If you came here by mistake, and want to get back, hit home. If you want to bypass my ramblings about how I came up with this stuff (bypass is recommended, really!) the links are here as well as at the bottom. Updated 25/02//2001
I tried to play around with the rules as printed to make Ix and Landsraad more balanced. Landsraad rules are impossible, so I left them for a long while. In the meantime I stumbled across Rick Heli's and Richard Vickery's two very different expansions for Ix and Tleilaxu. We all agreed on one thing - spice for Tleilaxu comes from the tanks (easy!). How to use it was a different story. Both Rick and Richard made their own leaders. I am terrible at drawing, and have no resources for computer imaging to create any, so was initially stuck. Then it dawned on me - the Tleilaxu rarely sent one of their own leaders out to do their work as it meant coming into contact with the unclean Powindah! Gholas were the key to their treachery many times. I added Face Dancers almost as cheap hero(ine)s to start with, then hopefully once the battles heat up and leaders hit the tanks they can be replaced by mor epowerful personalities. My favorite part of creating this expansion variant was the Karama rule where a ghola-leader can regain original memory.
Initially I kept most of the Ixian rules and just made the spice come from somewhere. However, this faction seemed lacking, and didn't excite me at all. GN Unger's variant where Ix had a black market feel appealed much more (thanks for the idea, and the comments!). In the end I made my own rules for Ix which gives them the unique advantage of being able to give (ie sell) cards away (adopted from the original Tleilaxu variant). Spice from battles to keep the cards coming in, and maybe this rework will be enough to keep the other Houses on their toes.
Back to the Landsraad. I tried to work out where spice or an advantage would come from. I was reading the appendix at the back of Dune and the words Great Covention' jumped off a page at me - perfect, Landsraad was all about making sure that the Forms were Obeyed, not to mention sitting back and raking in the profits while someone else did the dirty work (Harkonnen, mainly, in Dune). But look what that lead to! Atreides-Fremen jihad across the known universe followed by 3000 years of The Tyrant (or the Prophet if you are small, grey and have pointy teeth). First things first, I reduced the leader values to be more reasonable. If the Landsraad leaders were that powerful they would have been fighting, or at least recruited by the other major houses. Then I used the idea of the Landsraad determining battle order from the original rules, making it a more powerful advantage (that is also open to bribery!). Add a wee bit of free spice from the taxes and fees, and hopefully this gives a leaner, less one-sided face to this faction.
My versions are in no way intended to discredit or denounce anybody else's versions. It was just something fun I wanted to think about and see if I could come up with something a) balanced in terms of the game mechanics, b) fairly straightforward without lots and lots of additional rules - I will leave working on master plans to others, c) mildly original and fun to play. This is a work in progress, so I welcome any comments - please email me at: boycat_oh@yahoo.com If anyone wants to be part of a play-by-email playtest with these three additional factions send me an email.
Below you can connect to the factions. I made shields for all of the factions from still scenes from Lynch's Dune as, like I said above, artistic vision is not my forte! (Thanks again to Sorvan, as well as Flaney for templates and ideas). Quiz: For 2 favor, which scene is the Tleilaxu picture from?. Oh, last thing, sorry about the typos!
Boycat.
PS The six player original is balanced and wonderful, the extra factions are just there if anyone fancies a change. Hey, take it easy, and thanks for reading through all this stuff - can't believe you have nothing better to do! Thanks very much to Tempus_42 for his great input. And thanks to Econguy98 for promoting an idea where the Emperor gets to loan out his Sardaukar.