“I would like to make an original character” rated 1 to 5. So they’d mention a property, like Dune and ask them to rate these statements: They spent a lot of time and energy figuring out what people wanted to do in different universes. WotC had this incredible mound of market data. All we have is a tiny slice of one adventure. We seriously thought “there has never been a property better suited for this kind of Organized Play.” And now we were at WotC! We could really do it! Some of that work got started, none of it got done. We’d put issues before the Landsraad, just like they did in the L5R newsletter, let people vote. We’d have a website set up for people up upload their info, art. People would make their own planets, their own houses, and join the Landsraad. The Landsraad would be our version of Living Greyhawk. We talked about rules that scaled all the way up from the skirmish level, which is to say a normal RPG, all the way up to planetary battles played out like an RTS. We wanted to let players play across many scales. Thufir is obviously a high-level assassin! Paul is the ultimate multi-classed character! We had these conversations before we’d ever started working on ANY Dune RPG. Owen and I always believed that Dune was perfect for classes and levels. When we started on the d20 version of Dune, my boss and I sat down and laid out what we wanted from the line. And it’s my writing from 15 years ago so it’s amusing (Adventurons! The elementary particles of adventures!) and somewhat primitive.

A very tiny amount of writing was done, it’s just a curio. The D20 version of the game never saw print, alas, but I’m posting some of my work from it for posterity. In other words, a Dune RPG that used the D&D core rules. in 2000 we were bought by Wizards of the Coast and for a brief time, we were working on a D20 version of the Dune RPG. We went on to make the Dune RPG, one of the prettiest and now rarest and most expensive RPG books ever made. In 1997 I started working at Last Unicorn Games–a tiny little game company long-since defunct–on the Dune CCG with Owen Seyler.

Dune rpg chronicles of the imperium