Although Heroscape dice have similar symbols to the Heroquest dice, they aren't quite the same so I thought it would be good to try and create some more proper Heroquest dice. Being a cheapskate, I want to spend as little money as possible so I decided that it was time to experiment with making my own dice. I've read about it on various web sites but I wasn't sure how easy it would be in practice.
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| Looks pretty good from this side. |
First stop was some dice. I got 3 bags of 10 blank dice from Witzigs on Amazon for the bargain price of 99p per bag. Next was some inkjet photo paper. 10 sheets of Polaroid inkjet paper from Poundland - ideal!
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| Hmm... these ones slightly off-centre! |
Third was to find some decent inages of the HQ dice. I could have photographed/scanned mine but it only took a moment to find some images on the internet and copy/paste them into a larger image to fill a page.
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| Monster defend symbol slightly smudged! |
The page of symbols was printed onto the photo paper using a laser printer. Because I've used inkjet paper not laser paper, the ink stays on the surface coating. Cut out the symbol, place face down on a blank side of the die, press with a hot iron for 5 seconds.. voila! The piece of paper is now stuck to the die! A gentle tug peels off the paper leaving the ink on the die. The heat from the iron has caused the heat transfer ink to fuse with the surface of the die. Some of the inkjet film is still stuck on top, leaving a faintly milky surface but a hard scrub with some soap and a scouring pad removes this fairly quickly.
Because this was the first try, the results aren't perfect. Some of the symbols are off-centre and some have smudged because I wasn't sure how long to apply heat. Despite this, as a proof-of-concept I'd say it's very succesful and once I've re-sized the symbols slightly I shall be producing some more dice.
Now I just need to think of what else I can do. I'm thinking that casualty dice for Force on Force/Tomorrow's War will be useful.
