Aftermarket Dice

By Doji Kuribe, in Legend of the Five Rings: The Roleplaying Game

Does anyone make dice for the RPG other than FFG?

There was a company at GenCon that had some really nice stone dice but they were $100+.

I figured it might be nice to have a dice that stands out to make it easier to not mix up dice at the table.

16 hours ago, Doji Kuribe said:

Does anyone make dice for the RPG other than FFG?

There was a company at GenCon that had some really nice stone dice but they were $100+.

I figured it might be nice to have a dice that stands out to make it easier to not mix up dice at the table.

Not that I know of. However, here's a tip if you want to make your dice stand out. You can use a wax crayon to rub across the dice faces, which will fill the symbols with the coloured wax. You will need to give it a bit of a wipe down afterwards as well. I did all of my ring dice with yellow, because the red didn't really stand out against the black, whereas the yellow does.

Maybe you could use a pale blue for Crane (although you might need to test whether that is visible against the white). Or if you're feeling accurate, use a different colour for each icon.

The artwork on the dice is covered by copyright, so it could be tricky for anyone to legally sell their own versions without altering the symbols in some way.

As Tonbo-san suggested, re-inking your dice is one option (though you might want to use an acrylic paint rather than wax).

If you are willing to invest some effort into it, you could consider making your own dice sets molded from FFG’s. Rybonator has whole set of instructional videos on YouTube about how to mold, cast, and ink dice.

If anyone has made their own L5R dice, I’d be interested to see the results. The printed and glued set I made for the beta, though serviceable, are hardly objet d’art.

6 hours ago, Moribund said:

The artwork on the dice is covered by copyright, so it could be tricky for anyone to legally sell their own versions without altering the symbols in some way.

Or getting a licensing agreement. There's some really great dice companies that I'd love to have L5R dice in their styles.

Like some of the metal dice from Level Up.

So that booth was Level Up dice! They had dice sets, 5dRing and 5dSkill, in either obsidian with white font or lavender jade (jadeite) with black font. At GenCon I bought a set of the lavender jade. They were very friendly and let you pick the five out from all of their sets, it at least a couple. IIRC I bought the third to last set. Someday I might be tempted by obsidian as well. The booth people told me they were officially licensed.

https://usa.levelupdice.net/search?q=Legend+of+the+five+rings

The dice have a good weight to them. They seem fairly sturdy and roll without chipping. Though I only roll them on a play mat. Like metal dice I probably would be weary of the thinner dice towers. Forgive the potato quality of my picture, I used the thumbnail instead if taking the time to edit down the file size.

If these sell well I could see some wooden runs. Maybe sandalwood or agarwood if those are reliable woods.

I could see FFG possibly doing alternate sets of plastic dice, and maybe licensing out. Either way I would expect the price to be about double that of standard dice. Q Workshop under an AEG license had made clan (including Mantis and Spider, plus Imperial) d10 sets. The Mon was the 0 face. That wouldn't work for 5E but clan specific color schemes would. I think before Q Workshop someone else did a licensed run of d10s, but my memory of that is fuzzy.

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Edited by GM81 Protocol Droid
6 hours ago, GM81 Protocol Droid said:

So that booth was Level Up dice! They had dice sets, 5dRing and 5dSkill, in either obsidian with white font or lavender jade (jadeite) with black font. At GenCon I bought a set of the lavender jade. They were very friendly and let you pick the five out from all of their sets, it at least a couple. IIRC I bought the third to last set. Someday I might be tempted by obsidian as well. The booth people told me they were officially licensed.

https://usa.levelupdice.net/search?q=Legend+of+the+five+rings

Dang it! I blame [name] for not telling me they were selling these!! She tried to talk me into going to GenCon because of their dice booth, but I passed. I wish I had known this before!

3 hours ago, Hida Jitenno said:

Dang it! I blame [name] for not telling me they were selling these!! She tried to talk me into going to GenCon because of their dice booth, but I passed. I wish I had known this before!

At the very least you can order them online. /Yasuki