I first read Dune in 1984. I liked it a lot and later read and enjoyed the five sequels.
When I read Dune and the following novels by Frank Herbert I could see where the ideas for the nobles in Traveller has got (some of) its inspiration from. I also liked the style in which these books was written, with chapters about the different adversaries that met in a confrontation in the final chapters.
Other than that there wasn’t many ideas from the books that could be used in Traveller. There are no personal shields in Traveller, nor are there any Guild monopoly for transportation, and not much cloning (with restored memories) either. But this doesn’t matter. These books are still a great source for inspiration for Traveller just because of how the nobles are described. It is also some of the best science fiction that I have read.
Now I have read one of the new prequels called House Atreides by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. This was an interesting book written in the same style as Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. It described the intrigues of the nobility in the Dune Universe very nicely, and the book also had a good plot. Now I just must read the rest of the prequels. 🙂
At the CotI boards, there is an interesting thread about replacing one of the coyns for the major races with something else. E.g. a coyn for “the Virus” or IMTU (where the virus doesn’t exist) a coyn for the Hhkar. Since I am an evil referee, the coyn I would replace would be the humaniti coyn, (and this would happen all over known space). 😈
This could be the start of an interesting campaign where the PCs try to save the future of humanity. Only the PCs and a number of scientists would know about the change, and the authorities will not listen to their warnings…
With the help of some free Gimp plugins (Planet Render and Star Scape) I have made the image below. While it might not be as good as the plugins from Flaming Pear, it is still cool that You can make some nice images using free software. 😎
If I would have tried a bit harder, I might have been able to do something that would have looked a bit better. The image below is just to show You what is possible. (The image has also been compressed to a jpeg image so that it will load faster. This compression have added some distortion as well…)
At the CotI boards, there is an 