TEETH: Dune Special

With a few degrees less histrionic energy.

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Dune & The Baroque Space Opera Itch

Hello, you.

Inside me are two competing space messiahs. Like many folk of my age, I watched Star Wars over and over, and I became obsessed with it. Luke Skywalker’s struggles became interwoven with my own childish battles and became an oft-quoted lens through which to view life and fiction. However, a little later on in life I encountered Lynch’s 1985 movie adaptation of Dune, and while I did not tackle the book for some years, I was immediately taken with Kyle MacLachlan’s portrayal of boy-man space wizard Paul Atreides, as well as the pseudo-spiritual messianic nonsense that surrounded him. I soon knew each line of the film, and was enthralled by the disturbingly camp/baroque vision that it presented. Here, I knew, was a science fiction vision I could rely on to prompt my imagination to more outlandish things.

And so has Lynch’s Dune has long loomed large in my imagination. The Ludocrats, the comic that I produced with Kieron Gillen and Jeff Stokely, was described, not even jokingly, as “Dune, but if Obelix was the main character”, and that movie was no small influence. The bombast and eccentricity of Lynch’s Dune has stayed with me, and it’s a vision I was in no rush to see reimagined. I felt little urgency, then, to watch Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 version of the movie, and have only just done so. I have nothing against Villeneuve’s high production-value sci-fi theatre, and accept that he does what he does brilliantly. Nevertheless I knew from glimpsing the handsome contemporary Hollywood cast and the austere concepts of brutalist Arakeen and armoured space soldiers, that this would not manage the kitsch and melodrama of the Lynch version.

Nor, as it turned out, did it quite manage to convey the byzantine “people stand in rooms talking about the fate of the universe” flavour that made the original book so compelling. Not that Lynch quite nailed this either, too much of the action takes place “on screen” in the movies for that ever to be true, but it somehow missed the startling characterisation of the various factions such as navigators and mentats, and failed, I felt, to convey the reason for why the Atreides had been lured into such a cunning space trap. Moreover, those lines that I learned as a kid were delivered again in Villeneuve’s movie with a few degrees less histrionic energy than in Lynch’s film. I mean, that’s to be expected from a movie with that turn from Sting, how else could it have been? But it left me with a certain longing for the Dune universe that the movie had now provoked and not satisfied.

I immediately purchased the Modiphius RPG book.

This isn’t new, having arrived to accompany the movie last spring. While it doesn’t carry any actual movie imagery, it was nonetheless a book of the Villeneuve, complete with a Legendary Pictures emblem on the back to let you know there’s a bona fide connection between this RPG and the colour-corrected adventures of Timothy Chalamet. Not that I needed this connection, of course: I have been hankering for a sci-fi RPG to run with our group for a while now, having got the tastes for it in previous years, and I felt like maybe, possibly, with a little tweaking and added eccentricity, this could be the candidate.

Dune: Adventures in the Imperium is as beautifully-produced as any of the Modiphius books. It sits well inside that realm of desirable full-colour hardback production that makes collecting RPG publications a hobby quite easily divorced from the actual playing of tabletop RPGs. It’s also a fantastically rich book, setting up a situation in which you create your own aristocratic House, complete with homeworld, business interests, and antagonists, and then create your agents - plundering the heavily extended universe for diversity, while nevertheless remaining faithful to the original stories.

As a sourcebook for the Dune universe, Adventures in the Imperium does a remarkable job of summarising and articulating the history and context of the setting. There are dozens of pages of it, although I would fear the task of conveying all that to any players unfamiliar with the fiction. It is, naturally, a book tuned to allow you to play a game during the events of the Dune story itself, but provides enough breadth to allow your game to be set in other related eras, should you wish to tackle that. I did wish that there had been a little more “ready to hand” stuff that wasn’t focused around Arrakis, but perhaps that was missing the point. An expansion box has provided an instant House to play with too, although I haven’t picked that up.

What was most striking for me reading the book, though, was how appropriate the 2d20 system feels for a Dune game. This is actually my first encounter with this system, which I understand has been tuned and adapted to a number of other settings, such as Conan and Star Trek. In this instance the numbers that make up your dice rolls are split between Drive and Skill. Drive makes up the narrative component of any roll, and Skill the learned capacities of your House agent.

The 2d20 system is one of those game systems that attempts to meld crunchy dice rolling on a high-facet polyhedral with some “narrative currency”. In this instance the currency is Threat, which the GM accrues and then uses to plunge their players into greater peril later on. For the players there is also Momentum (do more stuff if you roll well) and Determination (push yourself to greater things), which players accrue and spend to further their own actions. I’m hugely into these sorts of currencies as ways to weaponise narrative within numbers, and was fascinated to see how the authors of this book bent the 2d20 system to give Dune a distinct mechanical flavour, rather than relying on setting alone.

I can see precisely how Threat would build up to a tipping point, allowing me as a GM to create a cascade of horrible situations for the players to deal with as the game unfolded. Really quite like Dune itself, at least potentially.

Fatally for my inner messiahs, however, the book did not leave me with a desire to run a Dune campaign, but rather a 2d20 campaign. It was more that I wanted to see these systems in action than to unleash any sandworms. It’s tricky to pinpoint exactly why I don’t actually want to run a Dune campaign specifically - perhaps it was the knowledge of the amount of prep I’d have to put in. I can’t see myself just winging it and seeing what happened as I have been able to with a few other systems we’ve run in the past few years. More significantly, though, it also felt like the RPG wanted to trap me in a fiction that was too close to the book and movie for me to want to commit. I felt like maybe I wanted something in that universe, but not in that timeline. I wanted the flavour of Dune without the actuality. Getting to that would require work. 

I want to play a baroque space opera, but not this baroque space opera.

Frustrated, I cast my net a little wider and was reminded of the existence of The Metabarons RPG. If you know about Metabarons, which is genuinely my favourite comic series, then you will likely already know how influenced by Dune it already is. Hell, the series of written by the man behind the Dune movie that never happened, Alejandro Jodorowsky. That unmade move is the subject of a documentary that is worth watching simply for the ageing director’s wide-eyed flailing and descriptions of Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe sat upon a golden toilet. The friend I watched this with observed that they had rarely seen me shriek with delight or laughter in the same way as I did when watching Jodorowsky’s insane recollections of the project.

Regardless, I haven’t yet pulled the trigger on a second hand version of the RPG, because I suspect it just won’t be that good. The Wikipedia summary does tempt me with its Metabarony description, however: ““Progress in the game depends heavily on adhering to a personal (and in many cases, self-created) honor code, though not one usually based on a simple good/evil or wrong/right dichotomy, but on resisting the Necrodream, representing complacency, laziness and apathy.”

Resisting the Necrodream! Holy shit. Jodo is there, then, at least in spirit.

But we’ll see. There is more research to do over the summer. I even noticed that there is a baroque space opera RPG literally called Baroque Space Opera. I cannot attest for the quality of that, either, and it seems to me some midway point between 40k and Dune, which might be good, but is likely to be Not Good. The game’s SEO quality title nevertheless amused me. We should all aim for such simplicity.

Perhaps the truth is that the space messiahs inside me do not live to conquer the universe of my table time, but have instead been installed in a sort of imaginative mausoleum. This liminal place is where I can visit to remember the glories of the past, but is not a launchpad for exploring the present, or the future. What I have to conclude from my many complex Dune feelings is that my original attachment to Lynch’s movie is not about fandom, not about immersing and indulging myself in that particular universe, but instead about getting a sense of what it is about far-reaching space fantasy that I actually find compelling. It is not a landscape I need to explore or even holiday in, but something more like a signpost to undefined experiences yet to come. I am on this road, and travelling in that direction. And perhaps, more specifically, I am bound for science fiction universes that are still to be written. Perhaps we could even write one, eh Marsh?

Sounds like a lot of work, admittedly.

COMPUTER GAME ADDENDUM

Also: I tried to scratch the itch via another, digital vector. I picked up Dune: Spice Wars on Steam. Years ago now I used to be a computer games journalist, and back in that era this would have been precisely the kind of game I would have probably grudgingly reviewed for Eurogamer to pay my rent. Hell, I’d probably have tried to review it for a couple of different sites or magazines to make the time worthwhile. I was mercenary like that. Also, I would have been able to make reference to my childhood love of space messiahs. 

Anyway, Spice Wars is a surprisingly robust strategy game with real-time strategy limbs and grand strategy organs. It’s by the Shiro folk, those devs of Northgard and a few other solid titles, so it’s no surprise that they did (or are doing, since this Early Access situation) a decent job here. The factions play rather differently, and the presentation and Numbers Going Up all satisfy the mind.

Did it satisfying the Dune-y space messiah sci-fi psychic itch? No, dear reader, it did not. How could it? Balanced factions mean no Space Messiah for you. It’s all about faction warfare and diplomacy. Sietch out of Ten.

Editor’s note: I typed Dune: Spice Warts every time I mentioned this in my first draft, which struck me as moderately good as typos go.

LINKS!

• I have a deep love of Symbaroum, as you probably already know, and so I have been fascinated and scandalised to watch the progress of Ruins Of Symbaroum, which is the 5e adaptation of the setting. The Dicebreaker piece on the release summed up my hopes and fears, saying: “All of the same beats and plot elements show up, but the holistic experience comes off a little muted, its edges sanded down to fit a format better suited for hack-and-slash romps through dungeons than scrounging one’s way across 70 kilometres of unmapped wilderness.” To be clear: the setting is too good to not be more broadly appreciated, and this will allow that to happen as it is sprung upon the D&D community, but I fear it will also lose a little of its magic (not least the literal handling of magic) in the process. Further: Symbaroum itself, in its original format, is, for me, deeply flawed, and I would sincerely like to see a second edition that ironed out some of the issues I have with it. I can’t say whether this release increases or reduces the likelihood of that happening, but at least more people will get to enjoy that extraordinary world.

• Speaking of Eighties movies influencing RPG design, here’s a short post about adapting the 1983 movie Krull to the Cepheus Engine SRD. I would absolutely play a proper adaptation of that movie. What a singularity of low-budget, high-ambition Eighties movie making that was!

• The Gauntlet blog is always rich with commentary and observation, but I particularly liked this post on the different facets of being a good GM, which is part of a longer discussion about mastery of games at the table. “There are five aspects of the job I think strengthen play and define a good GM. These are aspects I try to be really conscious of. I’ve played at tables where the GMs doesn’t have a grip on these things– that’s what’s cemented my feeling about the importance of the GM role. As I suggested earlier, a good table can mitigate a weak GM, but that's paddling upstream.” 

• This lengthy playthrough video of Donogh McCarthy and his bearded friends delivering a “Crash Course” of Blades in the Dark (our own favourite game) seems like a rather useful tutorial resource. Definitely to be recommended if you bounced off the book, which I did too, the first time.

• I also watched a bunch of Inherit The Sand, which was a playthrough of Dune from The Glass Cannon Network having seen it recommend by - EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED - Jon Harper, the creator of Blades in the Dark. Harper rightly observes that Jared Logan is a particularly good GM for this game and setting.

• Research this month alighted upon this story of how a grievously injured crane had solved the issue of whether birds migrated, which in previous centuries was unknown. This stork was harpooned in Africa, but managed to make it to the Baltic with the weapon still imapled through its neck. “Upon inspection, the spear was found to be made of African wood, prompting the inescapable conclusion that, notwithstanding its injuries, the stork had managed to fly the 2,000 or so miles from the continent of Africa, from which it had migrated. The doubly unfortunate bird was killed and stuffed and mounted and is on display, complete with its spear, to this day in the University of Rostock’s Zoological Collection.” Lucky old University of Rostock’s Zoological Collection, that’s what I say. It’s always about the upside.

More soon! x