Duke may also be able to claim Siridar status for the House, making it that much harder to 'remove' them from Caladan in the future...


Fostering and Friendships:

The game would be no fun if Nobles had no interactions aside from mudering one another and paranoia levels of infighting.  We know that there are freindships between houses, often due to familial relationships (Richese and Atredies due to Leto having a Richese mother (or... grandmother?), but there is more to it than that.  While the Heir to any given title may be heavily protected, non-inheriting nobles are encouraged to spend time in the galaxy. Paul is taught swordsmanship by Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck because he is the only possible heir,  Davis Richese, second son of the third concubine of the Duke of Richese, studies on Ginaz, possibly getting better training and rubbing elbows with his peers, as well as men of lesser castes who have full permission to kick his ass (at least in training), giving him a different outlook. Sure, Davis may, through any number of circumstances (including ambitiously murdering his relatives) rise to the Ducal Seal eventually, but until he does he has a pretty free reign to wander and socialize. Its not worth the hassle for someone from Ix to kidnap and torture him to death, and it probably won't even rise to a proper Kanly death, but it may result in a 'friendly' duel or two along the way.

When dealing with families, the primary motivator is the carrot, not the stick.  Among peers the general consensus is that any noble worth his spice is out for his House (which is the source of his wealth, power and privilege), and himself... and not necessarily in that order.  Even Baron Harkonnen doesn't resort to threats (much) to get Rabban and Fey'd to do what he wants, he dangles the position of Governor of Arakis and Heir to Harkonnen respectively, so a 'minor' noble of a Great House has as much independence as he wants.  Again: his wealth, power and spice are all gauranteed by the laws of Faufreleches, and while it is possible to simply murder him, its not entirely free of consequence.

But Houses have enemies, often ancient enemies, so even a minor figure rarely goes anywhere without an entourage, consisting in part of Householders and so forth, but also 'parasites', such as a Smuggler using him as cover, and if his own 'value' is low enough, other minor nobles with their own entourages...

... and thus we get a classic set up for a Fading Suns adventuring party!


EDIT::: bah, I 'rushed' it I guess, seeing as how I got side tracked or something and cut short the whole Fostering thing I was looking at.  Clearly allies will send not-likely-to-be-an-heir around to foster for a few years in a different house, possibly even hostage swaps mandated and regulated by the Landsraad for houses that are at odds, but still short of Kanly. In other words, there are unspoken reasons why the various Nobles of the Imperium have reasons to make friends and allies, eh?  THat's the quick and durteh of it, but since there is scant(no) evidence in teh books, any way you want to work it is as good as anything I write up, and probably feels more natural anyway...








* Technically there are no Freemen in Dune, so Landed Peasantry and so forth, though the exact level of 'not-free' varies wildly depending on the world and ruling House.

on a Note, since I'm tweaking the rule-set specifically to make it more 'Dune' than 'Fading Suns', I've been somewhat tempted to tweak the rules in other ways. Simply put: Fading Suns is more than 20 years old and  frankly wasn't designed by geniuses (they worked with White Wolf frequently, for god's sake!), so its got some cracks. Its light and fast enough to get away it, but that doesn't mean it can't be patched.

One example is the Spiritual/Social traits, which wind up being very useful in the system, but are inevitably horribly gimped because a: They are lower priority in design (intentionally or not), they are capped lower than other attributes by being set against each other on the same 'scale' as other attributes.

So, for example, a 'High' Extrovert score tends to be 5-6, rather than 8-10, as it is set in opposition to Introvert. This makes social checks and some Psychic powers more difficult because they use the same mechanic, or it means that 'Social Monsters' or psychics are weakened in Artistic traits (among other things) and OTHER psychic powers that rely on Introvert instead.

The simple solution in my mind is to a: Put aside 5 or so Attribute points JUST for these three pairs (Six additional attributes), while allowing people to yes, improve them with regular system, and b: setting the 'opposed' scale to 15 instead of 10, allowing for a somewhat more balanced pairing.  

I favor this simple fix off the top of my head (no play testing... I haven't played since 1e, honestly... much sadz) as simply cutting them removes an interesting set of mechanics, and requires reworking great portions of the skills/powers system, while more complex fixes (breaking them up and treating them like other attributes, for example) expands the attributes to absurd levels and misses that 'traits' like Passion/Calm and Faith/Ego actually generally have less value in the system except to measure your personal value system in an interesting, dynamic way.

The more complex fixes may make more sense (collapsing introvert and extrovert into one trait that is treated like a normal stat (Social?), creating a more aggressive opposition mechanic than simply limiting how high each pair can go collectively, etc), but then we're getting into 'Pay me money to be a game designer' territory, and frankly who's got the time for that noise?  



Another potential area I've got to look into is the damage mechanics, specifically with the 'power' of armor and the reported uselessness of shields (as 'rarely' does damage rise to the five successes necessary to trigger shields in teh first place.  I've noted in other 'reviews' from the same source that their grasp of mechanics is not always on point, but occassionally a facile mis-reading of something along the way, so I need to go over that portion myself to see if I see the same problem, and if so what is the most obvious fix.

On the other hand, providing the current work in progress as a 'how to Dune with Fading Suns' doesn't necessarily imply I have the mandate to punch the rules in other ways. In theory a proper character should be compatible between systems (pure FS/Dune FS) even if perhaps difficult to explain (like... Faufreluches rank...) to a Fading Suns Character.

Well, now I wish I played fading suns.

I wish Fading Suns had a better system.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1079602I wish Fading Suns had a better system.

I picked up "d20 Fading Suns" which gives it a workhorse system, but to my disappointment doesn't even attempt to be a complete game - I'd still need to buy actual Fading Suns stuff. Anyway it all felt much too metaplotty to me. But if you're going to run Dune then d20 FS might well be handy.

Don't mind me, I'm working in a Word Doc, as mentioned earlier, to give an updated Character Creation bit... for some reason I decided to be a bit more comprehensive than necessary, which means I spent a lot of time working on stuff I didn't need to, and now I'm a bit meh about doing the part that needed doing in the first place!  I'll get it up later this week, I'm sure!

Quote from: S'mon;1079616I picked up "d20 Fading Suns" which gives it a workhorse system, but to my disappointment doesn't even attempt to be a complete game - I'd still need to buy actual Fading Suns stuff. Anyway it all felt much too metaplotty to me. But if you're going to run Dune then d20 FS might well be handy.

yeah, I remember the d20 book being a huge disappointment.