Wind, Sand and Stars: reconstructing Dune pt. 1

Villeneuve’s Dune follows the dictum “art is deletion.” The director loves nearly-flat textures and deep bass drones and minimalism and brutalism and the Bene Gesserit

and deletes much of the rest – the Guild, Mentats, Herbert’s eccentric approach to scifi, computers, and space travel, the Duniverse’s long, repetitive history of Jihad.

Bravo. A strong editorial hand is simply necessary for making a film out of Herbert’s sprawling, invention-filled novels. You can’t make a Dune film without breaking ergs.

But that leaves a lot of potential Dunes on the cutting-room floor. So this post and the one after it are about other choices you could make to construct a campaign out of Dune’s ingredients.

Also, I have a sense that some players are reluctant to engage with Dune, either because they think they need to learn a wall of lore or because they don’t find it inhabitable. Han Solo opened up a giant door into Star Wars – you didn’t need to be an Important Person, you didn’t need a ready-made destiny plot, you could just be smuggling around the galaxy, fixing your jump drive with a kick, shooting scaly anteaters in dive bars. My hope is that these posts might open up some doors into what Dune has to offer – how you could play as someone other than Paul. In terms of scope, I too am afraid of the wall of lore that Dune develops in its later volumes. I restrict myself to the first 2 books, the bit covered by Villeneuve’s trilogy.

The title of this post, BTW, is stolen from Saint-Exupéry’s memoir of delirious revelations he had concerning the state of humanity, machines, and God while stumbling away from a plane crash in the Sahara. He fell from the sky and was rescued by Bedouin and felt himself stripped of everything but his humanity and maybe some wisps of divine protection.

“When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.”

I highly recommend it as fuel for a dream-logic Dune, connected by spore-tendrils to Frank Herbert’s blue-tinged musings on consciousness-expansion.

The Ingredients

Film schools tend to teach that stories are made out of characters, plot and setting, in that priority order. Get the characters right, you’re fine. Have them do some plot while you’re learning who they are. Nice. The setting is tertiary and basically interchangeable.

I think that’s why SF and fantasy movies so often come out wrong – they put setting at the bottom of the pile, when setting is the reason why a story is SF or fantasy. What if, instead, we think about stories having a heart (the reason the story exists), a skeleton (structure, often borrowed), and sinews – the parts that mobilize the narrative, that drive it along, provide reasons and resolutions. Those sinews are often lumped in with setting but they’re not the same: setting is kinda akin to fluff, sinews to crunch. You might be able to reskin a setting, but only if you get the sinews right, because they make it work. The ingredients I’m interested in are the sinews.

But let’s get the heart out of the way first. Dune is, like Star Wars, mostly a pastiche, and superficially the two look identical: little guys against a big empire (a familiar theme around here).* Original Star Wars’s heart is Kurosawa Samurai epics plus Dambusters or, to put it another way, “honor and daring ingenuity can beat any giant structure.” People talk about SW being good vs evil but the goodness of the heroes (and even the specialness of Jedi), especially in the first outing, is secondary to their quality of daring, of defying the odds and doing it anyway. Dune’s heart is Lawrence of Arabia:** “every triumph contains the seed of its own destruction.” And the more absolutely you start out as the hero, the more certain you are to become an agent of villainy. In Lawrence it’s super explicit: his success before the intermission is punished after it. And retrospectively you can see his failure was always there, waiting to be expressed. Dune makes it explicit by having characters who can see the future, so it doesn’t have to be retrospective: Paul, the Bene Gesserit, and various others can see the tragic arc, the rot in the bud, at every moment. They can sense the destination but they take the journey anyway.

* obviously I’m only talking about the first Dune book and the first SW movie here… well, maybe the first SW trilogy. We do not speak of anything above the number 3, ever.
** I mean only the movie Lawrence of Arabia, which is different in many ways from the memoir from which it draws. Movie Lawrence’s heart is partly borrowed from Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. And the movie of that is also a very good companion piece for all of this. It should clear up any confusion about whether Paul’s a straightforward White Saviour (he isn’t).

Also yes I know, both Lawrence and The Sabres of Paradise are cited as literary inspirations for Dune. When I’ve read Sabres I’ll get back to you about what its heart is.

see, that’s really the sinews

But Dune is not only that Big Theme, it’s also things revealed to Herbert by magic mushrooms (Jungian things about the wise power of women; eccentric things about how gay men are destined to go into the army). They’re a grab-bag but for Herbert they’re all Deep Truths. Mankind as a species is threatened by stagnation. An unexamined life is not worth living. Machines and comfort are counter-evolutionary. Nothing boosts growth like death. Nietzschean type stuff, mostly. And those things are what the sinews express.

1: Factions

Instead of Star Wars’s unitary Evil Empire, Dune offers a giant cage match of multiple, cross-cutting power interests with specialized realms of control and unique abilities, like highland Sri Lanka or the video game Hero’s Hour. Here’s the special thing Dune brings to this: even though they have different aims and they play on different chessboards, these factions can only make temporary alliances because they’re working towards philosophical/eschatological end-games, that only they really understand. Each one believes they must be in control, and soon, before the next apocalypse. Everyone has heard about the last apocalypse 10,000 years ago and is sure another one is just around the corner. When it comes, all mankind will be glad that they, faction (X), are in control.

The most familiar chessboard contains the Great Houses and the Emperor who are pretty much the Holy Roman Empire but spread over a galaxy. Compare them with Game of Thrones: the Houses compete in marriage, diplomacy and war. They have special strengths and weaknesses (and you can make more up at will). The visible parts of their courts are also the same size as GoT’s Houses – a nuclear family, a few servants, an advisor. Dune’s Houses are distinctive in also having hereditary bureaucratic functions, so imagine, say, the Harkonnens as the Bushes, with ancestral control over the CIA, and the Atreides as the Kennedys, born to run the State Department. Or the Tafts as the IRS dynasty. Houses could have any weird eschatology you can dream up but they’re mostly all worried that the Emperor isn’t doing a good job of staving off the apocalypse, so he must be replaced. Coincidentally becoming emperor would allow a House to pay off its enormous debts to over-mighty bankers from the Imperial coffers.

The Holy Roman Empire as a constellation, from the boardgame A Pragmatic War, which I now want to play.

Dune’s special sauce here, which changes everything, is that the Houses and Emperor are in a political tripod with CHOAM – the honorable company that holds a monopoly on all interstellar trade and which controls (like OPEC) the flow of Spice. (the full name, Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles, means exactly the previous sentence) Real power (and unlimited money) comes from a directorship in CHOAM. CHOAM locks the Houses together: no matter how many of your children they’ve killed, you still have to cooperate with the other CHOAM directors, or nobody gets profits. And CHOAM depends on (is really an arm of) The Guild, which has a (near?) monopoly on interstellar transport. (CHOAM also incidentally recasts all the Houses as colonists of their homeworlds rather than feudal fiefholders – they’re concerned with cash crops for the external market).

Of course the Guild keeps its closest eye on the Emperor, who can dispense great gifts (like contracts for Arrakis) but can’t hold onto them, making him maybe more of a Trobriand Island chieftain than a Habsburg or a Roman-style emperor.

Thufir among the CHOAM Directors

Being Emperor is like being a noble but more so: first among equals, he has no friends. There’s no step up, only down. And his Sardaukar legions are like Varangian guards or the Caliph’s mamluks – they’re the world’s strongest army so they’re well placed to seize power themselves.

The Guild controls all interstellar transport and has its own bureaucracy, training school, religion, and god knows what else. It’s ruled by Guild Navigators, who can see the future and don’t like it. They know they’ll never be more profitable than they are right now, and right now their profits depend on their transport monopoly, which in turn depends on:
(a) a technological edge – giant interstellar-capable ships;
(b) Spice – a drug that lets you travel safely between stars if you get high enough and have spent centuries turning yourself into a Guild Navigator.
If anyone else replicates these technologies, the Guild’s profits will plummet and it will lose its stranglehold (through CHOAM) on money and politics.
So the Guild spies on everyone to make sure they’re not developing transport or spice-like technologies, and tries to maintain stability while knowing that there’s nothing harder than preventing change on a big historical scale.

Things that makes the Guild interesting as a faction:
– better spying via mysterious future-sight, which is largely “seeing probable outcomes.”
– unmatched mobility and secrecy – the Guild knows whom it has transported and to where, but nobody else knows where the Guild’s ships are. They could be servicing a whole other Empire for all the nobles know. There are hints that they service some planetary systems that aren’t part of the Empire but are… in hiding? In wait? Supplying secret goods?
– truly unpredictable political alliances. They alone don’t want to be Emperor instead of the Emperor. Maybe they want to replace the Emperor with a more secure or weaker one but only to keep the Houses out of their business.
– highly predictable triggers: they don’t want innovation, especially in spaceship technologies. They want to control every gram of Spice. They don’t want anyone to know things they don’t know.
But…
– they’re total unable to hide their nature. Their top ranks have mutated (gotta say I like Lynch’s interpretation, which looks utterly inhuman) so they have to do any spy work through intermediaries.
– they’re totally dependent on huffing enormous, expensive vats of Spice, which have to be continually replenished. The Spice must flow because without it (a) there is no space empire, but also (b) the Guild will come down off their millenia-long high like lizards falling off Balinese palace walls.

“scratch a little to the left. There! I know you’re going to poke me in the eye and I forgive you.”

The political tripod has some interesting effects on war and diplomacy. Outright war between Houses requires armies to be transported by the Guild, and nobody can afford to be cut off by the Guild, so any war-fighting has to be negotiated with them first – you don’t want your invasion force to be denied a ride back home. The Guild is “strictly neutral” but even more strictly in favour of long-term stability (which might involve removing you, troublesome Duke!). So you tend to get limited wars – mostly of spies and assassins, mostly leading to situations the Guild considers more stable. That’s one reason why CHOAM directorships are the real Victory Points – you don’t have to transport them.

So playing a noble or seneschal of a House really offers three modes, that you can slip between for different situations.

• Out in the provinces, where the Guild doesn’t care so much what you do, it’s like Game of Thrones: each House stands atop ornery, maybe rebellious subjects, and other Houses’ assassins could blame a noble’s death on their own local troubles. Spying on what other Houses are doing is a survival tactic. Being able to report anything improper to the Emperor or Guild is a bargaining chip.
• In formal settings, like the Emperor’s Court, you’re under the full glare of Diplomacy but you’re also doing all the business of Dynasty, so think of the betrayals and ridicules of Versailles, the intrigues of Richelieu, hurried missions for Musketeers that have to be completed before the next public Ball. Outright assassination at the Imperial Court is liable to spook the Guild but making others look like bad partners/marriage prospects is exactly what it’s all about.
• CHOAM meetings are about trade negotiations and shipping contracts, which means doing favours for Guild ministers and competing to sell your goods across the Galaxy in preference to the goods of other Houses. Interstellar shipping is very expensive, so those goods will all be either great luxuries or special innovations your finest engineers have dreamed up… as long as they don’t stray anywhere near long-haul spaceship tech or computing (more on that below). Most of all, though, CHOAM meetings are about getting access to Spice. The Guild is the biggest customer, but everyone wants Spice because it extends life. So obviously the Dukes and Barons want it but it’s also the best thing in the world for keeping their advisors, administrators and army chiefs loyal. Assassinations at CHOAM meetings seem like a very bad idea, and social standing/reputation probably doesn’t matter so much to the hard-nosed Guild, but there’s still plenty of room for soft power: Guildsmen are still men, and the bigger an institution is, the more you can hide in its folds. The more human-looking Guild administrators probably chafe at the glass ceiling imposed by the Navigators. Within the Guild, the right to Navigate might be a system of dead men’s shoes, and nobody is better placed for smuggling than a Guild representative. If, in fact, the Guild is based at all on the East India Companies, then smuggling might take up more than half its shipping capacity.

Mentats are what Dune has instead of computers, and I think dramatically they’re way better: why have a mute, reliable machine holding your information when it could be a self-interested human? Whether they’re venal, corrupt, and blackmailable or idealistic, credulous, and biased, a Mentat offers so many more handles for a DM when imparting information to players.

of course, where you have continuous wars of assassins, you want your assassins and security under a Macchiavelli-style Mentat and, as usual, to complicate things, Herbert has them all train at the same school, making them a faction as well as a technology (next post).

I was going to make a crack about that school being Yale but Kissinger went to Harvard, so it wouldn’t have been funny.

That means they tend to know each other and have their own agendas and jealousies – the Harkonnens’ Mentat deliberately trolls his Atreides counterpart – partly to keep him distracted, partly for personal amusement. In theory, Mentats are supposed to be inherently ethical in their advice, but watch out! Herbert says there are also twisted Mentats, who aren’t. This is as close as Dune gets to a light side/dark side schism. Note that even “ethical” Mentats deploy assassins.

Factionally (and reasonably) they all distrust and work semi-collectively against the Guild and the Bene Gesserit, recognizing that both are up to stuff they don’t want anyone else to guess at. The Guild always wants to puppet the Houses; the Mentats are the Houses’ counter-measures. The Bene Gesserit puppet everyone anyway.

I’d recommend using a House’s Mentat as the PCs’ first patron: the players can ask the Mentat anything and get one of 3 replies:
– here’s the information
– you’re not cleared for that
– that’s not knowable/you can reasonably expect that hardly anyone knows the answer.
Because Mentats know what’s going on and are always full of schemes, they’re the ideal mission-givers and heist organizers. And then the PCs find out in mid-heist that their Mentat’s understanding of the situation was not quite as perfect as it seemed.

Mentats also have handles for the players – they’re addicted to expensive Sapho juice (no really), which they use to sharpen their minds, and often also to Spice, since long experience is a great strength for their role. They typically work alone and it seems like a lonely position: they’re never anyone’s social equal, they’re always the smartest person in the room but never the decision-maker, and they’re professional paranoiacs, seeing openings for assassins everywhere. No wonder they are so often prey to all kinds of weird vices.
It’s probably best to work up to playing a Mentat – they’re very high level – but in terms of replicating their published powers, just give the player a calculator and an encyclopedia – or the right to make up background detail at will.

It’s super important the women get their costumes right don’tyouagree

If the Great Houses are the Holy Roman Empire, the Bene Gesserit must be… eugenicist Jesuit nuns? They redefine bodily control, inflict pain in the name of restraint, and are freakishly concerned with who is having sex with whom, which all sounds a bit like someone went to Catholic school. They also spread propaganda in the guise of religious revelations, presumably aided by their trained ability to see whether people believe them or are excited by what they say.

“The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place-between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning and resourcefulness.” – Dune

Ahem. So they’re maiden/whores until they become wily old crones. Right. I swear, Robert Graves haunts this book. They learn all this stuff in their own Great School, which seems to be a totally sealed institution: it just quietly sends forth Black Widows at odd moments and people only notice afterwards. And it seems like it sends them wherever there are people to manipulate – there are apparently several high-ranked BG reverend mothers hanging out among the Fremen, whom nobody else courts. I think we can assume they’re also witching it up in all kinds of other little ignored power islands across the Galaxy, far from the Imperial gaze.

In all the visual media they’re shown wearing strange uniforms but in the book you know a Bene Gesserit by her perfect control, measured heartbeat and occasional irresistible commands. Their eschatology is the clearest: somehow they can see the future because somehow they can access racial memories but only women’s memories and therefore not enough. So they want to selectively breed a male Bene Gesserit who will be able to see the future perfectly… and then rule the universe through him. Their end-game philosopher-emperor will have the powers of a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother (detect lies), a Guild Navigator (future sight) and a Mentat (human computer) and will submit to the control of their own admittedly less-perfect and less-far-seeing leadership. I dunno, I can’t see the future but I think I can see a potential problem with that.

If the Bene Gesserit actually won, they would be no fun at all. But until they do, they’re frantically busy seducing nobles, stealing children, ruling from behind thrones, upsetting everyone else’s plans, and sacrificing themselves and others for secret purposes that might not mature for generations. Which is everything you could ask from a villain or an unreliable ally. At the very least, the threat of interrogation by a Bene Gesserit Truthsayer deliciously complicates any underhanded mission the PCs might have been given by their Mentat patron.

There are also Great Schools for Doctors (medics but also general researchers) and Swordmasters, so there’s your Kung Fu hero. Herbert doesn’t seem very interested in their factional possibilities and has doctors subject to intense conditioning, making them feel unspeakable pain if they’re in danger of breaching their Hippocratic Oath.

So what can we do with all this? How would we swipe it for our games or make the Duniverse more legible for our players? I note in passing that the Great Schools seem to pump out very D&D-like Classes of alumni: Swordmaster = fighter, Doctor = the medical functions of the cleric but Bene Gesserit can command/turn enemies and detect lies. The Mentat seems an obvious analogue for the Int-based wizard but their spells are all of divination. Thieves/assassins are strangely absent from the basic Class roster, but maybe that means everyone has those skills, or maybe just nobles do.

There are several key points to learn from Dune’s factions for court intrigue games:

1. Every time you do something, at least 3 factions are involved. If you assassinate a prince or steal a baby or bribe a trusted lackey, the affected House and their Mentat will be interested, obviously, but also there will be Bene Gesserit links because you don’t get to be noble if you’re not breeding material, and the Guild will be worried lest you trouble the status quo. At the same time, if they can, the Mentat, Bene Gesserit and Guild might present themselves as complicating allies, if they think you could serve their interests as well.
2. interlocking interests make plots and the Guild + Houses is an infinite plot generator. This is essentially what Vincent Baker says in Apocalypse World with his PC-NPC triangles: if you have 2 NPCs they will have overlapping or conflicting interests, so if one asks you do something, the other will object or want a piece of it for themselves or something. Complexity = conflict = drama. But Dune actually makes that easier by having a stable NPC entity you need to consider every time, so it’s not “I didn’t know Jo wanted this necklace too!” it’s “that princeling has a Bene Gesserit mother. Her whole Order is trying to control this family and they will come down on us if we aren’t careful.”
3. Which is to say: familiar pieces help you play chess. You don’t know what the Bene Gesserit want with this prince in particular, but you know broadly what sorts of things they’re concerned with: marriages, alliances, Truth-detection, pregnancies. Likewise the Guild: balance the Houses to keep them all weak, no obstacles to the Guild’s own operations, no new machines. If you’ve spent time introducing characters, keep reusing the same people. Politics is personal; if your players know the Guild ambassador is having to restrain his anger because of what they did last session, you’re winning as a DM. On the other hand, Dune’s institutions allow you replace individuals to great effect. So you killed the last Guild dude? Here’s a new one and he wants to know what happened to his predecessor and why. Remember also that everyone has trouble controlling their people – maybe the dead Bene Gesserit agent overstretched herself? Maybe she was on a secret mission the replacement doesn’t know about? The replacement will not automatically be an enemy.
4. Even though Herbert keeps saying “ohohoho plans within plans,” actually much of what happens is improvised and paranoid knee-jerk reaction. Each faction has its long-term goal to keep it busy, but they’re also thrashing about dealing with whatever just happened and attributing it to the other factions. For the players, remember: if you cause a bit of chaos, that will usually give you time to get away. Also you know enough to pursue your own goals. If they intersect with someone else’s goals, that someone will first approach you and try to work out a deal, because acting directly against you will probably be more damaging for their plans.
5. Have a Mentat or Bene Gesserit agent the PCs can consult. They start by hiring the PCs for a bit of work. That way the players can find out about the politics little by little and from information they collect themselves. Don’t infodump, don’t betray them on the first mission, let them figure out enough that they can see traps coming. The feel of this game is that you’re clever, not you’re lost. After a successful mission, have a Guild agent ask them to do some work, so they have a chance to ask their first patron about it. Build out a web of contacts.
6. Start small and/or young. It doesn’t make much sense for a working, mature Mentat, Bene Gesserit and Guild Ambassador to go adventuring together but if they’re all novices-in-training, then you could totally create something like a classic D&D style party of differently-skilled adventurers who are all children of the same House, for instance – it would be wise for a noble to send his children to each of the Schools, to have some eyes and ears in each camp. Adventuring youngsters also have excuses to rub shoulders with those independent go-betweens, snoops, grifters, and semi-official smugglers who are rarely seen but often mentioned in passing during the book – not everyone is locked into the Imperial power hierarchy, and trainees still have room to adjust their positions, before they get too deeply initiated into one cult to be able to get back out. Youth is when you can recover from your mistakes, pass unrecognized, and figure out the basics of your own Grand Scheme.

…….still here? OK so there are two more factions who exist to destabilize this opening setup, who intrude before the end of Book 2, which is probably where Villeneuve’s Movie 3 will take us. Since they are external to the basic power structure of the Empire AND they’re mysterious and disruptive, personally I would keep them as NPCs only. It’s good to have some important pockets of the unknown.

Ix is a planet full of renegade mechanical and electrical engineers who skirt all the technological restrictions that the Guild and Mentats depend on. The best machines come from Ix (better than those on Richesse) and everyone uses them – ornithopters, repulsor-lift pads (useful for making lights and fat Barons hover), semi-autonomous fighting dummies, hunter-seekers (flying assassin needles with motion sensors)… They never put out a fully-functional computer but it’s clear that many of their devices would require sophisticated logic boards. But then, the religious restriction is only “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind,” which, rather like the Islamic injunction against drunkenness, can be interpreted either as a strict ban on a whole category of products or a milder ban only against their over-use. The Ixians also dabble in conditioning and coercing people, like everyone in the Duniverse. But their efforts tend to be one-off lab experiments – ideal persuaders or seducers who are extremely good at their one function but aren’t intended to be the sort of trans-human superbeings that the Bene Gesserit, Mentats and Guild aim for.

Much of what Ix produces, makes the Guild itchy. The Guild would certainly cut Ix off from the rest of the Galaxy… except then they wouldn’t know what the Ixians were doing and they would lose their leverage to control/guide/persuade them to stay out of interstellar spaceship design. Perhaps the Guild could nuke Ix (perhaps one day it will) but for now it tolerates the Ixians, because their devices are so damn useful, because everyone wants to trade for them (which helps everyone tolerate the awful influence of Spice on their economies) and because profits are maximized when you don’t arbitrarily shut down all innovation. Still… one day they will go too far.

The Bene Tleilax or Tleilaxu are a civilization/cult/race of chemical, genetic, and social engineers. Where Ixians threaten the Guild’s monopoly on starships, the Tleilaxu threaten to create artificial Spice and, potentially, genetically-engineered Mentats, Bene Gesserit, and Navigators. They have several planets, making it harder to nuke their bases. Far worse from the Guild’s perspective, they can mimic any person in the Galaxy using their Face Dancers – engineered humanoids who can change their shape, appearance, and sex to undetectably replicate any individual. I think Face Dancers can even have children as males or females, but that’s probably best left as a mystery to discover in your campaign. Obviously, hiring Face Dancer assassins is very expensive.

They can also create clones (“gholas”) from dead cells and those clones can sometimes access the original’s memories, allowing for either functional immortality for their leaders or something like Calvin’s Duplicator Box. Perhaps in a nod to the creature’s strangely flexible morphology, the devices used to achieve all this are called Axlotl Tanks.

Next post: 2. technologies!

I don’t deal with Book 4 but… it does contain the charming plot point that the Ixians eventually develop a hunter-seeker capable of finding and eliminating all life in the galaxy. Like Grey Goo but flying and spiky.

Then 3. Dune mashups!

The alignments of franchises are Lore vs Merch. It’s oddly reassuring to see that Villeneuve’s Dune is also Lawful Merch.