Inspired by Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon and Adapted to Fantasy

Deep in the bowels of the earth, the mining of the dwarves broke through into the Cacophony: A vast substrate of strange, fluted rock through which howled an unnatural gale-storm of subterranean wind.

Others might have destroyed such a place. Or sealed it away to save themselves from its terrible roar. Fortunately, the work of dwarves is fraught with care: “With cautious skill, tap by tap — a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day” they discovered that the whole of the Cacophony was made up of a twisted morass of differentiated spires.

And each of these Spires, when separated from the Cacophony of the whole, possessed a unique and ethereal song of haunting beauty.

For generations, therefore, the dwarves have worked: Carefully choosing and extracting each songspire so that its music can be heard. They are rare and beautiful objects, prized by both dwarves and surface dwellers.

I remember a time when dice were far more important than they are today. It used to be that a “true gamer” attempted to find as many different types of dice as he possibly could. You started your collection by getting the essentials – the d4, the d6, the d8, the d10, the d12, and the d20. You usually got these in the boxed set along with your rulebook. These were generally cheap. You’d later upgrade these cheapies so that you had marbled or gem dice. Then you’d begin to add on the more exotic types. My first exotic die was the fabled d100… which, if you rolled it in 1988, would probably still be going if it hadn’t gone off the end of the table and hit the wall. My second was a purple d30. I once knew a guy who had a d12 printed with the digits 1-6 and 95-00. I never did figure out what the hell that thing was for. But it was cool.

Of course, then again, perhaps it’s only in my circle of gaming friends that this slow deemphasization has taken place. Perhaps other groups are still possessed of massive dice infatuations. Perhaps. I think it far more likely that the maddened collectors in this industry have all turned to CCGs for their fix. Certainly roleplaying games themselves seem to have retreated to a “single type of die” philosophy over the past decade. It’s no longer common to see a discussion of the differences between d6s, d4s, d8s, d10s, d12s, and d20s comfortably squeezed in between “An Example of Play” and “What is a Roleplaying Game?” in the first section of your rulebook.

All of this palpable nostalgia I have summoned up is only for the purpose of explaining where this “product of time” came from. DeathDice from Flying Buffalo, Inc. is a plastic tube of five six-sided dice – three of which have one side printed with a skull, two of which have one side printed with Grimtooth’s head (Grimtooth, of course, being their semi-cute trollish creature made famous by the Grimtooth Traps volumes… which, of course, you youngsters probably don’t know either… sigh…). The small sheet which comes with the dice is printed with advertisements for other Flying Buffalo products on one side and the rules for a simple dice game called Skulls on the other (which only requires two skull dice – no rules are given which explain why you’d need three… let alone two Grimtooth dice). The rules for Skulls basically consist of rolling the dice over and over again until you either decide to  stop or roll a Skull on one of the dice (which causes you to lose all your points for that round).

The skull prints on the dice are blurry and don’t seem to be based on particularly good drawings to begin with. On the other hand, Grimtooth looks as handsome as ever.

I can’t recommend this product to you… unless of course you’re looking for some truly unique dice to add to your collection. (And don’t deny it: You’ve still got it, even if you don’t use it all that much any more.)

Style: 3
Substance: 2

Company/Publisher: Flying Buffalo, Inc.
Cost: $4.50
Page count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 1999/05/28

About a year after I wrote this review, I had a backpack stolen which contained my entire collection of WEG Star Wars sourcebooks and my dice bag. I had built the collection of Star Wars supplements up because I was playing in a really great Star Wars campaign run by my friend Dave Blackmer. In the years since then, I’ve only replaced the core rulebooks.

My collection of dice, on the other hand, had been built up from the very first day I bought the BECMI Basic Set. It included the dice that came with the Basic Set (including a truly ugly pink-and-black d12), but it also included a complete set of waxed dice from the original Basic Set, the d100 and d30 talked about in this review, and countless others that represented an eclectic adolescence of gaming. And the dice bag was actually one that I had inherited from father. It was literally irreplaceable.

These days I own a lot of dice, but I don’t collect them: I own several varied sets, but they’ve all been purchased for explicitly utilitarian purposes. The exceptions are a hodge-podge of d10s which I received as a donation from my brother-in-law and a set of three d6’s which were wedding favors at my brother’s wedding. (I keep those in my bag to breed good luck… which is ironic, because my dice are frequently being used to kill the characters of my brother and sister-in-law.)

On a similar note, one last dice-related anecdote: The first dice I bought to replace my stolen dice bag was a set of black dice with red numbers. To supplement this set, I purchased additional, matching d6’s (’cause D6 Star Wars). Within only a few weeks of purchase, one of these d6’s shattered in my dice bag — leaving one big chunk and a number of shards. I still keep this entire d6 (in pieces) in my dice bag to soak up all the bad luck.

I may not be a collector, but I wouldn’t be a gamer if I didn’t have dice superstitions, right?

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Two weeks ago, I promised to continue posting “holding pattern” updates to let people know that I hadn’t suffered a Michael Vick-style concussion and forgotten what Legends & Labyrinths was.

Well, we’re still very much in a holding pattern and still at least a few more weeks away from entering the actual Final Countdown for Legends & Labyrinths. (And that’s assuming that some new disaster doesn’t strike.)

But things are progressing and additional art updates are hitting my desk with heartening regularity. To tide you over, here’s the latest work-in-progress update on “Adventurers at Rest” (the piece I showcased as concept art last time):

A fellow over on Reddit asked for feedback on a campaign in which an ancient curse prevented anyone from gaining XP and advancing past 1st level — a “world without heroes”. My random thoughts:

First, experience points are an abstract mechanic that represents the ability for people to learn and grow as individuals. If the world is literally “no XP is ever gained by anyone, ever” then, in terms of the game world, that means a world of horrible, almost automaton-like stasis.

Of course, if people can never learn anything more than the knowledge they’re born with, the human race is basically reduced back to base animals. So let’s make an exception for kids: If you’re a kid, you can still learn and be educated. But once you hit 16 or 18 (or whatever arbitrary age you want to set), the curse takes effect and the light in your eyes is snuffed out.

This opens the door a bit for child prodigies: The exceptional few who can achieve more than 1st level before they turn 18 and the curse hits them. Most of ’em still won’t get far, but you might get the occasional 3rd level character running around just to ease things up in your world-building a bit. (This could also give you a mechanism for your PCs: They’re actually just exceptional 16 year olds. But the clock is ticking for them: At 18, the light goes out. If they’re going to find a way to reverse the Curse, they’re going to have to do it before they join the grey mass of inertia-driven grown-ups around them.

SURVIVING IN A WORLD OF MONSTERS

The typical PC races are going to have a real tough time of it if the world is filled with CR 2-20 encounters and they’re all stuck at CR 1. Although the other races are also limited by the Curse, even something as simple as an ogre has a huge advantage in terms of natural selection in this world.

The obvious solution is that the PC races need to either transform themselves into something more powerful or they need to make powerful allies. A few possibilities off the top of my head:

(1) Most of the successful city-states have made pacts with demons. Basically, an entire city will auction off its souls to a demonic patron and that patron will, in exchange, protect them. A few “soul-free” might cling to the edges of civilization, but the lands of the civilized races have become dark and perverted places — a patchwork of demonic alliances waging fruitless and endless proxy wars.

(2) Vampires vs. Werewolves. Cliche? Sure. But undead and lycanthropic plagues are one of the few ways for humans to empower themselves in this milieu. Expect to see cities where vampires rule openly as an elite caste and freedom fighters attempting to overthrow the vampires willingly infect themselves with lycanthropy in order to have the strength to rebel.

(3) Or, vice versa, the nobles are all lycanthropes who, once per month, invoke their ancient rights of sanguis nocte and hunt through the city or countryside to feast upon their subjects.

(4) Or perhaps it’s a world in which human cities are built around plateaus of step-pyramids in which almost constant human sacrifices are carried out as part of the ritual magic required to keep the vast undead armies protecting the city under control.

(5) Dwarves survive because they have hidden themselves away behind vast layers of stone. Their cities are laced with countless traps — an endless layering of defenses which only fuels the well-earned dwarven paranoia. (Because they know, deep in their hearts, that some day a darkness will creep into their cities and they will be powerless to stop it. And the deeper they delve away from the terrors of the sunlit world, the closer to that darkness they come.) The rigidity of their caste structures coupled with the effects of the Curse over long centuries have reduced the majority of the dwarven population to an autonomous hivemind. (Ever read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson? Think about he describes the form human civilization took before we gained individual consciousness.)

(6) Things are not pretty for the elves. The woods they once ruled are filled with powerful dangers  they are no long capable of mastering and the ancient demesnes that once swore fealty to them are now more powerful than they. They are a broken and scattered people with no homeland to call their own.  It is said, however, that in the earliest days of the Curse some of the elves crafted refuges upon the Ethereal Plane before their craft was utterly lost to them. Its hard to say what may have happened to those trapped within,  having no way to return to the Material Plane when the arts of magic required for the passage were lost to them.