Dune starter set: Agents of Dune review

Agents of Dune is Modiphius’ starter set for their Dune RPG. It has a grand ambition, which is to teach roleplaying to people who have never played or run a ttrpg before, with play starting only a few minutes after opening the box. Does it succeed? It’s hard for me to say, because I’ve been roleplaying for over 40 years. 

But I’m going to try and figure that out anyway.

Caveats

I am not particularly a fan of Dune. I read Dune in school, and it was fine. (I may have been too young.) I may have tried to read some of the sequels. I can’t remember. 

I enjoyed the recent movies, but I don’t know the detailed lore.

Anyway, I bought this in Modipheus’ Black Friday sale. I wouldn’t have bought it at full price, but I did because I picked up the Masters of Dune campaign, and apparently, this is a lead-in. (And I also thought it might be helpful to understand the rules.)

I haven’t played or run the starter set – I have only read it. (Well, and run through a few scenes as a solo player.)

I’m definitely not the target audience for two reasons: I am an experienced roleplayer, and I’m not a Dune fan.

Given that, these are my thoughts.

Contents

The sturdy box contains:

One introduction leaflet, with a letter from the head of the PC’s house setting the scene and telling them they are taking over Arrakis from the Harkonnen. (Yes, this is an “alternate universe” version of Dune where the Harkonnen aren’t quite as vile as they are in the source material, and the handover to House Nagara isn’t a trap. You might not like this. I’m fine with it.) The back page has a summary of key rules: conflicts, attack sequence and determination.

Five 4-page pregenerated characters, all from House Nagara and including a mentat and a Bene Gesserit. The back page summarises the rules for skill tests.

Some counters with mysterious symbols. These aren’t always explained.

Five d20s with worms instead of 1s. They’re quite nice, and easy to read.

Two decks of cards, representing characters, assets and more. Standees are also provided.

Dice, counters, cards.

Handouts, trackers and maps. Various bits of card that are used during the game.

Adventure booklet. The core of the boxed set is a 116-page “campaign experience” that teaches the rules through a series of three acts, each divided into scenes. There’s a lot of text for the GM to read to the players – but they don’t need to read it all at once. Play can start pretty much as soon as the box is opened.

(Incidentally, here is a post from Modiphius outlining their approach to their starter set.)

The campaign experience

The campaign starts in Act 1 with the PCs being trained by the Harkonnens on Giedi Prime. Act 2 introduces the PCs to intrigue on Giedi Prime, while Act 3 moves the action to Arrakis. Each act is broken into scenes, with new rules introduced gradually. The story itself is quite fun, with dastardly Harkonnen, an assassination and spice harvesting on Arrakis.

So the first scene of Act 1 is “Seeking Discipline”. The PC’s shuttle is under attack. They are on the bridge and must first use the control panels to identify the problem. This is done by the GM reading out text, and the players responding to it (and rolling dice). Depending on the PC's actions (or the dice roll), the GM reads another paragraph.

So it’s a little like a choose-your-own-adventure, but with a GM.

My experience

To test it out, I took three PCs through the first few scenes, rolling dice and making player decisions. While it taught me the basics of the game, I’m not sure it was a good introduction to roleplaying. The focus is definitely on rolling dice rather than roleplaying, which seemed to be a bit of a miss.

And I expected the book to do less handholding as it went on, with the last few scenes presented more as a traditional adventure. But no.

While this approach is more restrictive than experienced players might like (there’s no tactical infinity here!), it allows for some intriguing moments that are effectively cut scenes. (For example, in an early scene, they are all attacked by traitors with dartguns. Friendly NPCs deal with the attackers (the scene is there to hint that all is not well on Giedi Prime), and the PCs aren’t in real danger – but there’s nothing they can do about it. I imagine some players may object to the lack of agency, but I didn’t mind this.)

Things that really didn’t work

I have no idea how successful this approach to teaching new players has been. I presume Modiphius tested it, but I don’t have any newbies to hand to try it out on. So I can’t tell.

But as I read through the campaign booklet, I tried to think about it as if I were new to ttrpgs. And I had a lot of issues…

Teaching being a GM: I’m not sure how well the game teaches being a GM. It teaches the rules, yes, but there’s more to being a GM than just knowing the rules. Even things as simple as sketching a map isn’t covered.

Scaling: Scaling challenges for different player counts isn’t explained. With my three test PCs, I found some extended tasks almost impossible. They would have been much easier with all five PCs, but there’s nothing that suggests you should be using all five, and nothing to advise a new GM what to do should they have fewer players.

Threat: Threat is the pool of GM tokens they can use to make the PC’s lives harder. The game explains how Threat is earned, and what it can be spent on, but it never explains when or why the GM should want to use it. Yes, I have a pool of Threat. So what? When should I spend it? And more importantly, why do I want to make things harder for my players? As GM, do I want them to fail?

Extended tasks: Extended tasks aren’t explained well. It took me a couple of readings to work it out – a diagram with the difficulty and boxes to be crossed off would have gone a long way. I ended up creating these anyway, but I suspect a new GM might have struggled.

Traps for the unwary GM: At one point the PCs are expected to ask about a prisoner – but the preceding text doesn’t mention a prisoner. And there’s no guidance on which of the PCs to use, if you’re not using all five. It turns out that one of them is critical!

And there are loads of odd little points that I picked up that a newbie might not. Why is the Move skill used to install a security system? Why is Determination used to buy a warehouse? And what on earth is going on with conflicts?

Okay, that last one isn’t a little point. It’s a huge point, so let’s talk about the system.

Dune’s system

Maybe new players take to Dune’s system like a duck to water, but I found it extremely odd. 

2d20

So Dune is an iteration of Modiphius’ 2d20 system. This essentially means for every task, players roll 2d20 and try to roll under the target number. The target number depends on each character’s Drive and Skill (added together), and the difficulty of the task indicates how many successes a player needs.

Spare successes can be used to build something called Momentum, which can be spent for various things – most often, more dice to roll.

So those are the basics. So far, so good. The problem (for me) arises with Drives and Skills.

Drives and Skills

Each character has five Drives and five Skills.

The Skills are Battle, Communicate, Discipline, Move, and Understand. They’re pretty self-explanatory, apart from Discipline, which is stamina and willpower.

The Drives are Duty (what is your responsibility), Faith (what your heart says), Justice (what is right), Power (what you want), and Truth (what the facts are).

And here are some tests the campaign book asks for

• Figuring out what is wrong at a control station.
• Deactivating an alarm system.
• Install spy eyes and listening devices.
• Rescuing a spice harvester from a sandworm attack.

While it’s usually clear what Skill to use (but not always – Discipline seems to have various uses), choosing the correct Drive seems fraught with confusion. And the GM and players have precious little guidance – they’re left to their own. 

And if I struggled with choosing the right Drive (why not always pick the highest?), it’s hard to imagine that new players will find it easy.

NPCs

Maybe things are different in the core rules, but the stats for NPCs are just like the stats for PCs.

This may just be me, but I like NPCs to have a cut-down set of stats. Frankly, in Dune, all a GM needs are typical target numbers to suit different levels of NPCs.

Maybe I’d make an exception for main NPCs, but most NPCs are bit parts and only need to be a couple of lines.

Why bring this up? Well, because there is stuff hidden in a statblock that is easily missed. For example, during Act 2, the PCs meet Sabrya Zavr, a CHOAM negotiator. We are given her full stats (see above), and her focus for “Communicate” (the skill she uses in the scene we meet her) is “Negotiation.” And because that focus applies to the task at hand, she rolls a critical if she rolls below her skill (Communicate – 7) instead of just rolling a 1. So she’s a super powerful foe in the negotiations that the PCs are carrying out – but this isn’t called out in the text; it’s only apparent if the GM pays attention to her stat block.

I know I would find it easier to have cut-down stat blocks for NPCs. I’m pretty sure new GMs would too.

Conflicts

Which brings me to conflicts. These cover situations that go beyond a simple series of skill checks. Although the starter set explains what they are, it doesn’t really explain why anyone would use the conflict rules rather than just skill checks. Instead, the conflict rules are introduced when the starter set uses them.

There are several types of conflict – negotiations, duels, skirmishes, and more. All of them use the same core minigame rules, which involve moving your assets into enemy zones and preventing your enemy from doing the same to you. Some actions let you move enemy assets, which I found a bit weird.

Anyway, I have a couple of issues with conflicts. (Although this is based mainly on what I’ve read, and solo playing one of the conflicts out in the book. Maybe they are better in a full game. I guess they must be, given they are a core part of the Dune RPG.)

First, they don’t feel like roleplaying to me. I’m not that keen when ttrpgs turn into miniature wargames when combat breaks out, and playing out a conflict is like playing a board game.

Second, I’m not sure how well I would run them. One of the reasons I don’t like running combat is that I’m juggling so many other things that I don’t really play the enemies particularly effectively. I forget bonuses, special attacks, and the like. I don’t use cover and special rules very well – I just forget while I’m trying to manage the players, plot, NPCs, and everything else. (If you want to give players a real challenge in their combats, bring in another player to play their enemies… But that’s another topic.) So I’m pretty sure I’d be rubbish at running conflicts.

Third, I am not convinced they feel like the things they are representing. The negotiation, for example, feels nothing like a negotiation and is instead a short board game. Maybe that’s not the case for conflicts, but the negotiation didn’t feel like a negotiation for me.

CHOAM negotiations

From a new GM’s perspective, I have other issues.

• How does one set up a typical conflict? The ones in the starter set don’t seem to have any coherent pattern. The negotiation is very abstract (is it used for all negotiation conflicts?), while the skirmish uses a map. What’s the difference? It’s not explained.
• In a couple of cases, there are special rules. For example, in the negotiation conflict, Sabrya Zavr goes twice. Why? Is that a general rule or a special case for this conflict?

As is probably obvious, I haven’t got my head around conflicts. They may be the best thing about the Dune RPG, but I probably won’t find out until I try them in battle. However, for a new GM, I am not convinced that the starter set explains them well.

Spice harvesting

Harvesting spice has its own mini-game, complete with an irrelevant map. Spice appears, and the PCs decide where to place their harvesters. Sandworms may appear, and Fremen may attack. And if the harvester survives all of this, then we find out if the harvest has been successful.

Harvesting spice on an irrelevant map.

A couple of oddities.

• The spice blow token in that zone modifies the difficulty of the roll for spice production. But it’s not clear if it’s modified upwards or downwards. I think it’s supposed to be modified downwards, so a +2 spice blow represents lots of spice (with increased chance of sandworms), but that should mean it’s easier to harvest.
• The minigame does not reflect that the PCs are the leaders of House Nagara and would have teams of people to do all this for them. Instead, they are running around, making the rolls themselves. (For example, the PCs must make Move rolls to save a harvester threatened by a sandworm. Move? Eh?)
• If the harvest is successful, the PCs can invest in more harvesters. But this just means the PCs are even more stretched as nobody else is making the rolls…

Dune RPG starter set – my overall thoughts

While I like the idea of creating a starter set that lets new players start playing within minutes of opening the box, I’m not sure Agents of Dune works. I like the idea of learning the game as you go along, but I would have preferred a more traditional ttrpg scenario that an experienced GM could use straight from the book.

I’m glad it wasn’t my first ttrpg experience.

Worse, the starter set hasn’t made me want to try the Dune RPG. From what I can see, the system is unintuitive, fiddly and has systems I don’t understand. And I’m no more a fan of the setting than I was before. I could be wrong about the rules, but the starter set hasn’t inspired me to give it a go.