If you’re into Dungeons & Dragons, you may be familiar with the idea of rolling dice for different types of damage during combat, although of course this concept isn’t just applicable to D&D. The concept of having different dice for different types of damage is also not exactly new, but today I’d like to spotlight a brand who executes this very well and offers a sizeable range of different damage and specialty dice for D&D: a company called Gyld.
Disclaimer:
I am not affiliated with Gyld in any way and did not receive any kind of incentive, samples, free items, monetary compensation, discounts, affiliate links or any other perks from them. This blog is not monetised and I do not provide services for incentivised reviews or promotion. This post was written and posted unprompted and is not paid advertising. I’m just a nerdy dice collector who likes to share what I love. 🙂
Damage Dice – Vol. 1
Gyld ran their first Kickstarter in 2019, introducing their Damage Dice designs which come as 18-die sets that consist of several d4s, d6s, d8s, d10s and d12s – enough to roll for your usual weapon or spell attack. Their initial Kickstarter offered dice for the 10 damage types acid, cold, fire, force, lightning, necrotic, poison, psychic, radiant and thunder. The dice don’t just have the numbers on them but also a symbol to visually represent the type of damage dealt with an accopanying drawstring cotton bag that has the same symbol embroidered.
Along with these damage dice, they also started offering certain specialty dice for spells or D&D class features as stretch goals that were all unlocked, such as a pair of Chaos Bolt d8s, a Prismatic Spray d8, Bless d12s and Bardic Inspiration dice. An optional set of d20s that matched the damage dice could be purchased to make your damage dice sets into polysets (minus the percentile d10).
Some of these early Damage Dice had some issues with readability, e.g. the acid damage dice were too dark with the black ink hardly readable and the gold ink on the fire dice was also hard to make out. They fixed this in subsequent production runs and the fire damage dice are now only availble from their shop with white ink.
Damage Dice – Vol. 2
Following the success of their first Kickstarter, they ran a follow-up one in 2021 with even more options and designs. This campaign included more sets for certain damage types (bludgeoning, piercing, slashing) and for the first time introduced metal Damage Dice.
More specialty dice were offered as stretch goals, such as Magic Missile d4s, Death Saving Throw d20s, Wild Magic dice, Sneak Attack d6s, Eldritch Blast dice, Superiority dice and Portent dice. There was also a Sleep dice stretch goal that didn’t end up being unlocked, so sadly these never got made. They had some issues with the Eldritch Blast dice in production, ending up with visibly darker and lighter versions of these. They let backers choose which version they wanted (I opted for the lighter version).
Two more Kickstarters followed in 2023. One was for a set of Weather Dice, the other for Healing Potion Dice.
Weather Dice
The Weather Dice is a set of three d20s with markings to determine weather, wind and precipitation, plus d12s with temperature indicators. The latter were initially only offered in Fahrenheit but with an unlocked stretch goal they also added a Celsius option. These dice make it easy for DMs to just roll for 5e rules-appropriate weather on any given in-game day without having to look up any rolling tables.
Healing Potion Dice
Their Healing Potion Kickstarter was a little quirky in that it offered somewhat oddly shaped sharp-edged, polyhedral dice. These are crafted to reflect the value of healing potion D&D 5e rules by returning results approaching a Gaussian distribution as per bell curve. I did not back this Kickstarter, so I don’t have the dice to show, but take a look at their Kickstarter photos and you’ll see what I mean.
As part of the Healing Potion Kickstarter, they also offered standard pyramidal d4s in healing potion flasks that come with a nifty faux-leather pouch. It’s also the first set of healing potion dice I’ve seen that doesn’t just include the relevant number of regular d4s but also an extra d4 that has the potion modifier on it so that you just roll all the d4s of the appropriate healing potion (standard, greater, superior, supreme) and add the results of all dice to get your final hit point restoration result.
More specialty dice were introduced through this Kickstarter, namely a polyset in the healing potion dice design, a set of Healing Potion d8s, a Hunter’s Mark d6 that comes with a set of wooden rings and a dice holder, a Guidance d12 (with 3x the numbers 1 to 4) and Goodberry tokens. Stretch goals that weren’t unlocked was a greatsword/maul d12 and (again) the Sleep d8s.
Even though I don’t nearly use these dice enough in gameplay, they are a fun addition to my assortment of specific D&D dice, and they are well made and nice to look at.
Gyld is also happy to listen to customer feedback, which resulted in them reworking some of their dice to improve them. As previously mentioned, they changed the ink colour on their fire damage dice to make them more readable and they changed the design of some other dice along the way, e.g. the Bless dice and the radiant damage dice.
Gyld also offers other specialty items for DMs and players, such as battle map pads, initiative cards, DM notepads, encounter notepads, session notepads, class dicebags or inspiration coins that double as bottle openers.
You can get their dice in the Gyld online shop (ships from the US), plus several retailers globally who have decided to carry the Gyld products. Relevant for EU citizens is that they charge local VAT upon purchase so that you don’t have to deal with any extra tax payments or courier handling fees upon import.
Shop and website shop.gylded.com
