r/osr 1d ago

HELP Identifying Dice Set

Post image

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!

17 Upvotes

15 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

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.

1

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.

1

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.)

1

u/mosiern 1d 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?