ranzware
I’m about to poke a bit of fun at Hero Forge here, so in the interest of fairness I’d like to say that I’ve been downright impressed by the amount of customisation it’s offered recent years. In case you’re unfamiliar, Hero Forge is a custom mini site where you get to design your own figure from a bunch of options, then order (or 3D print) it.
Thing is, the more the company’s added, the more it’s become a solid character creation tool in its own right. I’ve had friends who, rather than draw their D&D characters, simply opted to use Hero Forge to handcraft a tasteful 3D render—and given the fact that this thing has facial sliders better than some modern RPGs, they can get damn close to a 1:1 translation from their mind’s eye.
If you’ve got a pro subscription, you can straight-up kitbash, clipping and cobbling to your heart’s content. Don’t believe me? Here’s someone who made Bane from Batman. Just, straight up.
In a seeming race to find other things to sell you after basically solving the ‘digital kitbashing tool’ thing, Hero Forge is Kickstarting a new project to let you horrifically trap your D&D characters (or whatever dark designs your mind can cook up) in a set of custom dice. Because being able to kitbash Optimus Prime somehow wasn’t enough.
“For the first time, your dice can hold the very stories they help tell,” promises an announcer as an elf stands next to a dice holding his own trapped, magnified, light-warped visage like he’s a victim of AM from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
The idea, basically, is to allow you to shove most of Hero Forge’s options into dice. This does, admittedly, give you some cool opportunities—you custom-make some damage dice that use a mock-up of your character’s sword, for example, or shove a healing potion inside a d4 to really make you feel like that 50 gold was worth it.
I’m being very glib here, but I do think these things are sort of cool the more I look at them—especially since Hero Forge’s kitbashing nonsense means you’ll be able to stuff these things with whatever you want. While the proof’ll be in the pudding, the Kickstarter page promises that these dice’ll also be well-weighted, too:
“Float tests (wherein dice are placed repeatedly in a high-saline liquid to ensure each face comes up roughly the same number of times) and countless hours of robotic dice rolls ensure your custom dice will perform fairly. Make your design as intricate as you like and position it however you choose, safe in the knowledge that every roll is fair and balanced.”
Not to mention, it sort of doesn’t matter what I think. Over 3,700 people looked at the opportunity to trap their character’s mien helplessly inside a polyhedral shape and went ‘yes please, my D&D character deserves that fate’, funding over $380,000’s worth of Kickstarter dosh at the time of writing. That’s over 300% of the original goal. The people yearn for dice prisons, and who am I to deny them?
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Kurt Indovina
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