What we’re doing right now is upgrading those machines that we’ve worn slap out because they’re not designed to do large production runs. We had to get high-end hobby grade machines made for small batches. Here, Charlie pauses and muses for a bit on the disparity between the machines made for his product and the sheer volume of product he’d like to be able to put out to keep up with his fans. So I did everything just exactly wrong enough to make it work.” I didn’t know…I wasn’t a machinist, I wasn’t a woodworker when I started this. If you talk to a woodworker, they’ll tell you what we do can’t be done. “If you talk to a machinist, they’ll tell you that what we do can’t be done. Sure, there are other specialty dice out there (you can barely log in to Kickstarter without seeing one of them) but no one is trying to do the scale of production that Artisan Dice is. Artisan Dice now has dozens of metals, 150 woods, not to mention acrylics, carbon fiber, gator bone, stone, and other, even rarer materials. He got started a few years ago with blocks of exotic wood that he milled into fudge dice for his Dresden Files gaming group. And to that end, we’re always trying to make things better and better and better.” I’m constantly amazed at how rabid our fans are. It’s funny, I hated Math in school, now I’m surrounded by it every day! If you’d told me three years ago, we would be doing the volume of orders that we’re doing now, I would’ve told you that you were nuts. “I’m knee deep in spreadsheets trying to get our CNC machines back online. And he’s got a serious love/hate relationship with his process. “The trick is finding a piece that’s suitable to being milled.”Ĭharlie is a passionate guy. “Mammoth ivory is actually a lot more common than you’d think.” He told me when I got a hold of him at his Dallas, Texas office. A quick turn around the ol’ Google later, and I found out they do exist and, at $248 for a single D20, as expensive as I suspected! Turns out this bit of geek alchemy is the brainchild of Charlie Brumfield, head of Artisan Dice. I thought it was amusing, except Gabe’s mammoth-ivory D20 sounded like one of those impossibly ridiculous, yet real things that only well-heeled gaming geeks purchased. Last month, Penny Arcade ran a comic about specialty dice.
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