MOOP!

Dicember Day 10
Name: Emergency Dice!
(Obtained 2023 01 25. Manufacturer: Unknown, they were a gift!)



Okay so first, I have to acknowledge my mild annoyance at myself for not flipping the package over to take the photograph. Because properly aligned dice will have smallest and highest values opposite each other, and the fact that I can see two 1s in this photo means there are some high rolls being trained to be _down_. This is bad dicemanship and I apologize for it.

Anyways, these dice are wonderful not just for themselves, or their adorable "rip here in case of initiative" design. They are wonderful because they were a gift from a complete stranger! Oh sure, there were definitely some friend-of-a-friend-hanging-in-groups connections that brought us hanging out at the same place at the same time. But they had a number of these little bags, to clip to a purse or belt, and when I expressed amusement they just offered me one!

Kindness is so good y'all.

It is something I really try to think about with my dice, about the fact that obviously I love all of them VERY VERY MUCH but also...I love even more the idea of being able to give some of them to friends, to strangers, to kids, to people who need that extra flash of joy. Because sadness is a worse emergency than any other you might find.

(Okay, yeah, that's super hokey, but maybe it's not untrue?)

~Sor
MOOP!

Dicember Day 8
Name: Bell Dice
(Obtained 2023 07 22. Manufacturer:Fallacy Dice probably? (they were a gift))





asdforht;oiafmoiwrt.

Look. I have a lot of dice. I've seen a lot of dice. There's some clever innovations I've observed along the way. Some of my dice have been gifts. Some are incredible works of art, made with true love by their artists. It's a hobby that leads to wonderful enthusiasm from everyone involved.

And sometimes that enthusiasm extends to keysmashing, because y'all. These dice are _bells_. They ring. Not just metallic chimes as they hit the table. Somewhere in the center of that intricate sphere is a tiny bell and so it is, in essence, the most beautiful ring of seven in the world.

Yes my boyfriend got them for me and yes that means I'm horribly biased but like. Dice bells. DICE BELLS. BELL DICE. WHAT EVEN. Hence the keyboard smashing.

Austin gave them to me and was originally all like "I'm sorry, I know you don't prefer metal dice" and like how can you be so perfect and so clueless at the same time because how could I not immediately and entirely love these. They were, in fact, the very first set I put on the list this year to write about.

And yeah, they were sitting in my purse the entirety of my first peal. Obviously.

(I'm kicking myself for not having a video of them chiming --I will try and get that and edit it in later? Someone drop a comment and remind me.)

~Sor
MOOP!

Dicember Day 6
Name: Ecto Cooler
(Obtained 2023 08. Manufacturer: Dice Envy)



I really enjoy the arrangement of dice in a Dice Envy set! Their acrylic sets are ten dice, which is your standard 7, plus a bonus d6 with their iconic lion design, their exclusive "infinity d4" and one big ol bonus chonker d20. It's like ~bonus dice~ also there's something really satisfying about having a couple big fuckin' icosohedrons around to chuck if necessary.

Anyways, I think Seanan McGuire brought this particular set to my attention, because she is the Pumpkin Queen and I am just a wee little servitor of her court. And while green is not the primary pumpkin colour, that orange numbering goes a long way to causing a perfect spectacle.

I'm disappointed I didn't get a chance to photograph these outside in the sunshine, but on the plus side, that means they're one of my ~earned sets~! Yep, I am still doing my dailies, and still earning a little dice present if I get enough things done during the day. Austin just refilled it for its ninth run since I started in February of 2021 --so I earn a die about a third of the time. I can live with that kind of record, probably, but it'd be really really cool to up those numbers and get even more shinies!

~Sor
MOOP!

Dicember Day 4
Name: Orange Dice (no really literal oranges)
(Obtained 2022 05. Manufacturer: Fennek and Finch, formerly Cozy Gamer)



You can see in the name that I had to emphasize "no really" because I have a lot of orange dice. Not as many sets as I do green dice, but it's officially my favourite colour and so I have...acquired many a set in that shade.

But this one is notable because not only are they orange in colour, they are orange in theme! Wee tiny orange slices embedded in the center of this set!

I got three sets of dice with inclusions from this manufactuer way back when, and found them...okay. Inclusions are really hard to do well, and they had the unfortunate tendancy to have the highest face of the die result in the inclusion being upside down, which just feels like bad organization. But I was poking around on their website just now, and wowwww do they have a lot of *really* gorgeous sets that don't have any inclusions at all. Maybe this time next year I'll be telling you of a specific acrylic that really works for me!

~Sor
MOOP!

Dicember Day 2
Name: Incandescent: Fire
(Obtained 2022 12. Manufacturer: Dispel Dice)



This is a slightly awkward set of dice to write about, given that they were from a kickstarter that just after it closed, one of the two companies involved had a whoooole bunch of bad press about their explotative workshop practices. But! That was Wyrmwood gaming supplies, who make dice _boxes_ and not Dispel Dice, who make...dice. And to the best of my knowledge, did not know what was going on and have made a formal statement not to work with Wyrmwood again. So we cool, Dispel, we cool!

(Ah capitalism, why do you make everything so dreadfully difficult?)

Anyways, these were their Elemental collection, which had two variations for each colour -incandescent and iconic. Both were absolutely gorgeous and I am kicking myself that I accepted taking a photo of these when the sun was behind a cloud instead of demanding to see them crackle in direct sunlight. Things to remember for next year!

It's hard for me to get an orange I like (it's my favourite colour, but there's a more narrow band of shades I prefer than in greens) but this one is pretty close, and adding crinkly prismy sparkles inside something will go a long way to compensate!

~Sor
MOOP!

*Observes that it is December 3rd*
*Puts on their sunglasses and YOLO swags around anyways*
*Immediately falls off their skateboard because I am fundamentally Not Cool*

Hey friends and foes! Y'all may recall that last year I did a super keen little project I called Dicember! I took photos all summer, and then throughout last fall, I wrote little descriptions and memories and vignettes and opinons about 31 of my sets of dice¹. It was pretty great, and I spent lots of time preparing for it so that I could just go wild in the actual month and post with basically no barriers.

...

So I did take photos this past summer! And then I completely ignored the very concept of Dicember until about November 26th when I abruptly remembered this was a project I wanted to work on. WHOOPS.

But! I have made the list! I have gathered the photos! I have written...well I've written three entries, which is good, because it's December 3rd. We'll see about getting the rest done as the month spirals out.

And like last year, I hope you enjoy seeing many many shiny pieces of plastic. I know I will!

( Index under here )

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Then 134, now 215...ish...holy shit really? okay yeah wow cool. we cool. jegus.

Dicember Day 29
Chort and Paula's Wedding Dice.
(Obtained 2001. Manufacturer: Unknown, probably Chessex)



These are it. This hodgepodge of eight, unassuming, mismatched polyhedrals is where everything begins.

It was September 22, 2001, and Chort and Paula¹ were getting married. For favours, there were little origami boxes one could choose between. "Almonds for the traditional". "Bulbs for the gardeners". "Chocolate for everyone else".

And "dice for the gamers".

I was twelve years old, and I greedily grabbed two little boxes --one with a matched black d20, d12, d8, and d4. The other had a mismatched black and red d10 and d%, and two blue and yellow d6s. Eight dice. Don't really go together, but there's one of every kind. Mine, all mine.

My very first dice.

Oh, I'd definitely _handled_ dice before. I don't remember for sure when Da started the roleplaying game for the three of us kids, but it was well earlier than that. We'd just...grabbed dice out of the peanut tin my parents kept theirs in, a mix of colours and styles (and worn-smooth and waxy!). But I'd never had dice that were _mine_. That I didn't have to put away at the end of the session, that I didn't have to share with Shannon or Alys.

These dice are old enough to drink. They've been in my dicebag for two thirds of my life. They did not spend very long as the _only_, but they are the _first_ and that is important to me. And these days, they travel in a slightly bigger set, with my firsts of other sizes --d5, d7, d16. I usually have a couple of d2s in there as well. I really ought to get a d3.



Dice for the gamers. I suppose that's me!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: There is no way to write this entry without touching on the damnable tragic fact that Paula died of cancer several years ago, and it is an awful thing. She was a woman of joy and adventure and music and enthusiasm, and in addition to the dice from her wedding, I have a stone from her collection that sits on my altar in her memory and her blessing. Sometimes the world is so so utterly unfair.

At least now her and ShadowCaptain can dance together again. I don't necessarily do the whole ~heaven~ thing, but...but I believe that the spirits can still be dancing.

Dicember Day 27
Copper and Green Swirl "Bullfrog" and "Emerald Vale"
(Both obtained 2021 02, Bullfrog from Beholder's Gaze and Emerald Vale from Ice Cream Dice)

I have a problem.

Wait shit no, I've used that as a lead-in to an entry before. So now I have two problems: That I'm not a creative writer, and that sometimes I, er, accidentally get duplicates.



In my defense, it is a VERY PRETTY set! Sets. Two very pretty sets! But as it turns out, like with many manufactured items, copies abound. I know in many cases, it's because a lot of dice sellers sell wholesale dice from bulk manufacturers as well as their own unique designs. That may have been so with this doubling --although the two sets are subtly different if you look closely!



In my spreadsheet, they are labeled as a matte set and a translucent set. There's also the matter of luster on the numbers --one set is numbered in a glittery silver, the other in a sleek grey. Also in my spreadsheet there is a note, for both: "may be switched". I posted an order photo from when I received the Ice Cream Dice ones though, and I think through careful study I can identify that it's the more matte and grey ones.

(My spreadsheet is not meant to be infallible though. Certainly, I don't have price data for anything pre-2020, and I have discovered a delicious flaw in the "buy mystery sets from multiple shops and then let other people put them into my dailies calendar for me" plan, which is, er, I don't recognize this beautiful mystery set, and there are multiple options for where it arrived from. I do the best I can with what I have!)

((Also, fun fact, in that photo linked in twitter, all three of those sets were originally written up, in the time before posting. Then I decided that having _four_ Ice Cream Dice sets is maybe a lot, even though I am pretty fond of them, and swapped the Caramel Apple for the wee pumpkin coloured we saw previously. Creating this series of posts has been an ADVENTURE, let me tell you!))

(((Third and final fun fact, part of the problem was that these were purchased before I had started the dice spreadsheet. Part of why I have the spreadsheet is to try and keep track of what dice I do already have, especially since there are some I have not yet earned and so can't go look at whenever I want! I think I've only failed once since --I'm pretty sure there are two separate sets of cool looking blood-spattered dice in my "to be earned" pile, each from a different company.)))

( Separate pictures here under the cut )

~Sor
MOOP!

Dicember Day 25
Dwarven Stones Hematite Dice
(obtained in high school or earlier so like...2004? From Crystal Caste)

It is embarrassing writing this entry, because I discovered I actually had the entirely wrong company name here! Since corrected in my spreadsheet and above, but gosh I felt like a dweeb trying to search these up. Anyways.



These are the first high end luxury dice I ever bought. These are the dice that I coveted for years, that I thought about frequently, that I ultimately decided to drop a *huge* amount of my fourteen year old self's wallet on that one year at Origins.

Because I was _definitely_ a polished rocks kid. I am...still kindof a polished rocks adult (only now that I'm grown and witchy they're ~crystals~ instead), and so dice made of actual polished gemstones *blew my tiny mind*. I saw them in the pages of Knights of the Dinner Table and went "IT MUST BE MINE!"¹

And now I am grown! I can blow my paycheck on fancy stone and glass and crystal dice any time I want! I can have so many ~exquisite~ high end dice! I can...but honestly, eh. It turns out that through careful study of different mediums, I'm a plastic girl at heart². Which is not to say that I haven't spent...a lot of money on sets of fancy hand-made artisanal luxury dice. Just that they're fancy resin or acrylic these days, rather than hematite.

That being said, as part of writing this entry I did a wee bit of googling around and while I can't actually access the Crystal Caste site at work³ it looks like the ~vast price~ I paid was in the range of like...$25. Nowadays it'd be $30. If I actually wanted to grab a set of the Tiger's Eye (my canonical favourite stone) and make past!Kat insatiably jealous, it is much more in my reach than I thought. That's...that's dangerous and cool to know.

Also it turns out I can just search for a website in the Wayback machine and that's not blocked at school, so dumbass "hacking" wins again against the forces of evil (the school IT department, all of whom are quite nice and I like a lot except the dweebus in charge who somehow has a disproportionate amount of power over my work quality of life)!

((Also, it's not clear from the photo above, but they are TINY! They're your standard "small" size of dice, and very very pretty!))

~Sor
MOOP!

1: This mis-reference is intentional and imo, very funny.

2: This mis-gender is not intentional but my brain refuses to rewrite the sentence, so there we go, apparently one of the rare instances of me deciding to have a gender is right now as I talk about dice material types.

3: "games" sites are blocked, which means I used to be able to play any flash game in the world by googling it with the phrase "unblocked" and means that resources for the Game Theory unit I used to teach were often unavailable. Firewalls are great! (Dice sites are about 50-50 blocked or not)

Also, lest you side-eye me for doing dice related frivoloties on the clock, my kids are currently taking a test, I can't help them anyways, shuddup.

Dicember Day 22
Cosmic Stars Dice
(Obtained 2022 05, from TableTop Loot)



I was worried, because between making the list-of-sets-to-write-about and actually, you know, sitting down and writing, TabletopLoot announced they were going out of business, and put all their dice on sale. Oh no! I have enjoyed the previous purchase, oh well, guess I better drop a way-too-much on way-too-many sets while they're cheap...oh wait. wait, you're not going out of business after all?

Turns out one of their close friends bought the business and will be officially in charge come the new year. So that's cool, because this set I have of theirs? Came to me completely free of charge, as a very nice little surprise they threw in. And it is _so pretty_.

One of the things I really like about dice is that they are *all* _so pretty_. Even sets in colours that I wouldn't naturally pick up for myself (compare sometime the number of green sets to literally any other colour...) are still exciting and satisfying to admire and play with and look at. So the blue and red galaxy swirl here wouldn't necessarily be my first thought, but once it was in my hands? Oh, oh very yes, oh _fabulously_ yes! Look at it shimmer and glitter and be Just Plain Glorious!

I like this set to the point where I *almost* bought another one in the closing-not-really sale. Almost. Sorta kicking myself that I didn't. All is well though, I only need one pretty set to hold at a time!

((As an aside, my original TTL order came with a little note on the invoice explaining that there were different bags for different dice sets because they don't open-and-rebag the dice they purchase wholesale, as a way of reducing waste. I really appreciated that fact!))

~Sor
MOOP!