Behind the Scenes of the Cursebreaker Dice and Elderwood Academy

A lot of work goes into the stuff on your gaming table.

Those miniatures get sculpted. That dice tower gets constructed. Everything gets painted. (Sometimes by you!)

When it comes to the dice towers, rolling trays, dice boxes and other items made by Elderwood Academy, a lot of care goes into the beautiful items they produce.

Quentin Weir and Dan Reiss launched Elderwood Academy with their awesome hex chests, and they’ve since expanded to making all kinds of awesome RPG accessories.

One of those is the Cursebreaker die, a laser-engraved wooden d6 that came in the latest Dungeon Crate. We talked to Dan about the process behind designing and manufacturing these killer dice.

Dungeon Crate: So, where did the design process start with these dice?

Dan Reiss: This is a good one! Quentin does work in board game design and was working on a game with over-sized novelty dice (Monster Dice), which turned out to be fun things on their own right, so we started developing some art for them along with the Cursebreaker name and voila!

DC: Have you ever done dice before? Will we see more of them?

DR: These are our first set of custom dice, and we do love them internally, but we also know how much we would have to develop to get a whole set of polyhedral dice going. That said, we do love our dice and would enjoy bringing any fun and novel dice out that enrich the gaming environment.

DC: Are they laser cut like the designs on your other products? Or what is the process?

DR: All of the dice start out as what's called "rough-sawn" lumber. We plane, saw, and sand the wood until it's smooth and the right size before cutting it into cubes. Each cube needs to get cornered and sanded by hand before it goes into a laser (pew pew!), where we engrave the art on the dice.

DC: Is it fun doing custom pieces?

DR: We love to make custom work around the shop! We did a set of dice recently that had a "will you marry me" face in place of the 6.

DC: That’s awesome! I know you guys have some more projects on the way. What else will we see from Elderwood Academy?

DR: We have about 5 projects in the works around here, ranging from boxes, to improved products, to, ahem, dice, but nothing has congealed quite yet with what we want to move forward with :)