Dice, and the towers they roll down

I've been meaning to share this incredible dice tower my friend Graham 3D-printed for me for my birthday for a few weeks now, so let me finally do so:

I realize now I should probably have shown something for scale, but it's a good eight or ten inches tall, and large enough for “normal” sized dice to clatter down the stairs with ease. (I tried getting a photo of them in motion, but they descend so fast that they're just a blur!)

Now while you can use a dice tower for anything that involves rolling dice, as a way of ensuring a good random roll or just for the fun of watching the dice fly down, in this case it was because I finally had a nice set of dice worth rolling. (Very) long time readers of this blog may remember this post from all the way back in 2011, where I (badly) modeled a set of polyhedral dice and mentioned that I'd long admired the amazing designs of polyhedral dice that exist, but never really had a reason to get some of my own. Well, I finally picked up a set a few months ago from Die Hard Dice, which has a lot of really neat options such as this Mythica Copper Aquamarine set that I got:

They're made from a zinc-alloy with an electroplated copper finish, and if, like me, you've only rolled plastic dice in your life they'll feel surprisingly hefty, rolling with a good hearty ‘thunk.’ Not directly on a table top as they'd probably put a good dent in it, which is another purpose of dice towers now that I think about it. (There are also a few additional dice in the set such as a pair of ten-sided dice, but I wanted to focus on the Platonic shapes in this photo.)

The reason I finally got a set of polyhedrals is because a friend I know from board gaming invited me to a game he's running with a rather interesting premise: he's created an original fantasy world where he wants to have various games progress through time, with this particular time period involving small parties scouting out an unknown land mass. I'm one of over a dozen players, with the idea being that people organically form parties together based on what parts of the world they want to explore together (so one group might scout a river glimpsed to the north, while another scouts a ruined city to the east, or magical glaciers to the south). Multiple parties are considered to be running simultaneously over two-week periods in-game (though individual sessions would be spread out and consist of no more than four players each), with the world progressing forward in time after each party has had a chance to go out and explore (and return and share their finding on a large shared map).

It piqued my interest since it hits upon my love of exploration and discovery, and it's been a lot of fun getting to play with different groups of people each time. We're using the Shadowdark rules, which keeps things relatively simple and moving along, and provide pressure and danger when outside of safe areas. (Indeed, my first character was already among the first casualties, when three-fourths of our group got killed in a nighttime encounter; we learned that climbing trees is not a good way to fight hostile humanoid frogs since they can just jump up there with you, then proceed to knock you out of the tree to take falling damage.) I've long been sort of “peripherally aware” of role-playing games and the stories they generate, and I've been having a blast finally getting to experience it in person. We'll see how it develops! A hui hou!