Dice Delve: Black Plague Dice

Oh, Halloween, with your banquet of delights, how I love you almost as much, if not more, than Christmas. Especially when people you like put out stuff that you love that lands in October like it was planned all along. I'm talking about Black Oak Workshop and their latest offering, Black Plague Dice.

Those of you keeping score at home know that I love Skull Dice, so much so that I did a little write-up about them last October. Well, lookee what I got in the mail the other day! Cool stuff for my ongoing collection! These are not my first Black Oak Workshop dice, either. How do these stand up?

Black Plague Dice by Black Oak Workshop

SCORE: 5/5

Clarity   Yes
Heft       Yes

Color     Yes

Theme   Yes

Value     Yes

I've backed several of their Kickstarter campaigns right now, and I've been very happy with the results every time. These folks do great design work, at an affordable (for an Artisanal Craft Dice maker) price, with great customer service and quality materials. You can't go wrong with them. You just can't.

These are their Black Plague Dice, with the iconic and also unique skull design. The Kickstarter unlocked the dice bag and the pin, too. All quality items. I'm keeping all of my dice in Black Oak bags at the moment.

Their Kickstarter was initially only for d20s , but enough people pledged that they were able to swing making a complete set of seven dice. This was awesome for me, as there are currently no other sets with the skull motif on them in so prominent a fashion. And none of that noodly-fiddly stuff around the edges, either (gives Q-workshop the side-eye).







In addition to a readable design, these dice are also slightly larger than the average polyhedrals. That means these clicky-clacks can be seen from across the table. Easy to read. No problem. An old grognard's delight, to be sure.

Here's a Gatekeeper d20 for size comparison sake. Their d20 dice are about a millimeter larger than Chessex dice, so you can really see the difference in size with the Black Oak dice here. Substantial. By the way, the Black Oak solid color polyhedrals have great heft to them, as well. These are now in my current DM bag.

As I said earlier, the bags are a delight; large, with excellent embroidery on the outside and satin on the inside. Available in a ton of styles. This is my new Skull Dice bag. I'm doing that little happy goblin dice dance inside right now.








The Good: Follow these guys on Kickstarter so that you know when the next campaign is going to start. And visit their website to check out their line of Lovecraftian bags and other great stuff.

The Bad: only when their stretch goals don't completely make and you can't get a full set of dice. Come on, People! Have a little faith! Craig's turnaround time on his dice is measured in months, not years. And I think he's getting his dice in America, so no worries about Chinese Trade Wars to disrupt your hobby.

The Ugly: There is no ugly. There is only good stuff. Black Oak Workshop is my favorite dice maker at the moment.

Dice Notes: Some Friendly and also Unasked-For Advice

There is always a dice project on Kickstarter, it seems, and most often, more than one at a time. If you are dice-happy, or worse, dice-drunk, like some people I know, this can be both heady and frustrating. Mostly because we all have bills to pay, and people to feed. I've tried eating dice, and it just doesn't work.

I am no stranger to buying interesting dice. However, I'm seeing some...trends, let's call them, that are not just making me crazy, but also really dampening my interest in funding an otherwise great idea. In some cases, I think these are poor decisions based on a lack of experience and/or graphic arts training, and in other cases, they are just things that I personally don't like. I'll try to let you know which is which.

In any case, I'm not randomly throwing people under the bus. I really want your project to be a success, to be something interesting to add to the hobby, to be something I can partake in. I'm not being mean for the sake of being mean, nor am I trying to be funny at the expense of someone's hard work. I know these are all labors of love. And having been on the other side of the manufacturing process, maybe I can offer some constructive criticism.

Without any further explanation, here we go:

Dice Delve: Kung Who? Kung FU!

You don't notice lettering in comic books until its done badly. Same thing with editing in movies. Those things are invisible to the untrained eye when working as intended, and raised to an artform for the initiated. It's the same with graphic design; you don't "see" what a good job someone did until you see what a bad job another person did. 

In this vein, there are a lot of people out there in the Artisanal Craft Dice arena who have a basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator, enough money to order a bunch of raw materials, and they are off to the races. I see a lot of mediocre to bad dice being sold on Etsy and other online sites. To quote Tyler Durden, stuffing feathers up your ass does not make you a chicken. But there are some people out there who are doing it right.