Masters of Dune review

This is a first-impressions review of Masters of Dune, a campaign for the Dune: Adventures in the Imperium rpg. I’ve only read Masters of Dune, and below I explain why I’m unlikely to ever run it.

Masters of Dune is a 166-page campaign for the Dune rpg. Set over nine chapters, it continues directly from the Agents of Dune starter set (which I reviewed here) and puts the PCs in charge of Arrakis in a distinctly hostile universe.

Each campaign chapter consists of three or four acts, and between them, they cover all the elements you’d expect from an epic Dune campaign: the emperor, the Harkonnens, the Bene Gesserit, the Fremen and so on. The chapters are designed to be experienced in almost any order – bookended by Chapter One (the campaign’s start) and Chapter Nine (its finale).

Along the way, the PCs must deal with Harkonnen treachery, scheming houses, broker deals with powerful factions, learn the ways of the Fremen, and more. As they progress through the campaign, their actions will cause various indices to rise and fall, charting their house’s success and influence. Masters of Dune is everything you’d expect from an alternate-universe Dune campaign.

But I have no interest in running Masters of Dune. 

Why don’t I want to run Masters of Dune?

To be honest, there are a range of reasons. But these are the key ones:

I don’t really like Dune’s 2d20 system. As I explained in my review of the starter set, I’ve bounced off Dune’s system. It’s not the 2d20 system itself, it’s the combination of drives, skills, threat and conflicts that I find hard to grok. In the hands of an expert, I imagine the system works just fine – but it feels like a steeper learning curve than I can face.

I’m not a Dune fan. Masters of Dune rewards fans of the Dune books. I’ve seen the recent films, and I read Dune many decades ago. It’s fine, I’m not really a fan. So there were a lot of things that didn’t make complete sense.

So it was clear I was missing some things (what is kanly?), but I didn’t care enough to look them up.

However, as important as it is for the GM to understand the Dune universe, it’s as important that the players understand it as well. The PCs play the head of House Nagara – and I would expect the characters to be fully familiar with the politicking and negotiation that such positions bring. And yet, on several occasions, I felt that the campaign would let unwary players make decisions that their characters would never make.

Deeply political: On occasions, the campaign is deeply political, presenting numerous NPCs with their own agendas for the PCs to interact with. Not only do I find this a challenge as a GM, but it’s also a challenge for the players. It also reminds me that while I really like political games, I like them as larps, where each faction is played by its own player (or players). I struggle with political ttrpgs, just because I find it hard as a GM to keep everything in my head.

Flawed structure: Masters of Dune’s structure is such that the chapters are self-contained and address a single faction: the Bene Gesserit, the Harkonnen, the Emperor, and so on. They can be played in any order (some chapters contain triggers that happen when certain conditions arise), and some chapters might not even be used.

This is all very well, but it makes no sense to me to play the campaign this way. I would want to break the chapters up so that they are intermingled. So I would introduce the early parts of some chapters early in the campaign, and slowly introduce more complications leading to a climax.

There’s nothing stopping me from doing that, of course, but it means dismantling the whole campaign and rebuilding it.

Unhelpful layout: At first glance, there’s nothing wrong with the layout: two columns on each page, lots of headers and subheaders, a smattering of nice artwork. It’s only when I got into the details that I found a few problems.

Namely, the bullets and bold text are used inconsistently. Sometimes the text is broken up into bullet points (making them stand out and easier to read), but at other times it describes several different scenes the GM might present, hidden behind a wall of text. Bullet points would make them clearer, and I’m not sure why Masters of Dune is so inconsistent.

And the “map” on page 65 is so small and faint it’s virtually unusable. Why wasn’t this given a page of its own? (To be fair, the map is clearer in the pdf, as you can see below. Physically, the map is printed in grey and I found it unreadable.) 

Errors: Masters of Dune contains more errors than I expected:

• There are a lot of “see p.XX” errors – possibly more than I’ve seen in any other book.
• Most of the text on page 135 is repeated on page 136.
• At the end of the first chapter, on page 27, Masters of Dune describes the next steps the players might take and directs the GM to different chapters. Except that’s not how most of those chapters work. For example, while the players might want to seek an alliance with the Fremen, the Fremen chapter starts with the PC’s ornithopter crashing in a remote spot on Arrakis and then befriending some nearby Fremen. They can’t really choose to do that. And the Spacing Guild only becomes involved when the spice supply is threatened.

Overall

So, Masters of Dune isn’t for me.

It’s certainly an epic campaign, and in the hands of a good GM, I expect it’s brilliant. But for me, I would need to overcome my disinterest in Dune’s system and setting and rewrite the campaign’s structure. And I have other games I would rather play.