# Dune: Adventures in the Imperium *Created:* 2026-11-01, *Modified:* 2026-11-02 ![[Dune - Adventures in the Imperium (cover).jpg]] Most licensed games quietly hope you have come to play the hero. **Dune: Adventures in the Imperium** hands you the people who keep a noble House upright instead — the Mentat, the Swordmaster, the Suk doctor, the consort, the assassin — and leaves Paul Atreides to get on with his destiny somewhere off in the corner. Before anyone writes down a personal detail, the group builds the House they all serve: how much power it holds, what it is famous for, and which of its neighbours would be delighted to see it fall. It runs on Modiphius' 2d20, the engine already fitted to [[Star Trek Adventures]] and Conan, but this is the version that changed it most, and every change points at the same ambition — a game where an implication at a banquet and a knife in an alley are the same kind of problem, settled by the same rules. ## Setting The game opens in the year 10,191 of the Imperial Calendar, at the end of the era the first novel describes. Humanity has spent ten thousand years learning to live without thinking machines and has produced people who do the work instead: Mentats whose minds store and process data perfectly, Bene Gesserit adepts with absolute control over their own nerves and muscles, Guild Navigators who fold space by looking at it. The Great Schools train them, CHOAM sells what they produce, and the Landsraad gives their Houses a forum in which to be exquisitely polite to one another in public. Spice underwrites the whole arrangement — without melange the Guild cannot navigate, and without the Guild nothing moves. The player characters are the agents of a single House, and that House's standing is the campaign's difficulty dial. A **Nascent House** has only just clawed its way to Minor status and has no enemies worth naming yet; a **Great House** commands legions and is surrounded by rivals who would prefer it gone before it starts looking at the throne. The book is unusually direct that the second is not automatically the better game: *"The more renowned and dangerous your House is, the more deadly your opponents will be. You have been warned!"* ### Eras of Play Ten thousand years is a lot of history to hand a group, so the book splits it into six eras and says plainly which one it means: *"It is at the end of this era that we have set this game."* - **Butlerian Jihad** — revolution and war against the thinking machines, before the Houses of the Landsraad and before the Great Schools, when the old technologies are being thrown away out of necessity. - **Reconstruction** — humanity victorious and sworn never again to build a machine in the likeness of a human mind; the Houses and the Imperial government are established, and the Schools of the Mentats, the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild form to replace what was lost. - **The Imperium** — the default. Thousand-year-old traditions, a cold war between Houses, assassins behind any corner, and spice as the most precious commodity in existence. The remaining three — the Ascension of Muad'Dib, the Scattering and the Age of the Enemy — each carry their own notes and suggested reading from the extended novels. **Fall of the Imperium** is the campaign that walks a House out of the third era and into the fourth. ## Mechanics ### Agents and Architects The largest structural idea in the book is that play happens at two levels. In **agent-level** play the characters go and do the thing themselves: the duel, the infiltration, the negotiation. In **architect-level** play they push assets around from a distance — a general moving troops, a spymaster waking a sleeper, a ruler spending a favour. Any character can work at either level, and the book expects the group to drift between them according to what assets are in hand and how the players want to approach the problem, rather than according to how the adventure was written. ### House Creation The House comes first, and it is a group act rather than a solo one, because it decides both what kind of characters can be built and what kind of campaign this is. Four types set the scale, and each one fixes how much land the House holds and how much trouble the gamemaster starts each session with: - **Nascent House** — one secondary domain; no starting Threat. - **House Minor** — one primary and one secondary domain; 1 Threat per player. - **House Major** — one primary and two secondary domains; 2 Threat per player. - **Great House** — two primary and three secondary domains; 3 Threat per player. Then the group picks what those domains are known for (down to their areas of expertise), the House's homeworld, its banners and arms, a handful of House traits, the roles the characters hold inside it, and at least one enemy. The core book is honest that this is the narrative skeleton only — *"In later supplements we will be expanding the detail of Noble Houses and providing systems to manage their vast resources"* — and the supplement that did it is **The Great Game** (2023). ### Character Creation A character is two traits and two ladders. The traits are a position, which always names the House (*House Atreides' Master of Assassins*), and a reputation (*Just and Wise*, *Callous and Ruthless*); a third may appear for a second loyalty, such as *Suk Doctor*, *Mentat Conditioning* or *Bene Gesserit Sister*. The ladders are five skills and five drives, each rated from 4 to 8. The skills are **Battle**, **Communicate**, **Discipline**, **Move** and **Understand**. The drives are **Duty**, **Faith**, **Justice**, **Power** and **Truth** — and they are the game's replacement for attributes, which this version of 2d20 does not use at all. Each drive carries a statement, and that statement is what decides whether the character may spend Determination on a test. Planned creation runs concept → archetype → skills → focuses → talents → drives and statements → assets; the book also covers building a character mid-play and the supporting characters a House needs to function. ### Skill Tests Every test adds one skill to one drive for a target number, then rolls two d20s. Each die at or under the target is a success, and a 1 is a critical worth two. A **focus** that applies widens the critical band: any die at or under the skill itself becomes a critical rather than a plain success. Beat the Difficulty — 0 to 5, set by the gamemaster and raisable with Threat — and the action lands. Miss, and the character may still *succeed at a cost*, taking what they wanted along with the consequences. Difficulty 0 tests exist and are not a formality: you cannot fail them, but the successes still generate Momentum, which is how a group's preparation converts into an advantage before a fight starts. ### Momentum, Threat, and Complications Successes beyond the Difficulty become Momentum. It can be spent immediately to buy extra d20s (the first costs 1, the second 2, the third 3, and no more than three may ever be bought), to ask the gamemaster a further question, or to create and change traits in the scene. Unspent Momentum goes into a shared pool that holds at most six — and one point evaporates at the end of every scene, so hoarding is a losing strategy. Momentum granted by a talent or an asset is bonus Momentum, which cannot be banked at all. Every 20 rolled is a complication, which lands once the test resolves: a negative trait, a barred action, one point of extra Difficulty, or half again as long to do the thing. A player may buy one off for two points of Threat, and the gamemaster may trade a complication in for the same two points when nothing interesting suggests itself. Threat is the gamemaster's counterweight and the other half of the economy. For non-player characters it buys dice on the same escalating scale, raises a test's Difficulty by one per two points, buys off their complications, rewrites traits, and — for a single point — brings an enemy House into the scene. ### Determination One point at the start of each adventure, three at most. It may be spent when the drive being tested has a statement that genuinely supports the action, which makes Determination a reward for playing the character's convictions rather than the character's best numbers. Spend it for an automatic critical — declaring one die a 1 and not rolling it — or to re-roll any number of dice in the pool. ### Conflict Every conflict runs on the same chassis: **assets** and **zones**. An asset is anything a character controls and can wield, tangible or not, and the same company of House troops can attack in a war, guard against infiltration, or stand in a parade to overawe a guest. Zones are the space the conflict occupies, and they scale from six corners of an alley to two whole planets. The five forms — **dueling**, **skirmish**, **espionage**, **warfare** and **intrigue** — differ in framing and in which assets suit them rather than in their bones; intrigue zones float free, every zone counting as adjacent to every other, where a skirmish needs clear lines between them. A group that finds zones fiddly may run the whole thing in one zone, which the book explicitly allows. ## Editions - **Dune: Adventures in the Imperium** (2021) — the 336-page core rulebook, and the only edition of the game. The text has also been issued in Atreides, Harkonnen and Corrino collector's bindings and an Imperial limited edition: same book, different boards. *In the library.* ## Supplements - **Wormsign Quickstart Guide** (2021) — free introduction to the rules and the setting, and the cheapest way to find out whether the two-level structure is for you. - **Agents of Dune** (2022) — a deluxe starter set built as a campaign rather than a demo: a 116-page adventure that walks a group through play step by step, five character folios for House Nagara, two 50-card decks of NPCs, assets and traits, a spice-harvesting system, handouts, zone maps, tokens and trackers. The premise is a pointed "what if" — your House is appointed governor of Arrakis, and the Imperium is watching to see whether you can keep the spice flowing. - **Sand and Dust** (2022) — the 156-page Arrakis sourcebook: the planet's history and features, Fremen player characters with rules for riding the great sandworms, spice harvesting and the people who smuggle and stockpile it, gazetteers of Carthag and Arrakeen, campaign options for smugglers, Fremen and merchants, and the adventure *The Water Must Flow*. - **Masters of Dune** (2022) — a 166-page campaign in nine chapters, runnable on its own or straight on from **Agents of Dune**: seeking the Fremen's trust, space battles on the Guild's behalf, Giedi Prime, spice mining, the Bene Gesserit's tests, and politicking on Kaitain against the Emperor and the Landsraad. - **The Great Game: Houses of the Landsraad** (2023) — 128 pages taking the campaign off Arrakis and into the Imperium: the politics of the Landsraad, the rules of *kanly* and how to run a war of assassins, expanded CHOAM and Spacing Guild options, dossiers on the major Houses, rules for space travel with or without the Guild, world building for the million worlds, and the House-management system the core book promised. - **Power and Pawns: The Emperor's Court** (2023) — 144 pages on Kaitain and the court: Sardaukar, Tleilaxu Face Dancers, Twisted Mentats, Ginaz Swordmasters and Suk graduates as player characters, six new drives, Ix and the technology of House Vernius, guidance on running political campaigns, and the adventure *Blood and Riches*. - **Fall of the Imperium** (2024) — a 144-page campaign sourcebook that runs the events of the novel while leaving your House's fate open: four Acts of three adventures each, the Qizarate as a new faction, and guidance on carrying a campaign into the new regime after Paul takes the throne. Beyond the books, the line carries a Gamemaster's Toolkit (a four-panel screen with a 32-page booklet of intrigues, encounters and an adventure generator), Agent and Architect asset decks, a Player's Journal, custom d20 sets, and a run of PDF adventures — **Desertfall**, **Desert Flower**, **Shaitan's Bargain**, **Time Becomes a Narrow Door**, **Coriolis Storm**, **Kernels of Doubt** and **Fatal Journey** — four of which are collected in **Desert Planet: Adventure Compendium Vol. 1**. ## References - [Dune: Adventures in the Imperium — Modiphius](https://modiphius.net/en-us/collections/dune-adventures-in-the-imperium) - [The official game site](https://www.dunerpg.com/) - [Core Rulebook, Standard Edition — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/338242/Dune--Adventures-in-the-Imperium--Core-Rulebook-Standard-Edition) - [Review — Cannibal Halfling Gaming](https://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2021/04/28/dune-adventures-in-the-imperium-review) - [Review — Tabletop Gaming](https://www.tabletopgaming.co.uk/dune-adventures-in-the-imperium-review) - [Review — The Black Campbell](https://blackcampbell.com/2024/05/11/review-dune-adventures-in-the-imperium-rpg) - [Review — The Game Dork's Gaming Corner](http://www.gamedorkscorner.com/2021/09/rpg-review-dune-adventures-in-imperium.html)