Dune 2D20: House Viracocha

House Viracocha rules the Studio City of Lake, the heart of House Runasimi’s media empire. Though Bonavera is an unpopular place to shoot film due to the harsh light of its blue star, one out of every five movies in the Known Universe is produced in Lake. Filmbooks, movies, documentaries, pornography, Viracocha does it all.

The House is led by Earl Alejandro Viracocha. A sound mixer born into the pyon class, Alejandro’s skill at blackmail and his ability to instantly tell whether something would be popular saw his meteoric rise through the house production companies. He attained Earldom by buying off the sitting Earl’s debts, in exchange for the hand of his daughter Castine Viracocha in marriage. He is adept at anticipating and servicing House Runasimi’s media and propaganda needs. Privately, he considers them soul crushingly dull, referring to them as “corporate” or “the suits” in conversation.

Earless Castine Viracocha is an enthusiastic skier, mountaineer, hunter and explorer. Most of her media appearances are documentaries about her outdoor adventures. The Imperium is a mature civilization, but many colony worlds remain undeveloped or underexplored. Bonavera itself is only fully mapped at a satellite level, and Castine enjoys leading visiting nobility on hunting trips and ecological surveys to see if House Viracocha’s terraforming efforts are taking. She channels profits from the Viracocha media empire into real estate and tourism projects, building resorts for winter sports like skiing and repulsor jumping.

The Earl’s chosen heir is Capæcnencæpæc "Cappy" Viracocha, investigative journalist. Cappy is a master of disguise and an expert at getting people to share information with her. Her budding intelligence network gives House Viracocha greater control of incoming information as well as outgoing. It also makes her suspicious enough to be worth assassinating, or at least taking as a hostage. The Earl has told her publicly that if she gets captured doing something stupid, he’s nominating one of her siblings as heir rather than paying the ransom.

The Viracocha family would be helpless without House Mentat Figaro, the two-fisted screenwriter-editor-producer who leaves his personal touch on all the House’s most popular brands. Though his formal training is in propaganda and psychology, his true love is special effects work, hand painting each frame of a film to achieve the perfect blend of photorealism and style. He even finds time to do a little HR and personnel management work in-between, though he considers it an irritating distraction and prefers to farm it out to the House Truthsayer.