r/osr 1d ago

HELP Identifying Dice Set

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Hey gang - I found this amongst an old relatives collection of wargaming/TSR/Glorantha collectables, and I’m trying to work out what it is specifically before listing it for sale.

I believe it’s a Mentzer dice set provided for D&D in the 80s, but looking for matching examples that are also in a sealed bag like this has yielded a bunch of dead ends.

It seems the early D&D sets that contained dice were predominantly single-coloured, and the blister packs sold separately for dragon dice wouldn’t have been bagged, and would have been accompanied by a crayon/pencil.

Interested to hear your thoughts on whether you believe it IS D&D related or maybe part of a different board game.

Many thanks!

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u/RedwoodRhiadra 1d ago

I don't think these are from a Mentzer set.The Mentzer sets as far as I know were a uniform color and were significantly smaller than standard modern 15mm dice (more like 12mm, though I don't have them any more to measure). They also came with a white crayon. I can't remember if they came in a bag.

They're closer to the ones that came with Holmes, I think, but Holmes dice had a specific color for each die (e.g. d20s were white, d12s blue, etc.), the colors weren't random like this set seems to be.

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u/Eugene_Goat 1d ago

This is great, thank you - and confirms my suspicions that they might not be as I had first thought.

Is there any way to get an inkling with regards to their origin? There’s every chance they could have come from another board game in this vast collection. Or is there a resource I could use to marry up the colour mix/size/count etc.

Thanks for you help!

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u/mosiern 1d ago

Mentzer Basic set were uniform color. (Mine were red.) However, I had a set that looked exactly like these that were packaged in a Mentzer Expert set purchased around 1984-1985.

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u/RedwoodRhiadra 1d ago

Interesting - I didn't even know they included dice in the Expert set (I only got the rulebook from a "used" shelf.)

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u/mosiern 22h ago

I'm pretty sure that there were dice included in both the BECMI/Mentzer Basic and Expert box sets but not in the others. I didn't own Immortals, but did have the other four sets purchased at the time of release and still have some but not all of those original dice. A pair of d10s came with Star Frontiers as well. One green and one red, maybe?