The thought occurred to me that pretty much every major Dune spinoff, particularly spinoff video games and card games, is basically only dealing with the original "Dune" book. Even most of the extended universe prequel books are just "yet another young Paul book" or something, dealing with the same basic setup under the Corrino Imperium. 

That's why the Butlerian Jihad books are so interesting by comparison; at least the setup is different - even though it curves TOWARDS the later setup as it goes along. So I'm looking at yet another card game or prequel book set a generation or two before the first dune novel, and the thought occurs to me: "the main novels span 5,000 years of history, why don't they ever cover one of the other eras?" (sigh) because they're not nearly as popular. Well, spinoff books eventually did try to cover the gap between Dune and Dune Messiah about the Fremen Jihad across the galaxy - THAT is new and different. But sitting around reading through stuff, my biggest thought was "out of all these spinoff books, why doesn't he ever make one about the Famine Times and the Scattering? And the creation of the Honored Matres?" Because within the fictional universe, on the scale of galactic events, the Scattering is...arguably the biggest and most impactful event to happen since the Butlerian Jihad.

I guess I made this post because I've been re-reading "Chapterhouse: Dune" in anticipation of Quinn's new guide due out in four days :) and...A LOT of that book, more than Heretics of Dune, was dealing with the Bene Gesserit pondering what the heck happened out in the Scattering. I mean they mention Futars exactly once in Heretics. Chapterhouse is the one where they really start questioning what happened out in the Scattering, realizing "the Enemy" used biological warfare, that someone - probably Lost Tleilaxu - was having fun splicing human and animal DNA to make shock troops the Great Convention would never allow, etc. So I was re-reading Chapterhouse, which with Dune gone spent more time pondering what happened out in the Scattering, and I was left wistfully thinking what a great setting the Scattering is to round out in spinoff books.