I have finally managed the right time and group for playing Empire of Dust., by Clint Krause and Amy Garcia, published via their imprint KNRPG Productions in 2008. I bought it upon release at GenCon and I have often wanted to break it out. I’m surprised it took this long.
The game is entirely not available anywhere, and the modern internet, in its wisdom, has seen fit to obscure my attempts to find its remnants with a more recent digital game of the same title. This is a bad thing because the game is very exciting and clear.

The presentation and atmosphere are both [gory + a bit dark] and [playful, familiar anime], which completely compatible. It’s easy to catch the drift and to appreciate it, knowing that gut-wrenching opera splatter and techno-knights with spiky hair are just fine together.
Let’s see if a quick blast gets something across:|
- Osaris is a planet more or less lost to the galactic network, whose human culture has arrived at an early-modern medieval fantasy-ish thing (kings, knights, wizards)
- Wizards study the “Exodus Tower,” actually a mysterious alien spacecraft that crashed there a long time ago
- The galactic church traditions are preserved here although isolated, including various powers and God is actually real (another alien, a big one)
- The native species are
Trollbabe trollsbig shaggy horned people with shamanic traditions, mostly unhappy with humans taking their lands- Unfortunately the planet is infested with alien locusts and now it’s a barren wasteland; play is set in the only place left with any sort of ecology, so the Bruta and humans are both there
- The local resource is C_ore, a metal which generates amazing energies, basically “can do anything” as long as it’s unsafe, and can even be ground up into Dust, a powerful psychic narcotic
- Kimo Labs is the big science-y tech organization, more like a whole cuilture, which studies C_ore, causes disasters, and invented the robot race called the Geara
Big breath!
- Yet another alien has arrived, named Thron, apparently hunting God, and laid waste to the human habitation, prompting …
- a battered but determined alliance of the surviving power-players (the Xadian Alliance, which includes Bruta, Geara, and humans)
- a hardened Bruta tribal unity dedicated to a fierce “everyone get out of here” resistance (the Free Tribes)
- human turncoats including knights and wizards, called the Legon, reinforced by Dust-crazed cultists
Here’s the map of the region. Amaranth is ruined and contested. the Alliance has reconvened in Lagerstrom, retaining the Exodus Tower, Mount Gilead, and Red Canyon (Kimo Labs). The Legion holds Havenstad, Lathyrus, and Stella Dora (Morus Albus is an unwanted outlaws’ hive); the Free Tribes hold Atropa, the Western Reclamation Zone, and the Eastern Reclamation Zone. Play will change all of these and eventually leave one faction as victor, however Pyrrhic that may be.

Why go into all this, which looks and sounds like a portentous voice-intro to a late-80s video game, when they used actual video? Because this war actually plays out as the context for the individual adventures/missions, and the design for doing this is exceptional.
- Most straightforwardly, between missions, there’s a roll for developments. They can be extreme, e.g., “the Legion takes an Alliance stronghold.”
- In many cases the GM applies the text to whatever specific locations make most sense given the state of play
- The outcomes of missions often alter factions’ control of locations, either directly (e.g., take it over with guns and spells) or indirectly (e.g., acquiring certain tech or prompting some religious or magical event)
- During play, as prompted strictly by player action and statements, a time lapse may occur, which also called for a development roll
- Travel encounters turn into sub-missions (or really, problems or emergencies) with their own time-lapse, which may well render the assigned mission moot as whatever is happening there marches on without the player-characters
The idea is to play until various conditions are met which end the war, usually badly for everyone involved … although I guess that’s a matter of POV, e.g., everyone could be dead except for Geara, and if they all have the Freedom Complex and some C_ore facilities still exist, then I guess we have robot utopia. Or if the Legion wins, which is hard to imagine in terms of “what next” unless they all get high on Dust and march onto Thron’s sacrifice altars. Or maybe the Bruta and humans join in cross-species love and trust and move onto restoring the planetary ecology(and rename it Ghibli, etc).
Anyway, “next” after the war isn’t part of play. We play these characters, many of which many be pivotal via ties to the big NPCs or energy-weirdness, and also, replacing the player-character fatalities between missions. Because this is a hardcore skirmish and encounter game with exciting combat rules and much splattered gore or robot parts, which includes you.
The first thing to do is to choose which faction the player-characters belong to, because each one has its own mission list. You just take as given that these characters are a functional squad who might reasonably work together some or all of the time. The players chose to be an Alliance team, mainly so they could play across all the available races, much to my sadness as a Legion team seems by far the most fun to me.
Then I rolled the mission on the Xadian Alliance table and told them what it was (“Confront the Enigma”), and they made characters accordingly.
- KLG 106, “Hunter,” (Filip), a Geara soldier; notably, he has replaced the Father Complex with the Freedom Complex so is more or less hiding his lack of loyalty to Kimo Labs and his urge to spread the new Complex
- accompanied by his faithful D.O.G.G., a savagely effective robot dog
- Hiding Blade (Erik), a Bruta engineer; the most straightforward character
- Heaven Hedera (Denica), a Tower mage
- accompanied by Gregory, an invisible ghost boy who knows almost everything and is curious about everything else
Obviously the players made up characters well-suited to this mission, qhich is reasonable, but I like the fact that later missions are rolled too, so they will probably find themselved in later situations they’re not optimized for.
Chracter creation includes a lot of rolls, e.g. the names among many other things, finishing with a light brush of backstory. The main thing to pick rather than roll are the character’s traits, which range from straightforward abilities into social status or psychology and then into tightly-tied major textual elements, bringing what would be backdrop into situational status. So if you want to merely a tough little soldier, that’s fine, but you might otherwise be the heir to the throne of Amaranth, or whatever.
Then I worked up the mission to get ready to play.
- Confront the Enigma
This has formal and textual steps, but it is not automated. The GM must make sense of what’s rolled and decide any number of things, especially NPCs and their various needs and plans. The text is clear about how to interrogate oneself productively to do this. I don’t mind saying that it’s inspired by games like Trollbabe and Dogs in the Vineyard (and that’s not just inference, I remember the people and the design culture at this time).
I consolidated the ideas, thinking they were too messy and unfocused actually to use, but found they weren’t bad, just unfinished. I also realized I’d complicated things and boiled them down further … for results which I’ll redact considering we’re in the middle of playing the mission right now.
I went into play with a little reluctance, due to several things intersecting.
- “Confront the Enigma” would not have been my choice for the first session, as it benefits from more depth established in play regarding the robot Anomaly and Hunter’s direct tie to it; also, it alters context rather than directly shifts factional power-holdings, and frankly a simple fighty-fight to take over one of the Legion holdings would have suited me better
- Specifically, this mission is based on the Anomaly evolving, and we haven’t seen the basic/starting Anomaly yet, so I feel like I’m saying, “whoo whoo, this is new and exciting!” for no reason
- Heaven Hedera is already optimized for investigation and reconnaissance, and Denica chose the trait “Gregory’s Friend,” which is basically a means of mining any moment for maximum information; none of this is really bad on its own, but since “Confront the Enigma” is all about information, it means I have to make up a lot of it with no play-development to work from
Our first bit of play concerned Hedera talking to Zori, the NPC Geara, and went straight into using the game mechanic called the Persuasion Ladder. We really liked it! It’s a simple persuasion or rejection outcome based on rolls, not much more than a formal version of how people play such things functionally given vague rules … but our enthusiasm arose from the fact that it’s not just “talk more then roll again.” There’s room between iterations, if you’re not at one of the end-state conclusions, for other characters to get involved or other details to arise.
So much for talking. Fighting! Note that the gunbot babies can shoot through walls, get maximum damage when shooting from hiding, and given a hit, hit nearby targets automatically as well.

I’ve often talked about the difficult transition from not-in-combat to combat, and our session fell into it, not due to system flaws but simply poor play. Something felt off to me right about the time that Denica was talking about hiding and Filip was talking about awareness checks. I could tell that we were working with not enough information about the immediate moment, e.g., where precisely everyone was; and also too much information in terms of I-do-this I-do-that talking. The gunbot babies were ready and waiting, in full knowledge that the dunesled had landed and the door was opened. So I should have immediately called for the initiative check, and the various awareness or whatever would be conducted accordingly. When I realized this, I called for the check and then retconned the roll results into the order, once established.
Here’s an interesting point, kind of a social parallel to the fact that the players know where all the characters are, but treat the Stealth-hidden ones as unseeable anyway. During combat, allies are played by players and use similarly blue counters, so if I have an ambiguous character or, basically, someone who is not necessarily “on their side,” or not necessarily opposed to the “enemies” in the same way, then they are a red counter and played by me. So there isn’t any nonsense about “is the NPC really on our side,” they know that Zori is and that Zora Vale isn’t. That doesn’t mean, however, that they can put her in the same bag/target as the gunbot babies or vice versa; and that’s evident because she has her own initiative roll, so they know she and the gunbot babies aren’t a team.
Medals are a big part of play, effectively roll-modifying bennies. Each player manages their own, and the GM has a pool to use as they wish for their characters, but the NPCs on the players’ side seem to have to develop their own pools. I’d like to investigate this some more in the comments if anyone’s interested after watching the medals get used in the recordings.
Lastly, although no one died during our two rounds of combat so far, damage has already hit the team hard, and I am not averse to killing them all off as per the rules … we’ll see. Combat is both consequential per personal decision, i.e., it’s not automated where we run bots against one another; and full of unpredictable moments. The game text treats this as some kind of revelation, which for people trained in the 1990s it is, but it’s very familiar and welcome for me.
7 responses to “Gunbot babies”
I admit I am getting a bit of a Heavy Gear vibe, with the religious aspects juxtaposed with modern-ish war. In listening I did not get much of sense that it was a huge part of PLAY this session, the religious stuff I mean.
My other thought was “games explicitly about war are simpler to get into.” My own reaction to it seems overly simplistic, but am I wrong to think there is attraction to a more straight forward “mission”? Warfare, as opposed to simple combat (SLA Industries comes to mind) provides at least some context that might make sense, even if we find the actual subject matter abhorrent.
How much in between missions PLAY do you foresee, if any? I realize that may not even be of interest to the players or the game.
(last question first) Between-mission play occurs mainly through time-lapses landing at any point during mission play, including just after it starts or just before it ends. And since a time-lapse might obviate the planned mission (all the prep lost! just an outcome that lands off-stage), then basically, you have non-mission play when you didn’t expect it or schedule it.
I guess I should clarify that time-lapse doesn’t mean a quick cut, but rather, something else to do associated with varying amount of play – sometimes a lot.
Given an Anomaly-based mission, it’s about religion at least as far as the Geara are concerned, but not about the human religion. I should also emphasize the rather playful quality of the content, as we know this is over-the-top anime (which does not preclude genuine passion or tragedy), and that God is a rather disturbing alien rather than, how does one put this, “actual God.”
We don’t even have a character aimed toward that. We might, though. It’s a bit hard to explain since the text is so unavailable, but there’s a certain sense to seeing some fatalities, because as missions proceed, you make up new/replacement characters knowing what the next one is, in general terms.
So let’s say no one dies this time, and the next mission rolled is about human church-y stuff, or maybe bringing down a cultish aspect of the Legon. So our rather tech-y characters won’t be optimized for it, but will have to deal with fervent religious people and their issues. But if one or more of them die this time, and I roll that particular mission type, then someone might make up a character who’s well-suited to it.
At least a few of the mission types presuppose a battle which has begun, and there is a Battle Ladder which sets the context for individual actions within it. So actual battle/war participation as well as violent ops are potentially part of play. I don’t know whether that responds meaningfully to your “war” question, but it’s all I really know at this point until we’ve played through such things.
SESSION TWO
Check out the recording Iโve added to the playlist, in which we finish out the situation at the secluded Kimo Labs black site. To go straight to it, click here.
In play, I totally messed up with my prepared material, when I confused Zoriโs signal deck (which Zora Vale wanted to use her scramble) for the data cache in Zoriโs head unit. So I had Zoraโs first interaction concern getting the data cache (โhelp me get this gearheadโs head openโ), which made no sense. At some level I knew this was incorrect and it threw me entirely off my horse for Part 3 in the recordings; you can see me start to lose track of everything. Fortunately I was able to correct it just before enough action had occurred to ruin play.
During the time-lapse play at the end, I called for a Knowledge check among everyone, to see whether anyone realized that at Kimo Labs, Zori will be utterly broken down for data recovery and scrap. They all failed โฆ
Iโve realized something important about the game. All this time, and as Iโve mentioned here, I was under the impression that you rolled for new missions. But now, when I read what to do next more carefully, I think it works entirely differently: that you roll only for the initial mission, and all play afterwards proceeds into whatever makes sense based on what happened. Thatโs a lot more open and demanding than I thought, but it also makes a lot more sense. Our whole game is now โaboutโ what this event at this black site has done to the whole war.
I have to review the text in several parts to re-orient my thinking about how they work, especially the rolls to see how the war proceeds around the map where weโre not looking.
Oh no, poor Zori!! Hope this continues so we can see Kimo Labs get what’s coming to them!
The Medals / Banter mechanic seemed to work well at prompting players to anime-esque emoting without it becoming pro-forma. There was clearly a need to think strategically within the action economy when using it. I wasn’t totally clear but it seemed each turn characters get a combat action, a move action and also potentially a skill roll, is that right? So taking a Banter combat action was definitely a choice that needed to be balanced against the lost opportunity to attack, but there is still the potential to get something else done with a skill?
I could see you all groaning a little when a cool character speech didn’t coincide with taking a banter action – all those missed medals. Would be interesting to see if players start saving their cool ideas up to take Banter actions or if this is just a feature – sometimes these are mechanised, sometimes not.
The good news: we just played session 3 last night, so you’ll see it here soon.
The rule within an initiative order is “one movement, one battle action,” in either order, and nothing else. Skill (or attribute) rolls are formal subsets of many specific battle actions. Banter is a battle action, so if you do it, then it’s the only one you get that turn. It also includes a Willpower roll, to complete my summary.
Your observations about the bantering and ordering are therefore right on target. The only real solution is simply to role-play fun dialogue and thoughts all the time, and to make a Banter out of it when you are reasonably certain that doing so won’t get you shot in the head.
Since the GM is enjoined to play particularly hard, i.e., to role-play the NPCs’ various issues, goals, and capacity for violence as if they didn’t know they aren’t the heroes, this choice is not trivial. Especially since one is always sucking wind regarding medals.
By the way, in case it’s of interest to anyone I found an old podcast interview with the creators via the wayback machine here
SESSION 3 (direct link)
As mentioned above, I realized just in time that the rules do not include rolling for entirely new missions. Instead, when you play the game, you roll once to start for location and context for character creation, and then develop content from there as driven by play alone โ which has a lot of room, given changes in the war due to the events of play and during time lapses, as well as the ready openings to backdrop content via traits and new traits. Potentially, I suppose, the roll + development can be done again if we make up all/mostly new characters or even switch to a different faction, but thatโs not relevant here.
Therefore, we began session 3 on the characterโs dunesled flight back to Red Canyonโs main Kimo Labs installation, during which I deemed interception is inevitable. I figured that the Office of Sentries would lose no time in trying to intercept the scary tech now that the team has conveniently extracted it from the dangerous black site, so an ambitious operative shows up in a battlesled. I conceive of Kimo Labs as riddled with spy tech and leaks, so I also threw in some Freedom Complex Geara, wasteland rebels turned up to 11, having welded steel mohawks and (in one case) boobs onto themselves, riding dunebikes blasting metal, also seeking the new tech. Neither of these factions knew what it was, as that was privileged player-character information at this point.
I wrapped my head around the NPCs, whose rolls had yielded more content, e.g., I rolled the same surname for the O.S. operative and pilot, so I decided they were siblings, and that cemented the notion that they were on their own junket with Dallasโ own ambitions, not a mandated op by the O.S. director. I came up with the three Gearasโ names myself, so you know whom to blame for that.
Preparation notes scribbles
Preparation notes for use
I knew that the O.S. people wanted the tech and were not necessarily oriented toward attacking the characters with intent to harm, whereas the rebel Geara were not oriented toward harming other Geara (Hunter, Zori, and D.O.G.G.), although they didnโt mind maiming (โgoringโ) them in order to infect them with the Freedom Complex later, and they didnโt have any use for the meatbags.
I found a couple of maps to use for a vehicle chase in rugged wasteland, and we began at the left of this one; play brought the action deeper into the map and down to the right. I reviewed the Chase rules as I would use those entirely for the context of how the vehicles related to one another at any point.

Vehicles
Briefly, although the player-characters again held the lead unanimously in the initiative order, their rolls did them no favors. Significantly:
Both of the NPC vehicless (treating the three Geara as collective) were within attacking range, which was quite lucky for the Geara as their weapons were only close-range
The Geara acted before the O.S., so they successfully jammed communications, which led the players to assume that the O.S. ship was equally hostile, so they felt quite threatened
Although Heaven did spot the O.S. ship in front of them, Hunter did not realize they were under attack from the rear until the frag grenade hit
Without communications, they also misinterpreted the O.S. shipโs warning shot as an attack
โฆ and thereโs one rules detail which I found unhelpful. The Chase rules are great, but they apparently set the context for initiative-ordered rounds inside what they determine โ and there seems to be no way at all for a pilot or driver to affect the contextual chase via attempting anything; itโs all reactive. (You can see me riffling the pages trying to figure out whether this was indeed the case.)
So that meant Erik, playing Hiding Blade, heroically tried to pilot their way safely, but was reduced to merely trying to control their crash landing after the second frag grenade blasted the hell out of the interior of the dunesled, so they were โflying woundedโ almost from the start.
Said grenade had its devastating effect when Zori tried to throw it out of the sled bay and failed.
D.O.G.G. rolled desperately badly for the range of its jump pack, resulting in a tumble instead of a guided attack, which then turned into a failed Fate roll, which removed their heaviest hitter from the confrontation (who did survive falling into desert, however).
[The following paragraphs are included with Denicaโs permission]
Thereโs no other word for it except meltdown. I know because I did this a lot in my history of role-playing, when I wasnโt GMing. It took some effort to shift out of it, step by painful step, in (I think) the late 1990s.
In editing, I was able to see it begin long before I realized it while playing: feeling โtrapped in the box,โ literally in the case of the non-weapon-equipped dunesled, not only for herself as Heaven is primarily a stealth-and-convince character, but also for other hard-hitting melee characters like Hunter and D.O.G.G.
When feelings like that kick in, actual options tend to vanish out of mind, e.g., asking Gregory anything about the NPCsโ motives or vulnerabilities.
Assuming the worst about the injury-and-death rules, including (as I see it) a lot of defensive negotiating, which ultimately led to me laying down boundaries for talking through assumed future outcomes
Not clear that the desperate circumstances, amounting to trying to survive a crash, arose from several rolls with incomplete information, rather than seeing it a no-hope GM preparation and feeling betrayed (Erik grumbles about this at one point in play as well).
Denica talked later about disliking one-roll take-downs, but that canโt be the actual issue. I have seen her play cheerfully and dramatically through her beloved character Ruh dying in exactly that way when we played Dark Sun/The Pool. This is about feeling shut out of play and feeling manipulated.
I almost never observe these things in play, not for many years. They donโt happen when the authorities are clearly organized, including what is and isnโt affected by stochastic devices. I think Empire of Dust is well-made in this sense, so we followed up in discussion, afterwards.
Denica told me that she is currently playing in another game in which one of the other players is constantly pre-describing whatโs going to happen, in classic negotiatory defense mode, which she finds aggravating, so it surprised her (or might even have been a matter of bleeding over from that game) to find herself doing anything like it. She also acknowledged that Iโd been clear from the start that this game requires being willing to whip up another character semi-regularly, but somehow this context was over-ridden by feeling trapped by the perceived (actually distrusted) rules and perceived GM control.
My interest โ and very directed warning to anyone and everyone โ is that this feeling often arises not to the actual rules and other people, but due to prior experiences. It can arise like a storm, internally, vaporizing all existing trust, overwhelming dialogue, and turning any rules-talk into a debate about exactly what will soon happen. Most especially, it is isolating, destroying reincorporation across everyoneโs contributions; play itself for the affected person is gone.
I talk a lot about how play is not fragile. It isnโt. But it is an active state with specific criteria. Fortunately Denica recovered her commitment to it, as youโll see in the final part of the session.
Anyway, now the characters and their precious Geara baby-making information are captured by Dallas and Devin, with D.O.G.G. trailing them, and the thwarted Geara cursing their luck. This time, I did roll an event during the time-lapse, so the Legion has captured Mount Gilead, certainly drawing the wrath of God (an alien in an orbiting space-satellite) upon that location.