Houses Minor
The popular name for the planetary gentry, those landowners, politicians, entrepreneurs, and performers who were confined by economic circumstance to one planet or planetary system. The Houses Minor were far more numerous (some estimates have reached as high as one million; other commentators limited the number of Houses Minor to about 100,000, using economic and political factors to decrease the possibilities) and far more diverse than the Houses Major; they cannot be described except in the broadest of terms. In general, however, they consisted of those
persons or families who had reached an economic status of relative luxury compared to those around them, or who had entrenched themselves as a persistent political power in the lives of the citizens of at least a planetary continent, but who had not yet transcended planetary status. Many of the Houses Minor were employed by the Houses Major; none of the Houses Major served others except in
transitory political alliances.1Dune Encyclopedia, p 430
Houses Major
Officially, the “Recognized Houses,” those Houses accorded individual voting status in the Imperial Landsraad, the legislature of the empire. Although all of the noble houses technically belonged to the Landsraad, a practice developed at an early date in the history of the empire of according only certain of the more influential houses separate voting privileges; all other, lesser houses belonged to “Circles of the Empire,” each Circle being accorded a certain number of votes representing each sector or system in the known universe. These circles elected representatives to sit at each session of the Landsraad, the representation being rotated on a regular basis. The different circles had differing methods of electing representatives.2Dune Encyclopedia, p 373
In Dune: Houses on Fire, Minor Houses will need to maneuver their way to controlling an entire planet and develop a second Primary Domain before they can be considered ‘worthy’ of inclusion in the rarefied rank of Houses Major.
Index of Houses
Back to the top of Dune: Adventures in the Imperium
This is a fan site devoted to running Dune: Adventures in the Imperium by Modiphius Entertainment, based on Dune created by Frank Herbert and owned by the Gale Force Nine, a Battlefront Group Company. No use of eithers’ intellectual property on this page is meant to constitute a challenge to either entities’ rights and is intended under fair use provisions. We encourage you to buy a copy of this fine RPG, if you use one of the links provided on this page we’ll receive a small fee that will help support expansion of the material found here. The planetary illustrations here are mostly from the core book and NASA. Art not coming from Modiphius, or NASA are fan works either from myself or other fans, I credit other artists where I have a source available and would appreciate your help finding the origin of other fan art included without attribution. In many places I cite the Dune Encyclopedia, a collective work released in 1983, which I got from a book of the month club accidentally and was my entry point to the Dune universe, I would love to have a link available so you could get your own, but it appears to be out of print.
Leave a Reply