Dune 2D20: Whalefall - Retinue

A couple or three people you might meet on a visit to House Tlaxxon's manor - a tiny keep that floats above the whalefields, roof planted with beautiful cacti and sootblack flowers, fastened to the earth by an anchorchain connected to an enormous boulder that predates the arrival of man on Giedi Prime.

 

CHAAK TLAXXON - HEIR

"Please Kubaba, Horned Mother, Fourteen Sages, don't let me end up like my parents". This is a prayer every teenager knows by heart, but to Chaak Tlaxxon it is his religion entire. Mom is a face peeled back by barbed hooks, eyes staring lidlessly into a comscreen. Dad is a fist, jerked back at the last moment only by organ spasms induced by parasites embedded in his body. If Chaak wastes every day hot rodding an old grain hauler and plinking at grackle with his rifle, it's because it distracts him from the portent of his eventual fate waiting at home.

 

OPOCHTLI "LEFTY" TLAXXON - MENTAT

Lefty wants to be an assassin when she grows up. Doesn't everyone? Unfortunately for her she lacks the people skills for covert work, but Chaak's younger sister takes after her parents more than he ever will. A perfect synthesis of mother's neuroses and father's paranoia, held together by drugs and mentat training. She's not even interested in killing her brother to take his seat. Only a fool breaks her lightning rod in half during a ruinstorm. Her biggest vice is her love of practical jokes, mixing up harmless but irritating poisons and clandestinely dosing people to "hone her skills" as a covert killer.

IZTAYOTL - WARMASTER

Ex-poacher Iztayotl immediately kills anyone caught trespassing on House Tlaxxon's land. It's better than what House Texoco will do if he takes them alive. Old Man Katl put Iztayotl in charge of punishing his kids when they misbehaved, because he didn't trust himself not to kill them, and that was bad enough. Despite this unfortunate softness of heart, Iztayotl is plumb center with a rifle and no slouch in close quarters either. Oh and he's a teetotaler, which is almost unheard of on Giedi Prime. The world horrifies him enough without a layer of drug induced unreality over the pasteboard mask.

 

VAGAR - SPYMASTER

A pyon from the swale of neighboring House Rust, Vagar always dreamed of seeing the world. Giedi Prime is divided into a million fiefdoms and corporations and each one stakes a claim to its own access shafts and housing blocks and food courts and factory floors and power plants and drug dens, and doesn't let pyons and maula wander freely between them. With a cibus hood and a mission from the Jaeger that blackmail be retrieved or some person be killed, you can go wherever you want. Vagar's big weaknesses are his distractability and his unwillingness to delegate. Why let someone else have fun?