How much can you pack into a die without making it look too busy?
Name: Poppy Pods and Moss dice set
Description: A set of sharp edge resin dice with a collection of seed pods from Poppy flowers, moss, and a little bit of copper foil inside. The numbers are carved and painted with a copper color. The set uses a jaunty font that I’d say looks like a combination of an almost italicized Linotype Rowena and a TNR variant. The font has odd little decorative serifs behind the top of the 1 and 7. The 0 and 8 are carved to look like they’re made with one pen stroke that doesn’t quite complete the figure. There are dots used to indicate orientation on the 6 and 9 faces. The d10s have edged waists and all edges and vertices are very sharp. Each die has a large white Poppy seed, a thin whisp of moss, and a little bits of copper leaf embedded in them. All of this makes the dice look very busy and crowded.
Size:
d20: (Face->Face) 22.2 mm (Point->Point) 27.8 mm
Where did they come from: Fennek & Finch (They sell great dice)
How much did they cost: $50
Material / color: Clear resin with Poppy seed, moss, and copper inclusions
Quality: Very good. These are well made dice with only a few complaints which is what I’ve come to expect from Fennek and Finch
Readability: Very poor. I’m having a hard time reading the numbers while the dice are sitting next to my keyboard on the desk while I’m typing this.
Value: Okay. They’re good quality but hard to read and while $50 is a fair price for a nice set of sharp edge resin dice, these don’t feel like $50 dice.
Overall Rating: 6/10
Attempts needed to roll a natural 20: 30 rolls
Ten d20 rolls: 14, 3, 12, 3, 4, 20, 15, 9, 7, 9 (9.6 avg)
4d6 drop 1 stat block: 11, 13, 10, 8, 13, 7 (62 total) A Bossy Elf monk from the Freelands who is afraid of fire.
For reference: the Standard Array method totals to: 72 and the Point Buy method totals to: 69.
Random Tables rolls:
City encounters for level 2 adventurers in D&D 5e: 66 – The party encounters a large crowd of people gathered around a street performer. The performer is an Elf juggler, who is throwing multiple objects high in the air and catching them with ease. He offers to let the party join him in his show if they can prove themselves as skilled enough, or else he will reward them with some coins for their efforts.
Dwarven features / quirks: 26 – Is usually snacking on some form of hard cheese or salted meat.
(I’m getting these random tables at: https://d100tables.com by the way
Final Thoughts: I had high hopes for this set of dice. I stand on F&Fs quality and beauty. The quality (mostly) delivers but this design just doesn’t work well. I should have paid more attention to the website photos and thought harder about whether this design would look cluttered or not. It’s definitely cluttered and very hard to read, which really knocks down the rating for me. The copper color that they used for inking the numbers just disappears into the background or vanishes at a sharp viewing angle.
These were another regretful purchase like the dice in review 002: Autumn Leaves. They looked great on the website but are nearly unusable for me at the table. Maybe I should show up to the table some night with only sets of dice that are really hard to read. I could play with my worst dice and see if it bothers me as much as I think it would… Anyway, the font bothers me both with the quality of the carved out numbers and with the oddities of the font itself. It looks normal at first but when you look closer, it’s a hodge-podge of a few different font styles.
The size and weight of these dice are on par with what I like in a set of sharp edge resin dice but for my money, I’d rather use the Critical Role character dice that I reviewed in review: 008: Highway to (Bells) Hell(s) that cost half the price. I’m sure these F&F dice are fancier than they’re letting on and much more work went into creating them than the CR dice but it just doesn’t show unfortunately. These are another lesson learned for me thinking deeper about how dice are going to look at the table in less than photo studio quality lighting.
I’ll probably give these away at some point. Bummer.
11/26/24 Update: I did indeed give them away to my LGS for a raffle prize.
Leave a Reply