Dune 2D20: Whalefall - Houses

House Harkonnen's adroit manipulation of the whalefur market required them to establish a handful of potemkin operations on Giedi Prime, importing Bjondax Whales from Lankiveil to rouse suspicion that they were planning on establishing a rival operation. These efforts had to appear credible to make it past CHOAM's audits of the House's financials, requiring them to gift extraction rights to a handful of Houses Minor so they could spin up something convincing.

Once they had the money, the Harks immediately lost interest in their sacrificial whale farms. But nobody ever gives up power on Giedi Prime. A handful of Houses resisted consolidation, extermination, and the market crash that immediately followed the Baron cashing out.

Proposed Texoco "happy whale" flag prepared by Mezcalero, Chief Marketing Mentat 

HOUSE TEXOCO

Fields of enormous crush cages as far as the eye can see, dangling cetaceans filled with shunts delivering nutrients and siphoning precious oil. Snipers in guard towers keeping watch over vast tryworks, where pyon workers refine a neverending torrent of reeking slime. Bjondax Oil is used across Geidi prime for applications where its specific gravity makes it more desirable than petrochemicals in industrial applications. Luxury goods (cosmetics, patent medicines, food additives) made from the stuff are transported on Guild Heighliners at enormous expense and sold for even more money across the Known Universe.

This is the realm of House Texoco, a House Minor sandwiched between the mailed fists of the Houses Major pressing down on them from above, and a wolf pack of Nascent Houses angling for their seat. Like everyone on Giedi Prime, they keep their seat by practicing every degradation of spirit, controlling those beneath them and intimidating those above them with calculated cruelty and naked sadism. They are particularly fond of making underlings punish themselves - forcing victims to eat contaminated earth, pierce themselves with thorns and eat parts of their own bodies.

House Texoco's most famous terror troops are the Zamburakchi, clad in whalebone and armed with large caliber "suspensor rifles" loaded with self-propelled explosive rounds. The projectiles explode unshielded targets and "stick" to shielded ones, slowly boring through under their own power and detonating inside. Though much depleted by House Harkonnen's planetwide levy of troops for the Arrakis Affair, a cadre of these elite snipers still stands guard over the whalefields.

Banner with stylized depiction of House Grindhvalur's holdings.

HOUSE GRINDHVALUR

House Grindhvalur is the only house still producing whalefur on Giedi Prime. They survived the market crash thanks to their strong branding, maintaining a dedicated customer following across the Known Universe as purveyors of artisanal fur products through a vertically integrated series of corporations from farmers to furriers to clothing sweatshops. Their headquarters is the "tannery city" of Mercury Falls, directly adjacent to House Texoco's lands and sharing the same access point to the planet's mass transit system.

House Grindhvalur's holdings look very similar to House Texocos, albeit with the poor beasts skinned rather than siphoned. Thy despise House Texoco for succeeding where they failed, for being their neighbors and roughly similar to themselves, and for their obscene habit of taking enemies alive and torturing them to instill fear, which contradicts their own warrior tradition. A man shall be feared for his power to kill. Anything beyond that is vanity.

House Grindhvalur's Hakkapeliitta ("hackpoles") wear suits of fogwood laminate armor, which conform to their thoughts and allow them to move freely despite covering everything except the face. They fight by grappling, bear hugging their enemies and pressing splinters of animated armor through their shields, which worm their way into the victim's body and travel along the nerve channels to vital organs.

The archetypal encounter between the two is a Hakkapeliitta embracing a Zamburachiki, injecting a woodchip into the sniper's heart right at the exact moment the exploding bullet finally works through the Hackpole's own shield and explodes.

By tradition, the crest of House Tlaxxon is painted freehand in runny gesso of mixed gypsum and razormetl sap.

HOUSE TLAXXON
The land where the whale fields sit was once a vast forest. The forest was tended by the Jaeger, a hereditary gamekeeper and warden who kept out poachers and managed the land and its creatures. Centuries later, despite attempts by every House Major to stomp out inefficient feudal traditions, the Jaeger family Tlaxxon still stands watch over a whalefield at the edge of House Texoco's demesne. While House Texoco's goons fend off raids by shielded commandos, the warden of Tlaxxon and his goons pick off mundane poachers who brave the boundary fence of razormetl to cut slices off their livelihood.

The current head of the petty noble house is Katl Tlaxxon. Long term use of performance enhancing drugs has pickled the Jaeger's amygdala, forcing him to rely on the hooked pincers of drugbugs and chem leeches for emotional self regulation - lest he lose another child to a bout of paranoid madness. He eats nothing but whales because he spends all his time watching them, and he would notice if one of them was poisoned.

Nobody talks about Katl's first wife, and his second rarely leaves her office to participate in society functions where Giedi Prime's petty nobility typically assassinate one another: The disgraced Mentat Bergtorra Tlaxxon, acquired by her husband at a bargain price after the crash. Her lidless eyes stare forever at the stock ticker, her hands furiously scribe message cylinders and tap out buy and sell orders in response to every minor fluctuation of the market.