I had a lot of them, accumulated over the years from when I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in Smart Kid Class in grade school (I must have told that story sometime) through my time at WPI. The last time I saw them was in... gosh... 2002 or 3, a year or so after I moved back to Maine, when I went back to MA for a day to play in the finale of Eric Reuss's D&D3E campaign (the Einar Skinnarland game).

At some point between that trip and the last big rearrangement of my house (ca. 2009), the suitcase I took on that trip disappeared. I've looked everywhere I can think of for it and can't find it anywhere, which is weird, since it's a full-size vintage Samsonite and it's orange, so you wouldn't think it would be particularly elusive. Nevertheless, I've lost the damn thing somewhere, and I was absolutely certain that wherever it had gone, it had taken three things with it that I had last seen on that trip:

1) My big bag of dice;
2) A journal I used for gaming notes, and which had the latest version of Einar's gear and some crib notes Eric provided for what had happened in the game world since I last played; and
3) A copy of Morgan Robertson's novel The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility,* which I was reading at the time.

Of the three, I was most annoyed about the loss of the dice. I don't play tabletop games any more, but those things had a lot of sentimental value.

Fast-forward to a few weeks ago, during part of the operation to rearrange things out on the porch, clear away some of the rubble, etc. At one point, quite at random, I noticed a red clothbound book sitting on the arm of the old sofa that's been parked out there for years. Picking it up, I discovered that it was my copy of Futility. This completely baffled me, because I was certain it was in the lost suitcase, and equally certain that there had been no book where I found it the last time I was out there. This sent me on another furious tear looking for the suitcase, which still did not appear.

Now let's skip ahead to today, when Dad and I were bringing boxes of overflow books in from the porch to shelve in the new bookcases. While I was out there checking one of those boxes, I happened to move out of my way an old peach basket that someone had put some random gubbins into during some previous clear-away. This contained some random nicknacks that probably came with the house, some old mail that I almost certainly didn't need to keep, and, lying right on top in plain view... this.

Now... what the hell? Has that been there the whole time? Why have I never noticed it in any previous search?

And where in Christ's name is that feckin suitcase?!

So, uh, anyway! Found my dice.

And also my gaming journal. And a pen that almost certainly doesn't work, given that it's been through however many winters' freeze-thaw cycles out on the unheated porch—assuming it hasn't been stashed in some lost-items parallel dimension this whole time.

Here are some of the highlights:

These are the d10s from a Marvel Super Heroes Advanced Set. I think you were meant to read the green one as the tens place and the red one as the ones place, though I might have that backward. In any event, I've never been in the habit of rolling 2d10 for a percentile roll, so I didn't use them that way.

These are the dice I always used to play BattleTech and MechWarrior. They're also the only green pip d6es I've ever seen.

When I started playing Shadowrun in high school, I suddenly needed many, many more d6es. Fortunately, I found them by raiding my family's board games cabinet (note to the young: every family used to have one of these, as far as I know), wherein there was a copy of Challenge Yahtzee we had tried to play once and then put away forever. Challenge Yahtzee was a weird dice-poker variant that my family just didn't cotton to. You rolled the big red dice, and the little white ones were for keeping track of your "hand". There should be four more of the small ones, but they evidently got lost somewhere along the way.

I bought these dice as an act of sarcasm, after my Shadowrun GM accused me of using the tiny Challenge Yahtzee dice to gloss over failed rolls. The next time I was in Bangor, at the little game store that used to be down there, I saw these oversized novelty dice (normal-sized red one for scale) and bought as many of them as were needed for the most common roll my character had to make (I think it might have been the size of his Hacking pool). Unfortunately, I seem to have rolled only three successes this time.

These battle-scarred survivors are the dice from an original 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. They are the first RPG dice I ever used, as they were the ones in the set we used for the campaign in Smart Kids class. When that class closed at the end of the year, and it had been made clear to the instructor that D&D would not feature in future curricula, I think I won the set in a drawing, or possibly I was just the ony one who wanted it. I was nine, I can't remember for sure now. Either way, I ended up with it.

Compare those dice, beat as they are, to the ones from a 1983 red-box Basic Set. It's kind of funny in retrospect that D&D was a much bigger phenomenon, and TSR presumably had a lot more money to throw at the product, in 1983 vs. 1977, and yet the 1983 dice are kind of puny and lacking. Somewhere along the line, I lost the d12 and d4 from this set.

This is not a die, it's a wumpa fruit, but it was in the bag. It originally came with a Crash Bandicoot action figure, and was probably in my dice bag because I played Crash in a homebrew tabletop game for a while. I RPed him with an Australian accent that would probably be prosecutable as a war crime, but I think the statute of limitations has expired by now.

There are lots more in there, but those are the ones that have particular stories attached that I can still remember now. There is a translucent orange d10 in the bag—you can see it just below the lefthand end of the Ziploc banner next to that blue d8—that I feel has some significance, but I can't remember now what it is, only that it feels like it was once important. The Force is strong with it, if that makes any damn sense at all. No idea why, though; the actual memory itself is gone.

--G.
* Futility is a story about the largest ocean liner in the world, the Titan, which hits an iceberg and sinks with great loss of life, largely because there are not enough lifeboats aboard. If that sounds like a pretty obvious plot, please note that this book was published in 1898, fourteen years before the largest ocean liner in the world, the Titanic, hit an iceberg and sank with great loss of life, largely because there were not enough lifeboats aboard.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

And yeah, I have...a lot of stories about things showing up in places that those things were certainly not at the previous day/month/whatever.

Unfortunately, my original dice and the handmade red doubleknit bag they were in was one of the things taken when our apartment was burgled a good 25 years or more ago. I've since rebuilt my supply, of course, but I lost a few things I've never gotten around to replacing, like the backgammon doubling die I used to roll to generate a target percentage for a player to beat when I couldn't be bothered to reason one out, or the 30-sider that was surprisingly useful at times.

-- Bob
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My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.