Classic novels of intrigue and spies are ripe for exploitation in a Dune game. Think about the plot of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Author: matt
Gamer. Writer. Dad. Serial Ex-husband. Creator of The 23rd Letter, SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO, ZOMBI, Testament, Creed. Slightly megalomaniac
DUNE: The Landsraad
The Great Houses or Houses Major are the most powerful and important houses with voting right in the Landsraad. Their number was not fixed; they varied in history with political and economic fortunes, and depended to some degree on the strength of the Empire’s basic institutions: there were as few as 35, and as many…
DUNE
After watching the movie, the thirst for playing the Dune RPG (by Modiphius) is high. The movie is filled with outstanding visuals and the background is sufficiently rich the only barrier to a dozen sourcebooks is, I guess, the license Modiphius holds. There’s some astounding imagery. Fabulous for developing a game, visually.
Draculas Night Oot
Attached below is a script I wrote a few years ago. It was for a BBC comedy shorts competition they were running out of Writers Room. The competition was called “Fright Shorts” and it was meant to be comedy horror. My idea was Dracula arrives in the North East of England but rather than going…
DUNE: The VICINIS of the Spacing Guild
The question of the lack of alien life in the Dune universe has been asked many times. The coverage of the Known Universe is still small enough, in the massive scale of the universe that the Fermi paradox does not hold. But that’s not the reason there are no aliens in Dune. The Vicinis are…
The Start of an Alien Campaign
The Alien can’t be the main thrust of the story because, well, with the exception of Ripley and Jones, no-one survives an encounter. So you need a story of intrigue which has the alien as the kick off or the denouement. Like in the Expanse where the fungus thing is its own plot. Maybe the…
Dune – The Sobaki
Hasimir Fenring has to be one of the most interesting minor characters in the book. A “might have been”, deadly, BG-trained, and seemingly with fingers in every pie. But it begs the question about other might have beens and “the test”. PLOT THREAD The players are the lower level companions, functionaries and agents of a…
Dune – preparation game notes
It must be noted that I have no direct plans to run a Dune game. But I am a little forced by my mind to examine the game and the concepts deeper than should be permitted as I am after all, running one game, playing another, holding down a job, studying two courses (film production…
The One Ring, session 01 – A Once-Forgotten Treasure
We’ve spent the last couple of weeks generating characters over Discord. We have one player in Seattle, two in Ireland, one in England, one in Cornwall and myself in Northern Ireland. First session last night. “A Once-Forgotten Treasure” The Company: Caranion, Dunadan sorcerer. Being tutored in magic by Gandalf himself. Anwen, Dunadan Ranger, lately of…
Regency Royale
In late 2019, just before the Covid thing, I was working on a game design document for a real time tactics video game with the working title of “Regency Royale”. A quasi-historical world designed to evoke some great narrative inspired by one of the best RTT games in the genre, Myth II (originally by Bungie,…
Two Books on sale at DriveThruRPG
In an attempt to calm this raging passion I have for writing, I’ve begun to embark on putting my books on DriveThruRPG – the pre-eminent site for selling RPGs online. Testament and Creed are two books of a trilogy of games. Both are set at the end of the world, in the Jude-Christian sense. The…
T2000: W+36
You ever get the feeling that things are about to get worse? As luck and dumb fate would have it, we weren’t able to escape the area as quickly as we hoped. A puncture on the UAZ and an alignment problem with the axle which Monk couldn’t explain in simple enough terms left us stranded…
T2000: W+35
I still have my shopping list. We didn’t make it to Prague. The forests here are a little threadbare. I think they might have taken some shelling but everything just looked unhealthy. Along an old road weaving through a forest clearing, we bumped into a soldier with a torn uniform heading the opposite direction. As…
T2000: W+27
According to the Colonel, strong sergeants make strong soldiers. I can believe that. Our CSM was a soldiers soldier. You cut him open and he bled red, white and blue. He was just as you read about – moral, principled, heroic, stoic, and a role model for folks like me. During the Fall I saw…
T2000: W+26
Monk is a strange fish. He doesn’t talk much, isn’t prone to fits of emotion but it’s plain to me that he’s suffering, you can see it in his eyes. When I think about it; we are all a bit cold. I think that you have to be cold or detached from things to cope…
T2000: W+24
Progress has been slow. Monk warned us that running two vehicles was guzzling our gas so with great reluctance we siphoned off everything from the tank in “Dale” and filled up “Chip”. We covered Dale with branches and dirt and hid him in a ditch. Monk then buried a a 2 litre bottle filled with…
T2000: W+22
The little things in life make a big difference. We’d just crossed into Germany and pulled into a town called Görlitz. It’s beautiful, even now with the smoke blackened towers and the burning fields. We were flagged down by a cheery Herr Emmerich, landlord of a Gastehaus that survived most of the fire. He babbled…
T2000: W+12
I remember just after I finished Basic, I was late for Guard duty and the SM thought I should work it off in the kitchens. I spent days peeling potatoes, mopping floors and washing dishes. My hands were constantly wet so my skin started to slough off – which was pretty gross for anyone who…
T2000: W+10
W+10 No. That is not the sunrise. We’d been near the town of Luban, not far drom the German border for a few days and was beginning to feel a little more human. The people of the town had given us a couple of buildings to settle in while we repaired the UAZ and calmed…
T2000: W+9
After the fire raged through, we took the UAZ through a small town land on the outskirts of Warsaw. The bushes and trees and grass were still burning. I saw a dog, it’s back on fire, screaming as it ran down the road. The metal of our vehicles began to heat and I wondered whether…