So I made my first foray into the world of Dungeons and Dragons. It was a lot of fun, but I immediatley got dice envy.
Turns out theres quite a lot of really cool dice. Gemstones, metals, wood, bone, glass - pretty much any material you can think of. Then there are hollow ones, liquid core ones (so you can have nice swirly effects) and other wierd and wonderful properties.
I really like the idea of metal dice, something with a bit of weight to it - cue searching the internet and finding a tungsten DnD 7 dice set - only £479.00 (plus they ship from the US…).
Hmmm, I am not quite ready to spend a monkey on a set of die, or even a pony for just the D20. But tungsten die as really going to be super cool (and super heavy).
Next I see the gemstone dice. But more importantly this guy who makes dice, I follow to his website and find his initial start in this path. This full story is available, but the short version is that his dad had a Gem Faceting machine.
These machines are super clever, and you “stick” the rock to an arm, and it has all sorts of angle markers and clamps and you can grind each side to very specific angles. Excellent for making an icosahderon. But the machines are expensive – again too much outlay. What can I make with cheap tools I have? Well, maybe I should start with wood.
I find that a regular icosahdron fits nicely in a cube, and it’s easy to make a cude of wood. Then you cut 20.9° angles from various sides and finally smooth off the remaining points. That is a massive simplification, but the idea is there: you perform a but of cuts at the same angle from different sides of the cube, and finally mark and cut off all the remaining sharp corners.
First attempt was a bit rubbish, I used a full size saw, my coping saw blade broke and I didn’t have a replacement and I had to do all the sanding by hand. It was not great.
Next attempt will be with a dremel to help me, probably still on wood, but perhaps I will start on some pebbles I have. apparently you can “sand” stone away with the appropriate grit of paper. I think I need to work with the tools for a while to understand how to use them to create what I want.
The endgame is to produce at least 4 awesome stone d20s for the other players and games master) in my campaign. I can only hope to have something half as beautiful as the basic stone dice Doug made.
Unsuprisingly stone is hard. Who would have thought.
So perhaps I switch targets from beautiful ground stone D20s to beautiful resin cast dice, which seem more attainable!
Watch this space…