Part 3: So Many Dice! Where Do You Keep Them All? (Dice Bag Giveaway)

In my last couple of posts, I’ve been writing about all the dice you should have as a player and dungeon master in a game such as D&D or Pathfinder. For example, for my Pathfinder magus, I have 22 dice on hand. For a dungeon master, I recommend at least 30 dice. I even suggest that you may want a different set of dice for each character you play based on their differing needs—this is especially true if you frequently play in different campaigns with different characters and thus have to change your dice load-out frequently. This leaves us wondering, just how do we store all these dice?

There are countless options, so, in this post, I’ll cover what I do with my dice, but this is where you come in. We’d love to see how you store your dice, and to encourage you to share your dice and your dice storage solutions, I’m going to give away a dice bag! To enter, just send an email to dicebaggiveaway@gmail.com with a picture of your dice and how you store them. As long as the image is something I can share on this family-friendly site, I will then post the image in an album that will be displayed on this post. At the end of the month, I’ll select a winner (Sorry, US and Canada residents only), and you will get a nice leather dice bag made by yours truly—check out a sample later in this post!

Option 1: Crown Royal Bag

Growing up I always had a Crown Royal bag floating around. It held dice or other knick-knacks. So, when my kids started playing D&D, and a need for dice storage surfaced, out came some of the familiar purple bags! You can find the bags, sans Crown Royal, on Amazon in various sizes, and even in green. For a pretty-penny more you can get it complete with the liquid treat inside! These bags are plenty big to contain even an extensive dice collection.

If you’re wanting to maintain a separate dungeon master dice set and one or more separate character sets, though, most Crown Royal bags are too large. The drawstring top is also susceptible to dice escaping. I do still use these bags for the multitude of un-assigned dice, though.

Without knowing I had already introduced my kids to the wonders of Crown Royal bags, a few years ago, my dad gave them personalized Crown Royal bags with their names embroidered above the Crown Royal name. One of these bags is on the right in the above picture.

Option 2: Elderwood Academy Hex-Chest Remastered

The Elderwood Academy Hex Chest Remastered is an elegant way to store a nice set of seven dice. My player set of dice includes a standard 7-dice set, so storing my favorite dice in a hex chest would make them available across characters. Maybe you could carry special dice in a set like this, and the rest of your character-specific dice or dungeon master dice set, in a bag.

While the Hex Chest Remastered that came into being from a recent Kickstarter and was reviewed earlier by GeekDad is not yet available for the general public, their original Hex Chest and other cool accessories such as the Spell Book Game Boxes are available on their site.

The Spell Book would probably be a good solution for storing larger player-character and dungeon master dice sets, as would an elongated Hex Chest, without central hive shape, that was made available on the Kickstarter.

Elderwood Academy also made Hex Chest Flat Packs, a much cheaper DIY option for the hex chest. The one in the picture below was assembled by my son, and it includes magnets to hold the box shut just like the full-fledged Hex Chest. I think a little stain would make this already nice dice box really stand out.

Option 3: DIY Dice Bags

By far my favorite dice bag to date has been a bag I created this past Christmas to hold the various dungeon master dice sets I gave to my kids and others. My original intent was to create a dragon eye bag, like this one on Etsy and utilizing my skills learned making these dragon eye books and pendants, but I did not figure out the shaping of leather, or get glues that worked as intended, in time and resorted to just making a plain bag. But the bag I ended up making is truly the best dice bag I’ve ever had—well, I gave them all away, so I don’t actually have one yet, but I really like them!

I modeled the bag after a Crown Royal bag. It is made up of two side panels and a center strip as seen in the image below. I purchased black glove tanned leather at Michaels. (I’m pretty sure this link is the same stuff. I was in the store when I bought it, not online.) This leather is pleasantly soft and pliable, but, even so, my sewing machine was barely able to handle it. (I did not have a special needle of any kind… please note, I don’t really even know what I’m doing.) The piece of leather I bought was big enough for five bags.

The side panel is 4 inches wide by 6 1/8 inches tall. The center strip is an inconsistent 2 inches wide by 15 inches long. The center strip is a little long, and I cut off the extra once the bags is mostly assembled. I didn’t want it to be short.

After cutting out the pieces, I sewed one side panel onto the center strip, then attached the second side. Then I folded over the lip of the bag about a quarter inch (maybe less) and sewed that down. I purposefully did not want to put a drawstring in the fold-over like the Crown Royal bag has since I feel that leaves potential to lose dice. The drawstring at the top leaves for a barely closed bag. Instead I used a leather punch to put holes about 1/2-3/4 inches down from the lip of the bag. Each panel (all four sides) got two holes each.

I used a .125 inch leather lace to thread through the holes to tie the bag shut. In the picture at the beginning of this section you can see how I wrap the strap around the bag ensuring a good seal.

If there’s enough interest, I’ll make this into an actual pattern. GeekDad’s resident cosplay expert, BillyTheBrick Cosplay, gave me some pointers on how to convert my essentially prototype pattern into a usable and resizable pattern. I just haven’t done it yet.

This bag holds the dungeon master dice set nicely and feels so nice in my hands! I’d like to maybe find a way to brand or mark the bags for identification and personalization, but even without, I love this bag!

Again, if you send an image of your dice load-out and storage of choice to dicebaggiveaway@gmail.com and you’re a US or Canadian resident, you’ll be entered to win one of these bags!

Other Random Options

There are so many other options. Some dice come in nice containers like the Dragon Bones in the above picture, there are tons of dice bags and other little bags that just slowly accumulate through a gamer’s life. Dice often come in little containers that perfectly hold the standard seven-dice set (but I like to convert those into 28mm miniature figure cases.) And, of course, there are Ziploc bags!

When I was trying to set up player sets for my Pathfinder group from my selection of dice and found myself having to do that at the beginning of most sessions because they wouldn’t bring any, or would just have a single seven-dice set, I started storing the sorted dice into Ziploc bags. It was a quick thing to do at the time, and has the added benefit of allowing me to see the dice and easily redistribute at the next game.

Again, this is just what I’ve used for my own dice; there are so many more options out there like Wrymwood, Elderwood Academy’s awesome Spell Books, dice bags of all types including chain and scale armor pieces, heck, I’m still trying to get my wife to knit me one!

There are so many options! In my prior posts, I suggested that you may want to have a different set of dice for each character. It would be cool to store the dice in something that each specific character might have—a leather coin pouch for your rogue, an Elderwood Spellbook for your wizard, a leather belt type pouch for your magus, a glass bottle for your alchemist, but maybe I’m going overboard here!

Now it’s time for you to share your favorite dice sets and what you store them in. Please send an email with an image and some explanatory text to dicebaggiveaway@gmail.com I’ll post an album of images here so people can get even more great ideas!

If you are a resident of the US or Canada (sorry rest of the world, but we could make a few bags for the cost of shipping!), you’ll be entered into a drawing for one of the DIY dice bags described above.

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Disclosure: Elderwood Academy provided the Hex Chest Remastered for our earlier review.

Part 1: Build the Perfect Roleplaying Dice Set | Part 2: Build the Perfect Dungeon Master Dice Set | Part 3: So Many Dice! Where Do You Keep Them All?

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