I’m pretty enamored with the idea of geomorph printed dice, which I found out recently from Grognardia and Dyson Logos’ blog. Apparently they’re trying to drum up funding for the project, and as of right now they’re pretty close to the half-way mark of their $6500 goal. I love both the concept behind the system for drumming up enough money to actually make a batch of these (anyone whose ever tried to manufacture anything in small quantities knows how cost-prohibitive it can be), as well as the actual product they’re trying to make. So I couldn’t help but drop some money into their hat.
Best part is, you only have to pledge $20 to the cause to get a full set of the dice when they’re produced, which I think is a pretty reasonable price for what they’re creating. So why not head over there and drop some cash on this project?
These look like a royal PITA to use. Why not have a pile of numbered geomorphs, then roll to see which ones you use on a table or something?
I think what I find so appealing is the raw number of things on the table. The system you describe would of course work fine. However, you’d have to have dice to roll and space to roll them, a table somewhere to look up the results, and a stack of geomorphs to page through to find the right ones and assemble. With the maps right on the dice, all you have to do is roll them and line them up. I’d love to try running a game where I just drop the dice on the table and run the adventure from that.
It meshes well with what I’ve been doing for monster hit points recently. I keep a bunch of d8’s on hand, and when the party encounters a monster I just grab the right number of d8s, roll them, and then leave them in a separate pile where they land to use to mark the monster’s hit points. When he takes damage, I reduce the amount showing on the dice. No extra paper to write down numbers on, just a couple piles of dice here and there. It actually works much better than I ever imagined, and only when the party faces a particularly large number of enemies do I find myself ever writing down hit point totals.