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View Full Version : [DUNE D20] Partial, Original, Once Official Arrakis Adventure

Matthew
04-27-2005, 09:12 AM
I was clearing off my old Mac and came across something I thought I'd lost.

http://users.adelphia.net/~mattcolville/Dune.doc

http://users.adelphia.net/~mattcolville/Duneoutline.doc

It's an interesting snapshot, for me, of what my writing was like 5 years ago. It's a rough draft of one chapter, sorry. I don't think the whole thing was ever finished. The outline shows you what would have been done. I also have a chapter of Steve Long's work on the project, but I would not presume to put that up here without his permission.

WotC had done research about what players wanted from different settings. Apparently, with Dune, it was decided that the Heroes would be original characters playing a story in and amongst the action from the first novel, without being the main characters. Weird choice, I thought, but there you are.

Later, of course, I'd work on two Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Adventures, aimed at kids, sold in book stores, and I got the chance to do essentially the same thing but with the player playing the main characters.
Iceman_Wraith
04-27-2005, 09:37 AM
will read and enjoy...

2nd link didnt appear to work
Matthew
04-27-2005, 09:53 AM
will read and enjoy...

2nd link didnt appear to work

Should work now.
Voriof
04-27-2005, 09:54 AM
Thank you for sharing this, Matt. Its much appreciated.

Voriof
Matthew
04-27-2005, 09:56 AM
It's worth noting that this was written not only before I'd seen the d20 system (D&D wasn't out yet) but before the D20 Dune RPG was finished. Owen Seyler was working on that while I was writing the adventure. So the encounters were just guesses at how the game might work.
Cam Banks
04-27-2005, 10:19 AM
This is all very cool stuff, Matthew.

So, uh. Who came up with the term "adventurons"?

Cheers,
Cam
Voriof
04-27-2005, 10:24 AM
This is all very cool stuff, Matthew.

So, uh. Who came up with the term "adventurons"?

Cheers,
Cam

The term clearly originates from the Orange Catholic Bible from the Fourth Book of Gygax. :p Since that, the Bene Geserit have used the terminology and it has become common among the teaching programs among the Great Houses.

Voriof
johnnype
04-27-2005, 11:00 AM
Neat!
Matthew
04-27-2005, 11:46 AM
This is all very cool stuff, Matthew.

So, uh. Who came up with the term "adventurons"?

Cheers,
Cam

I came up with the idea and the name. "Adventurons" as the elementary particles of adventures was a name we would probably change in development.
Matthew
04-27-2005, 02:34 PM
I came up with the idea and the name. "Adventurons" as the elementary particles of adventures was a name we would probably change in development.

In the Outline you can actually see me proposing to my boss that we use the word. In retrospect, that was probably not a good idea. Even though we both came to have affection for the term, it doesn't sound Duney even one little bit.
Cam Banks
04-28-2005, 06:56 AM
In the Outline you can actually see me proposing to my boss that we use the word. In retrospect, that was probably not a good idea. Even though we both came to have affection for the term, it doesn't sound Duney even one little bit.

Not really, no. Very Gerry & Sylvia Anderson, though. If you end up writing the Supermarionation RPG, you've got a winner.

Cheers,
Cam
Ithaeur
04-28-2005, 08:52 AM
Looks interesting, but I can see there could be some railroady problems, especially with players who are familiar w. Dune plot; on the other hand, the adventure acknowledges this, and provides some pretty good solutions.
Voriof
04-28-2005, 09:11 AM
Not really, no. Very Gerry & Sylvia Anderson, though. If you end up writing the Supermarionation RPG, you've got a winner.

Cheers,
Cam

Or a Mad Science! RPG. For some reason the term made me think of Dr. Farnsworth from Futurama.

Voriof
Matthew
04-28-2005, 03:00 PM
Looks interesting, but I can see there could be some railroady problems, especially with players who are familiar w. Dune plot; on the other hand, the adventure acknowledges this, and provides some pretty good solutions.

Yeah, but that's part of the mandate, right? WotC says "make an adventure where the main characters are there, and the plot happens as written, but the players run other characters who move in and out of the story."

That's...well, it's not the most satisfying way to do an adventure for me. It was a lot more fun, for instance, to say "You play Gandalf and Legolas and Aragorn," than "you play some guys you made up and run around under the feet of the main characters."

In the LotR adventures, Frodo could die, Sauron could get the ring, and the entire world could be covered in a thousand years of darkness. This makes me happy. "Everything happens exactly as it did in the book," does not make me happy.
artaxerxes
10-19-2008, 04:48 AM
Sorry for the thread resurrection.

I have been running a Dune campaign in a homebrew d20 Modern conversion for nearly 5 years. I remember being delighted in finding this thread a few years back and have been directing people to get these intriguing files from our discussion (now slightly moribund) over at the D&D forums (http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=225679&page=26&highlight=rulbuk).

If anyone is interested in seeing the D20 Modern Conversion just PM me.