Randomized Nation, or Of Dice & Men

As detailed previously, I got a set of Dice of Disappointment at G&G XVIII - basically a bag of odd or misprinted polyhedral dice - factory seconds, if you will. A couple of them appear to be legtimately pretty dice, and I may throw a die with a blank face into the mix for my own amusement at some point, but they are mostly a novelty item...except for the one nostalgic entry.

You see, one of  the proferred dice is a jet black 10-sider (or "d10" in the vernacular of my people), with barely discernible numbers etched on the sides - some sort of inking failure I suppose. But back in the day, this was how most polyhedral dice came. If you were lucky, they included a crayon so you could grind some coloured wax into the faces to make them legible.

And as off-putting as this might seem now, it was a vast improvement over the first boxed edition of D&D I ever got, which contained a crappy set of laminated chits (meant to be drawn from cups) instead of any dice! (And this was apparently not due to a dice shortage as is commonly reported, but because of TSR's poor transition from ordering dice to manufacturing them, according to James Ward!)

Regardless, I am currently indulging nostalgia at a higher-than-normal rate, including drinking paralyzers while the Oilers are still in the playoffs, so this afternoon I took it upon myself to see if I could salvage this d10.

Luckily I have not one but two large sets of Crayola crayons I have received as gifts (one coming from the factory store in Minneaoplis!), and in the tin of the older one, I have somehow procured another dozen or so as well? And with one of these duplicates being the white I was looking for, I set to work.

It took my fingers some time to remember the methodology of getting the wax into the engraved numbers and filigree - a firm grip on both die and crayon, high pressure in a variety of directions and switching from circular to linear motion as necessary.

The faces look pretty sloppy after all this, full of smears and the occasional wax crumb. The next step therefore is to wipe off the excess wax, leaving only the deposits in the engraved recesses. I started doing this with my bare thumb, but eventually wised up and started using a nearby paper towel, whose increased frictional coefficients made for much more thorough removal of the errant waxy pigment.

When I was done, however, there was a more notable discomfort in my hand than I recall from doing this when I was 13...but at any rate, it didn't take too long to get a new ten-sided polyhedral randomizer into my Crown Royal dice bag.  

And this exercise was nostalgic in exactly the right way: it reminded me of a simpler time, while simultaneously making me grateful to live in the time I do, with pre-inked dice available in countless shades and permutations.