Monday 23 May 2016

[UKGE 2016] Things We Want to See - Dust Adventures



Dust Adventures is produced by Modiphius under license from Dust Studios. For context the rpg is based upon the popular wargame, created by Paolo Parente, and which has seen many guises, such as Dust Tactics, Dust Warfare, and Dust Battlefield (Warfare is notable for Andy Chamber's involvement). Dust is also seen as the a sort of legacy of Paolo's work while at Rackham. Dust features prepainted minis and is set during an alternate WW2, where alien technology has led to WW2 becoming drawn out, and mecha battle-suits and walkers dominate the theatres of war. Three major factions are available in the game; the Germans - who have been purged of the Nazis by the Blutkreuz Korps, the Allies - who rely on cobbling together stolen tech to fight their enemies, and the Sino-Soviet Union.

Dust Adventures is thus a rules light game for stories of espionage, battle, and perhaps even life behind the front lines, during this "Weird World War", where alien technology empowers the battles across the globe.



Character creation is reminiscent of Fading Suns, with a life path style to building a character. Dice rolls use symbol based d6s (basically you are rolling a d3), and dice pools are rolled with 5-6 being a success, and the other results adding specific effects to the dice result. Thus most rolls in the game are simple and require a degree of success, and combat is resolve with opposed rolls, where ties are broken by comparing the other possible results.

Ultimately the game poses an interesting setting, that oozes pulp adventure and noir thriller. Add in the mecha elements, and alien tech, and what we have is something that has the feel of Indiana Jones, mixed with some of the mecha action that makes Warmachine so popular. In many respects then the Dust rpg can be compared to the Iron Kingdoms rpg. Both rely on systems developed from their respective wargames, but both also use worlds at war, which draw on our own world history for inspiration. Where Warmachine is Napoleonic warfare amped up with magic technology, Dust is the WW2 on super science. But just because Dust rpg is derived from the wargame, that should not mean the only stories you can tell are about a team on the front line. You could play researchers looking for the next bit of alien tech, out in the depths of the Amazon, or perhaps you play a team of Mission Impossible type spies, looking to infiltrate the SSU and extract a valuable agent.





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