Monday, April 25, 2011

A reader asks help in identifying these dice. Does anyone know where they come from? The one on the left looks like one of the Dikesha dice from the AD&D 2e Ravenloft boxed set, Forbidden Lore, but the other two I cannot place. Any help in doing so would be appreciated.

Yeah... What are the symbol, or symbols, on the (Forbidden Lore?) die on the left? Tents? Yurts?

Similar to Mr. Shorts (what an appropriate name) reaction I had initially thought it was a boxers or briefs style undergarment randomizer of some kind. I suppose It could be an interesting tool for character development if there were such a thing.

They were for fortunetelling. Similar to runecasting or a tarot deck. (The boxed set actually has a tarot deck of cards too called the Tarokka.) The symbol that looks like tents is "The Town" and the symbol on top is "The Cave".

Just for trivia's sake, I'll add that the Dark World die is unique to the original Dark WorldL it is not in its sequels. The original Dark World die had 2 blank sides, 3 "1 swords" and 1 "2 swords". Village of Fear and Dragon's Gate had D6's printed as D3's, with "3" to be used as "0", presumably so Canada Games could save a few cents by not ordering new custom dice. Ergo, there was one less 1 and one more 2. Despite that, I still think Village was the only remotely hard one. Probability! It's what's for dinner.

Unfortunately, I've been beaten to the punch, but I will add that I own all those dice myself. :-) That said, without your prompting I wouldn't have got the Dikehsa dice on it's own - it's only as a set of five with the different colours etc that I would probably recognise them.

I've never used the Dikesha dice; the Tarokka deck got a lot of use in my recent D&D campaign, though, especially since one player was a half-Vistani. HeroQuest is a game I own almost all the expansions for but have only played a handful of times - as with so many of my early Games Workshop purchases, I longed to play them but never got the chance. (Though I had a computer version I played a lot on my own.)

I did play Dark World a few more times since it's even more a conventional board game than Heroquest is - there's some RPG trappings to Heroquest with character's going through a plot, but Dark World's only long-term option is to play the eventual three board games one after the other. The figures were quite cool and the look of a fully set-up board is hard to beat.

Hmm, this reminds me of finding Village Of Fear years after the fact in a discount store, sealed and everything, and buying it... to discover no instructions. (And each Dark World game had weird little sub-rules so you really needed the book.) I sent a letter to the manufactuers who apologised and told me it was long since out of print and they couldn't help me. They did send me a free copy of "Sorry!", which to be fair was a game more conducive to talking your parents into playing. :-)

Too bad for you about the Village of Fear rules, DuxColonel, considering it's worse than the others for custom rules. In fact, it's downright buried in them, between combat that's arbitrarily different, keys, invisible monsters in minigames and the way the Warlord gains HP for killing the Heroes. I've got a write-up about the rules somewhere that I wrote years ago, but I haven't got around to posting it anywhere. It's a good game and probably the best one for competitive play, but compared to the others, a total mess.

I recognized the HeroQuest combat die and the Dark World attack die off the bat!

Battle Masters and HeroScape also use HQ-styled combat die, and can be used in HQ (do to the arrangement of "shields" with both sets, the MB dice are good for HQ monsters, and the HS are good for the Heroes).

I really like Combat Dice, as they are really fun to use, and you can get really fast results. When it comes to HeroQuest, I'm one of those crazy players who buys other game to cannibalize the game pieces, and houserule the hell out of the game, until it plays like an RPG lite!

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