Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2015/08/15/exotic-polyhedra-rpg-dice-mad.html
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I prefer to roll crits with depleted uranium dice (too bad they are only d6s)
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/dudice.htm
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How good are they for on-line security?
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Fool! Crits are best rolled with HEU dice. Many at once.
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Automatic critical?
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Yup! Blue Flash of Death.
That leads me to another idea. What about a die that would have only the bottom half from DU?
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The wooden ones are really pretty.
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The pretty dice always kill me b/c I got a pound of dice from chessex a while back so I’ll never really have an excuse to buy a whole new set of anything. I already have so many dice that I’ve had to split them into two bags. One is mostly d10’s for oWoD games, the other is everything else.
I did get a light up d20 with geek points from think geek, and I got a neat little steam punk 3D printed d6 as a present one year, but other than that I’ve have to keep myself from getting new ones except for some purple borealis d10’s and d6’s that I got to make necklaces and had to keep. Purple borealis is my all time favorite.
I’ve seen really nice stone sets and the wooden ones above are really pretty. The gator ones, I like the idea more than the look.
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The meteorite d20s are back!
I have vials of cuttings from a friend who prepares meteorites for display, both stone dust and cuttings from a pallasite. One of these days I will get off dead center, make a form, and use resin to cast my own dice from interstellar dust.
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“So much so that an alloy of titanium called 6Al4V was used in the construction of the vaunted SR-71 Blackbird (the world’s fastest airplane) to withstand the extreme temps created by the friction of the airflow and high supersonic speeds.”
Ti 6Al4V is commonly used stuff (“workhorse, general purpose high strength alloy”) in aircraft; it’s not all that exotic. It’s also used in cutlery. But it’s cool anyway; it always feels lighter than you would expect. 
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What about ferroalloys? They are relatively cheap, available in chunks, and e.g. ferroniobium makes the same nice colorful oxide layers as the oxidized titanium.
Or regular iron? It rusts, but that may be a desired effect. A properly corroded die has certain beauty.
What about cubic zirconia? Toughened with yttria it could withstand the rigors of dice handling, and its index of refraction is pretty much diamond-like. With properly cut facets on the edges it could throw quite some rainbows.
Tungsten. Close enough to depleted uranium in the density and feel.
DU, hafnium-free zirconium, beryllium. Dice from three real nuclear materials, and with interesting differences in weight/feel. See my earlier idea with rings.
Plutonium, gallium-stabilized. I’d love that one but may be annoyingly difficult to procure.
Single-crystal nickel superalloy. Nothing that much special visually, but has interesting mechanical properties. Could be made from remelted and recast turbine blades, for added pedigree. Don’t forget the thermal treatment to avoid polycrystalline morphology.
Glass. Nothing that much special but allows for interesting internal patterns. Take a couple colored and transparent glasses, melt them together like how marbles are made, then put the red-hot ball into a mould. Out goes a glass die, each piece unique.
Another possibility with glass is using a clear crystal, and drawing a 3d image inside with a laser. Exactly like those dots-in-3d trinkets are made. The numbers themselves could be made to appear floating under the surface. Round the edges to avoid chipping.
And on and on and on I could go…
Too bad many of them are rather useless for structural materials. Too many are gases, liquids, or too brittle.
…though a solid-argon die could be quite fun.
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The noble gases need a special die.
It will have an inner core containing a li-ion battery and a tesla coil, like a CFL circuit. The outside of this inner core is covered by the inductive charging coil. The outer envelope will be sealed from the outside at least, and contain your noble gas.
Solved.
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What about just having a transparent shell with a coil inside, and couple the power from outside, e.g. via microwaves or an induction cooker like coil? Would offload all the electronics into a pad to throw the dice on. Or maybe to a glove to hold them through.
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Each has its strengths.
Mine are portable. Yours glow really, really fucking bright.
For really bright glow, go with sulfur in an alumina housing. Warning, will get hot. Really hot.
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Now all we need is someone dumb enough to make a Kickstarter.
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Aaaaand HERE is the capacitively coupled neon-lit beer glass (or coffee mug?) that Thinkgeek used to sell.
http://www.infmetry.com/plasma-mug
http://www.stylehive.com/bookmark/thinkgeek-plasma-mug-welectronic-coaster-83983
Picture here:
This is what led me to the idea of the dice glowing on the pad.
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Aw, that’s slick.
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