Hero Forge did its first Kickstarter more than ten years ago to launch a custom miniature printing business, and launched a second one to bring color to their minis. In between and after the fact the platform has continued to add more and more options to their catalog: new items, species, materials, and so on. Now Hero Forge has a third crowdfunding effort, and it’s focused on what you use to determine your miniature’s fate: the dice.

The custom dice are all about taking things from the normal Hero Forge offerings and putting them inside the dice, and they’re offered in two sizes, regular and XL. These are important not just because one will be ‘normal’ and the other can be used as a projectile weapon; the size determines what options are available to put into the dice.

Her Forge sent me a few samples to look at! They start with a color mini, since that’s where a lot of your custom dice contents are going to come from. Then there is a d4 with the little mushroom guy from the mini, and a d20 with the simple bust. Finally, there’s an XL d20 with a playful cat!

Suffice to say that little mushroom guy is my favorite, and in a lot of ways I think it hints at the most potential; there are tons and tons of wee familiars, weapons, gadgets, and doodads in the Hero Forge catalog that will fit inside dice quite nicely.

The detail on the simple bust inside the regular d20 was pretty good as well! There is, however, one issue. Adding a bust to a custom die basically involves sticking what parts of the mini you want into the die’s frame, and the rest of it gets cut off. You can choose the color that gets used at the cut off point, but for me it’s still an angle of the die that just… isn’t going to look that good when it’s face up. Granted, for the sample here that includes the 1, which is actually pretty funny now that I think of it.

For a moment I also thought there was a misprint in the numbers on the simple bust d20 as they were quite a bit off-center, until I took a proper look at the campaign and realized that you can adjust where the numbers are placed for better visibility of what’s inside.

This also addressed my only problem with the XL d20, as upon my first glance the numbers looked terribly small for the die’s size; it was simply a choice made when making this specific feline die. As this is the die that can fit an entire mini, it’s also the one that draws my eye the most.

The general quality of all of the custom dice seems quite high, and there’s a ton of, well customization potential. However, you are paying for what you get with a luxury product. A  single, regularly-sized custom die will be $39, and an XL one is $99. Of some note is that these, along with every other tier, do come with access to the premium Hero Forge Pro service for a month or more. Single add-on dice are the same price, however, without extra Pro time, so make of that what you will. If you want more than a single regularly-sized die than you might as well go for the full set; at $199 the seven dice set is a fair bit cheaper per die.

There are a fair number of other tiers, encompassing things like full color minis, statuettes, packages of more/more types of dice and more months of Pro, getting to design some of the stretch goal items, and so on. There’s a somewhat stealthy launch of another new Hero Forge project buried in some of the tiers, the Prototype Ultra HD.

These aren’t something I was given a sample of, so all I can say is that they do look nicer in the provided image, but even the Kickstarter notes that they’re experimental. Their inclusion feels much more in the ‘fund it to make it exist’ model of Kickstarter rather than the preorder model, and as of this writing there aren’t many of the limited tiers to get one left; they are not available as an add-on.

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Lets’ wrap up! I think there will be a certain amount of varied mileage depending on what the end user does with the maker and how that translates to the final product, and for my money I think the busts are better for static display than rolling about. Overall, though, I think the custom dice seem like another solid offering from Hero Forge. As is typical for them, the stretch goals are simply about adding more options, so I think we can also expect the custom dice to continue to improve – just like Hero Forge at large has done over the past decade.

The project has surpassed its funding goal and will keep running until April 5th, so if sending your die and your mini (or their beloved mushroom pet) into dice jail all at once strikes your fancy, then give it a look!

Thank you to HF’s Amy Hernandez for reaching out and sending me some custom dice to look at in person!