Review: Dune’s New TTRPG Understands What Makes The Book Great

Dune: Adventures in the Empire is a new tabletop RPG that perfectly captures the feel of its original material. Editors Modiphius Entertainment have focused on the scope of Frank Herbert’s epic political power struggle, but also on the intimacy of his personal conflicts. And they’ve done it with ambition and scale, plus a couple of nifty opposing mechanics.

Together they create a give and take so exquisitely Dune which extends beyond the interactions of the individual characters and into the meta narrative of the campaign itself. The result is a stalemate between players and the game master (GM) that constantly threatens nuclear annihilation and the total collapse of the Galactic Empire. In other words, it’s a fantastically tense and fun game night.

Dune: Adventures in the Empire it relies on conventional 20-sided dice for its skill tests, much like Dungeons & Dragons. But it also introduces a secondary set of resources that can have much larger implications on the table. Momentum is generated when players exceed success in a task. Each task, such as opening a door, has a required number of successes. So if players get three successes to open a door that only requires two, the additional success will become Momentum. The boost can then be spent to facilitate subsequent challenges or to overcome an obstacle using brute force.

The impetus will be to spend Momentum early and often, but doing so can put the group at a disadvantage later on. That’s because spending Momentum creates a threat, a separate resource that game masters can use to make things more challenging. Perhaps GMs use Threat to increase the difficulty of a given encounter, or to launch a nasty curveball in the form of more enemies or unexpected twists in the story. It’s fun on a micro level, with individual characters struggling to survive. But the game itself, like the original novel, has a much greater scope than that.

Adventures in the Empire operates on an unusually large scale compared to other TTRPGs. During character creation, players will not create a single character. Instead, they will create an entire House: a collection of highborn characters and their blue-collar and white-collar entourage, as well as the planet, their society, and the culture that surrounds them. Things may start with just two characters fighting with swords on the surface of Arrakis, but by the end of your campaign, players will be controlling entire platoons of soldiers and weaponry. From there, it’s just a jump and a jump into a galaxy-wide battle for power. And, even at that scale, Momentum and Threat are still looming over the table.

I only saw my players use Momentum once during our first game night, to help themselves escape the jaws of a sandworm. In a moment of utter desperation, they made a hopeful final athletic check to get to safety. The momentum barely pushed them to the limit, and when they did, everyone applauded, including me. It was a moment of pure joy.

But it left me, the DJ, with a powerful choice: What if I undo that success, either in that case or later in the future?

As with any TTRPG, the DJ must show restraint. That’s especially true for something as powerful as Threat. It would have been easy, maybe even fun, for me to throw a wrench at their escape, collapsing the rock they landed on and sending them tumbling back into the worm’s mouth. But would it have been fun for someone else?

When used as a club, Threat has the potential to turn bad judgment calls into hurt feelings – a great way to make sure no one leaves the session happy. But, when used subtly, Threat offers one of the most fantastic ways to increase tension and organically introduce the rhythms of history that I have ever seen in a TTRPG.

Instead of messing with the damage numbers behind a DJ screen, the game master can make players sit up and pay attention by directly saying, “I am spending one Threat to reinforce enemy troops and two Threats to introduce the roars. of a sandworm. “Alternatively, Threat can be used to suddenly drop a new character drawn from a House’s backstory into the mix. Perhaps a player fails a skill check that is based on their Bene Gesserit training. As the DJ using Threat, he could leave an old mentor on the sidelines, glaring at him disapprovingly. Threat can be a powerful storytelling tool, as well as a tool for violence, one that allows for great “oh shit” moments at the table.

That is especially true when the group realizes that it has been accumulating threats since the first session.

TTRPG rules are often just guidelines for playing. They are always present and important, but they rarely connect to the core of the universe. Dune: Adventures in the Empire He accepts the rules wholeheartedly, creating a system that really feels like everything is on the edge of the abyss, hoping someone will take too much of his advantage. In short, it looks a lot like Dune.

Dune: Adventures in the Empire it was revised with a final commercial version provided by Modiphius Entertainment. Vox Media has affiliate associations. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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