Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the Elder Dice Kickstarter rewards I received from Infinite Black. I remain quite happy with the Lovecraft Elder Sign set I got then, pictured above on the left, but when they announced a new campaign to crowdfund new designs and offered some deals on the Astral Elder Sign set from that first release, I sent some money their way for that, too. Those dice have now arrived, as can be seen by the presence of the dice box on the right above! The shipping box was in bad shape thanks to the tender mercies of the Chinese and United States postal services, but the contents seem to have survived unharmed.

The box is printed to look like a book, and it has a magnetic clasp that holds it closed. Opening the box reveals artwork, a card detailing the company's mythology for the set symbol, and the dice. This originally had a standard set of polyhedral dice in a small bag, but I expanded on that selection as discussed below. I haven't closely examined all of them yet, but it appears they are all well polished, free from manufacturing defects, and the numbers and symbols are all nicely painted. These plastic dice are typically formed in a mold, coated liberally with the paint intended to be shown in the recesses for the numbers, and then tumbled to smooth the edges and remove all unwanted paint. It looks like the process was done right on this product.

A d6 is the standard cube everyone should recognize, and in Monopoly or most other games a player rolls 2d6 to determine the move distance. Role-playing games use the same concept, but alter the number of dice rolled and the range of possible outcomes they offer. The extra dice I ordered resulted in the following variety: 2d20, 1 percentile die, 4d10, 4d8, 12d6, and 4d4. The percentile die is the d10 with multiples of 10 on each face. It is rolled along a standard d10 to generate a random number from 1-100. The d6 pool is probably excessive, but plenty of games require d6 dice. In fact, I think it would be fun to make a custom fantasy world map for Risk and use 2 green Lovecraft elder sign dice and 3 blue Astral elder sign dice for that. This may even tie in nicely with the map I am drawing for the Fractured Realms as I expand its scope. What do you think?

The gold-painted numbers shows up well against the marbled blue, and is a perfect accompaniment to my gnome wizard for Dungeons & Dragons, especially with the mystical symbol replacing the highest number on each die. I don't buy dice for each character I create, but this is a serendipitous match nonetheless. Unlike many tabletop RPG players, I think I have achieved the fabled state of enough dice sets now. This set will serve my needs nicely as game master and player alike. I think it's better to have a few nice dice than a lot of cheap dice, but feel free to comment if you disagree.

You can visit Infinite Black for all your Lovecraftian dice and doodads here: https://infiniteblack.net/