Almost paradise…

[robotech_master]

Actually, a lot more than just a pair of dice.

I recently splurged and ordered the Skull & Bones assortment from Dicepool.com. I was curious to see what I might end up getting.

I just got done dumping the whole thing out on my bed and sorting through it, and here's the final tally for what kind of dice I got:

• 18 D4 "caltrops": Interestingly enough, 13 of these are "D'oh!" dice—dice that, instead of the number 1, have "D'oh!" printed on them, in homage to our favorite portly cartoon character. (Of course, this makes the assumption that you're playing a game where rolling high is a good thing and rolling low is a bad thing.) The funny thing is, there were no other "D'oh!" dice in the assortment. The D'oh!s were solid colors, but the five normal ones all had some nice translucent/reflective marbling to them. (I also ordered, separately, a 12-sided die numbered 1 to 4 in dots three times.)
  
  Update: I was taking a closer look at my dice, and I suddenly realized why I got so many of these D'oh! D4s—they're all misprinted! The sides don't line up right. If you put one flat on one face and read all the way around it, you're supposed to see the same number next to the ground on all sides. But these dice you see "D'oh! D'oh! 3," or "3 3 D'oh!" or "4 4 2" or "2 2 4," depending on which face they are resting. They're all completely useless (although they might be fun to throw into a game sometime just for general confusion, heh heh). Yeah, I can imagine when this batch came off the assembly line and someone looked at it, "D'oh!" was probably the very first thing he said.


• 54 "normal" D6: A wide variety of colors and sizes, both digit-faced and dot-faced. It included one 18mm die, one 9mm die (with digits instead of dots), and the rest in-between. A bunch of solid-colors of various kinds, but also some lovely crystals and marbled color dice in there. I got a bunch of other D6es, but I'll get to those.


• 22 D8: Some solid colors, but also a bunch of lovely translucent marbled ones.


• 13 D10: 8 of these were the don't-let-your-players-fudge "tens" dice numbered 10 through 00; only 5 were single-digit. Of the "tens" dice, 5 of them were the ordinary kind with the large numbers that take up the entire face; 3 were the kind with smaller numbers in a more rounded font that read across the face. The set also included one "Dwarven Stone" D10, which is a tiny die that has actually been carved out of natural rock. (I didn't include it in the count of 13.) I don't know what material it's made out of, though; it's a sort of reddish brown color, with darker streaks, and didn't seem to match any of the colors on Crystal Caste's website. Since I'll mainly be using D10s, for playing Universalis if I can ever find anyone to play it with me, that's exactly the die I wanted anyway. (Also, I ordered five "pipped" D10s in various colors separately—oversized D10s numbered with domino dots instead of digits.)


• 13 D12: Mostly red or orange and translucent, the rest marbled. I've never been quite fond of D12s, I'm not sure entirely why—maybe I've just never played anything that used them much—but these certainly are some pretty dice. I also got that 12-sided D4 I mentioned earlier (which is about twice as big as a normal D12, and looks like it might make a decent defensive weapon against an angry wild dog if you couldn't find a convenient rock), and another "special" D12 that I'll mention below.


• 3 D20: A little surprising to find so many other dice and then just three of one of the most commonly-used dice in roleplaying, but I suppose that part of the point of this set is to get rid of overstocks and odd lots, and I expect D20s sell fairly well. Two of them are rather attractive (if perhaps a little hard to read) grey digits on white plastic; one is silver digits on translucent orange.

Now we come to a more interesting category: the odds-and-ends dice that came in the assortment. I'll start out with the more "normal" types of dice, then get into the really weird ones. I'm hoping any gamer types out there can satisfy my curiosity as to what games some of them came from.

• 1x (1D12, astronomical symbols): This die is covered with symbols for the sun, moon, and planets, plus "ascending" and "descending," similar to this one except it's black with gold symbols, and has the symbol for Pluto instead of the one for earth. Presumably it's meant to be used in casting horoscopes. This was the only "special" non-D6 that I had, the rest are all 6-sided.


• 1x (1D6, dotted, pentagram in place of 1): I think this isn't from any particular game, just one of those funky custom dice that companies make to appeal to gamers' tastes. I have some dice like that with a unicorn in place of the 1.


• 2x (3x Superman logo, 3x Darkseid): dvandom says these are most likely from West End's DC Heroes RPG; apparently it has some kind of a die pool where the hero logo is positive and the villain is negative results.


• 1x (2x Darth Vader's face, 2x lightsaber, 2x blank): I'm guessing this is from a Star Wars game of some kind. But I could be dead wrong! Update: Thornhammer from the RPG.net forum says this is probably from West End Games's Hoth game; cartoonlad confirms it.


• 1x (2-6 in digits, 3 dots and a squiggle in place of 1): The 5 looks like the number in the Babylon 5 logo, so I'm guessing this is from a B5 game. Update:notcroaker identifies this as being from the Narn faction die set that Agents of Gaming did. Good catch, notcroaker!


• 1x (-3, -1, 0, 1, 3, Xena logo): Could this be from some kind of Xena game, or is that too crazy?


• 3 D3 (1-3 in digits, 1-3 in dots): I suppose you could use these in a game where it was better to roll low—at least until the other players caught on.


• 2x (1-5 in dots, blank): I assumed these dice were normal until I was rummaging through the D6es and happened to take a closer look. I don't know whether these are misprints or whether there's some particular game where you roll a 0-5 die rather than a 1-6, though I suspect probably the latter.


• 3x (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, flying bird): Here begin the ones that I have no idea on. Update: kensan_oni says these may be from Elfenland.
  

  Elfenland was a boardgame where you ran around and tried to visit all the
  elven kingdoms to become king. It was a strange European game that didn't
  do too well at any of the stores I know of that tried to sell it. Did
  well in France, from what I hear, though.

• 3x (0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2): I've been advised these may be Warhammer scatter dice, for showing by how many hexes an attack missed its target; however, notcroaker points out those have arrows and a bullseye. But the idea of it being some kind of scatter dice seems likely.


• 3x (1-4 in dots, stick figure, bullseye)


• 1x (1-4 in dots, 5-pointed star, globe)


• 1x (+, +, -, -, i, i): Or it could be !, !, I'm not sure. It's an outline, and I suppose you could look at it either way. At first I thought it might be a FUDGE die, but those are three pluses and three minuses. Update: I've been corrected that FUDGE dice are actually 2 pluses, two minuses, and two blanks, so both this and the aforementioned Vader die could be, or be used as, FUDGE dice.


• 1x (20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120) and 1x (200, 220, 240, 260, 280, 300): I'm guessing these come from the same game. Update: I was told by a game dealer at the local VisionCon that these two dice are two out of the three dice from a dice-based bowling game. The only such game I can find in a quick google has dice that have actual pins on them, though.

So, a total of 150 dice, plus the Dwarven Stone and a dice bag. Not bad at all for the price.

Apart from this, I also got a set of "crystal" dice—not the translucent kind, but the kind that are like handle-less dreidels rather than Platonic solids. They come in their own little spring-loaded box and are kinda neat.

Anyway, I'll update this post with the identities of the mysterious dice and the names of their first identifiers as they come in. Let the games begin!

Update: Odd how appropriate Friday's xkcd (xkcd_rss) turned out to be, isn't it?

Comments

[not-croaker.livejournal.com]

# 1x (2-6 in digits, 3 dots and a squiggle in place of 1): The 5 looks like the number in the Babylon 5 logo, so I'm guessing this is from a B5 game.

Yes. The "three dots and a squiggle" is the Narn logo; Agents of Gaming did a set of faction dice when they were still running the B5 liscence. Pictures here.