House Nizari in the Odinani system

Dune: The Roleplaying Game
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I started a new short campaign with the kids down at my gaming club this week. As previously the group are more on the immoral side again. Possibly best illustrated by the decision to play a House Harkonnen Minor… Regardless they are playing a very Dune style of game so it is all good.

House Nizari
House Minor under House Hakonnen

Primary Domain: Kanly (Understanding)
Secondary Domain: Military (Machinery)
Traits: Infamous, Brutal

House Nizari holds a valuable place in the Hakonnen war machine. They advise on precisely how far the rules of Kanly can be pushed before the Landsraad will intervene, as well as providing numerous military vehicle and other large pieces of ordinance to the Hakonnen armed forces. A very lucrative contract to hold indeed.

Dramatis Personae

Warmaster Krieg Schneider

A powerfully built man with a face scarred from childhood. His right arm is a Tleilaxu prosthetic, matt black metal which clicks & whirs as he moves it. A fact he uses to intimidate his opponents & subordinates. He has a reputation as master Tactician, albeit a Brutal & Unpredictable one.

Dr Kine

A Mentat in service to Nizari, whilst not a product of the Tleilaxu he is often mistaken for one due to his odd mannerisms. Including a penchant for sadism and a habit of discussing matters out loud with a person that only he can perceive. Compared to many of members of House Nizari he seems harmless at first glance, but this just masks a personality which fits in perfectly with the others.

De’ath

No-one truly knows his history, or if they do they are not talking. His personal combat training is at an expert level, possibly a threat to a Ginaz if he could only control his bloodlust. Barely held in line by Dr Kine, he is not so much given a mission as he is unleashed. When not training or fighting he is constantly searching for a new adrenaline high.

Spymaster Ashley Tarise

A former assassin who has climbed the ranks of the Nizari hierarchy, Ashley “Ash” Tarise now handles a small team of spies and assassins used for special projects of the House. Unusually amongst modern assassins he has a preference for ranged weapons, including a lovingly maintained rifle. A seemingly archaic weapon that has surprised many targets who did not have the paranoia to maintain an activated shield at all times when outside their House shields.

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The game began with the party being summoned to a meeting with the Harkonnens for a non-diplomatic matter. With the leadership of the House knowing enough to stay away the party were dispatched to represent the Nizari.
Upon arrival at the Barony spaceport a flunky appeared to guide them through the cavernous facility to the direct monorail to the Hakonnen palace. Dr Kine quickly realised they were be guided an unusual route and redirected them to a more populated path. The flunky appearing flustered left to arrange the carriage for them. Naturally the party was suspicious, but various complications means that the carriage appeared secure.

As the monorail swept high above Barony heading straight to the palace two groups of thugs revealed themselves from each end and closed in on the party. What followed was a brief and bloody combat resulting in 3 dead bodies inside the carriage and one unfortunate member bodily ejected from the monorail by Kreig. (A useful minor conflict to introduce the rules)
At the palace the party were briefed that House Novebruns has recently taken de facto control of the Odinani system at the expense of several House Minors who had been making good profits from their operations there. The Harkonnens also desire the valuable fief and have sensed an opportunity with the recent turmoil.
House Nizari was charged to destabilise the situation in Odinani so as to enable the Harkonnens to make a play for the system directly. The Baron did not care for the methods, just their results.

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((This was the initial intro, made up off the top of my head during the session after they chose to play Dune and created their House & Characters. Improvisation does seem to be one of my strong points, certainly better than my planning))

After a week to put together a more coherent plot the party arrived in the Odinani system with a small team of spies and troops. House Novebruns Naval vessels were prominently placed near the Heighliner arrival point. They seemed mostly concerned with showing their presence, though the party did notice them ordering checks on some arriving freighters.
Having done some research on the disenfranchised House Minors in the system the players decided their best course was to focus on House Reyder, a ‘Minor House’ of Mikarrol. Though calling it a House was generous at best, more a bunch of rabble & pirates whose Head frequently changed as power shifted within them. The perfect disposable assets for House Nizari to exploit.

Preferring more control than a mere arrangement with the current head in the system, they chose to undertake a plan to acquire a prominent member of the House and through manipulations and assassinations secure their promotion to Lord. An arrangement that would be enforced by means of a delayed poison they would hold the antidote for.
They identified a promising candidate, Ennis Thiago, who controlled one the Reyder’s more aggressive pirate vessels. Sending out his agents Ashley found his vessel and managed to infiltrate it with some of his people. A successful use of Hidden Motives convinced Thiago that he was Trustworthy and he was persuaded to attend a meeting at a remote processing station.
The initial meeting went well until De’ath and Krieg, who had been keeping watch outside, noticed several squads of obvious troops preparing to raid the cantina they were meeting in.

De’ath decided that the best course of action was an immediate assault as they focussed on the cantina. 6 success later (He threw his determination in to start with and spent a momentum) one of the Lieutenants and his squad were dead across the promenade. Surprised the others fought back against De’ath and also broke in via the rear of the cantina.
Within the cantina Ashley had distributed weapons he had smuggled in (to be fair to the player he had mentioned he was bringing them at the start of the session) meaning that the attacking troops were now faced with armed patrons. Kreig spent momentum to create a squad of Nizari troops and then used Bolster to pass them to Ashley who promptly attacked the squad inside the cantina in a brutal pincer attack which wiped out the squad and allowed him to incapacitate and kidnap their officer.

Falling back to their ship they escaped the station and rendezvoused with Thiago’s ship within the local asteroid belt. The beginnings of an arrangement between them were now secure, though with Thiago being kept in the dark about exactly who they worked for other than they wanted revenge against the Novebruns.
Interrogating the officer they had captured (which consisted of Kreig intimidating him, De’ath beating him unconscious and then Dr Kines using him for some experiments “What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity, so… be honest. How do you feel?”) they discovered that House Novebruns had a bounty out on Thiago and were being fed information from someone within House Reyder.

I left it there with them plotting to find this House Reyder leak and use that knowledge to get Thiago promoted to the Reyder council and onto control over the House.

It didn’t occur to me until I was hunting for ideas for the main session that the group and I have effectively created the Spacing Guild chapter from Masters of Dune, just from the mercenaries side. :rofl:
This group are much more bloodthirsty than my main group. But then they are about a third of the age as well.
There will be another 3-4 sessions of this campaign, I’m hoping to conclude it with a Harkonnen invasion of the system to have that set piece battle conclusion. But we will see what my players do.

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Second session went fairly well. A bit more trouble with the De’ath player who just wants to kill things, but that is par for the course when you are running for a bunch of teenagers.

One thing of note is that I am playing House Reyder as a House in name only, a legal fiction for their House Major. The Lord frequently changes and there is a Council of 5 that actually run things. This allowed me to had out an intelligence briefing on the Council members for the players to work out how to go about their plan of getting rid of one and getting Thiago promoted in their place.

The council

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I started off in Architect mode with the players deploying their spy assets. Ash & Dr Kine’s initial investigations into the Council ran into an immediate stumbling block with a complication on the first roll (The first of approximately 10 complications in this session). With at least one member of the council aware they were investigating them. Cutting their losses on that councillor they moved on to the others.

Krieg & De’ath chose to try and follow up the mole by breaking into House Novebruns intelligence service. Once they had tracked down the main facility I switched to Agent play as Krieg infiltrated it via a supply run and De’ath waited nearby to assist with an extraction if needed.
Despite really not being a stealthy character Krieg successfully managed to snag a report on the mole, whose identity wasn’t listed but did show that they had been leaking information for quite some time.
A spend of threat caused one of the intelligence operatives to notice that Kriegs arm was artificial and Krieg failed to convince him of his authority to be there. Concluding the conversation by slugging said operative.
A melee broke out as De’ath launched his assault to extract Krieg. He was successfully extracted, though De’ath prized bike was wrecked in the process.

Elsewhere Dr Kine & Ash had a disagreement over tailing another of the Council. Something that Dr Kine felt was too risky, but Ash ignored anyway and proved that he still had his skills. Successfully ruling her out of being the mole.
Dr Kines foucsed on Kye T’avin, the longest serving councillor and closest thing the council had to an administrator. Whilst not able to identify anything obviously suspicious he did note several gaps in his history where things seemed to have been removed and cleared up.
Deciding that he was their more likely culprit he arranged for a slow acting poison to be slipped into his drink. Nothing fatal, but something that would enhance his fight or flight instinct at the upcoming council meeting.

Having briefed Thiago on what they had uncovered, circumstantial evidence that Key was the mole and using House Novebruns to eliminate rivals within the House Reyder, Thiago accused Kye at the council. In the back and forth the council seemed split with questions about the parties origins being raised. Leaning on the drug they had administered the players manoeuvred Kye into accepting a Duel between his champion and Thiago’s, De’ath.
I didn’t use the full Duelling rules, more of a skirmish approach as I usually do. In a bloody and messy fight it came down to De’ath literally beating his opponent unconscious after being disarmed. (We had 5 complications between both parties!)
With his champion defeated and his anxieties through the roof Kye conceded his Council seat and flounced out with his entourage while claiming that Thiago was not capable of holding it.

Due to timings of club GMs being away I am probably going to wrap things up next week with the players causing chaos in the system before the Harkonnen invasion and interstellar Warfare conflict.

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The short campaign has now come to an end. It was interesting… I haven’t run Dune for such a bloodthirsty bunch of sociopaths before. Though I know all the players so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

One thing to note first is the Kriegs player wanted him to have a lasgun in his Tleilaxu cybernetic arm. He made a create asset roll and got a natural 20. Yep, all installed fine, no problems…

They started by ensuring the loyalty of the House Reyder Council by means of slow acting poisons and intimidation. Dr Kines demonstrating why he is often mistaken as a Twisted Mentat.
Having manipulated House Reyder into acting as catspaw for them in the Odinani system the party moved onto causing as much chaos as they could.
For this I used a version of one of my favourite tools. The spice bloom tokens from the starter set.
Here I used the 0-2 tokens to represent how much opposition they would be facing on each task they undertook. 0 meant very little opposition, +2 meant they were facing House Guards and agents.

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They started off with a distraction raid on the storage facilities near the main spaceport. They got lucky in that they flipped over a 0 to start off with so only the local security guards were present. With Krieg commanding his forces from a distance and De’ath, now renamed Shadow, taking a more personal interest in it. It was, unsurprisingly, a massacre.
I like to give my players what they want in a game and so Shadow’s player was happy keeping track of his kills…

Elsewhere the more subtle team of Dr Kine & Ashley were infiltrating a communications hub to disrupts communications across the system.
With a mixture of stealth and blackmail/bribery they were able to avoid the slightly heavier security and install their own agents in the staff to slowly degrade the systems. Broken equipment, mislaid messages, wrong connections. Nothing critical at first, just cumulative impacts.

With their first missions successful they decided to hit one of the main processing plants in the system. This time however they flipped over a +2, House Novebruns was ready for them.
Taking over an ore shuttle they attempted to infiltrate the processing facility, but were diverted to a nearby military base due to their being off schedule.
With their plans thrown out they decided to bluff until they were in position to launch an ambush. The initial attack went well, but facing well trained and equipped House troops they were in trouble.
It was at this point that Krieg decided to try and intimidate the enemy. Revealing his lasgun he threatened to fire it at the shielded troops. The player doing a good impression of an unhinged madman. Then he rolled another complication. I decided to run with his comment of “It’s gone and fired hasn’t it?”. Never trust anything made by the Tleilaxu.

I was nice, I only blew his arm off. The resulting massive explosion amongst the House Novebruns troops was devastating however. The party used the opportunity to make a swift withdrawal. Their initial objective was failed, but they had still caused mass chaos and casualties.

While lying low at their base, a space station in the asteroid belt they were hailed by incoming Novebruns vessels who ordered them to stand down and prepare to be boarded on suspicion of harbouring criminals wanted for piracy and possible breaches of the Great Convention…
This was run as the reverse of Act 3, The Mercenary Base of the Masters of Dune Spacing Guild chapter. The players were the ones defending, while I was attacking.
Initially things went well for the Novebruns forces who succeeded in boarding the station, which is where things started to go wrong for them.

Shadow was having much better rolls this week, with his forces inflicting serious damage on the Novebruns forces. Dr Kines also played a significant role with his control of the space combat forces leading to an eventual crushing defeat on the Novebrun vessels.

Having succeeded creating havoc in the system and defeating the retaliatory strike against them I called the campaign at this point. House Harkonnen was now well placed to take the system from House Novebruns as they were clearly unable to control the fief.
There will be some fall out and the PCs are going to have lie low for some time after the mess of the lasgun/shield incident.

A short campaign, more of a long one-shot really. It took me to the final session to get the balance of what the De’ath/Shadow player wanted (violence mainly), but the other 3 had plenty of fun on all 3 sessions with their plotting and scheming. There were plenty of Dune moments (and a few which I didn’t feel were quite in keeping, but were fun to run).
I might do a couple of one-offs for the club, but I think I am Dune campaigned out for a bit.

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