Nerdy Endavours: Creating a Proper Shadowrun Dice Tin

As a seasoned pen-and-paper role player, I have together with my friends and compatriots from my role playing group explored many fantasy universes and role playing systems, but none have worked as well for us as the third edition of the cyberpunk role playing system known as Shadowrun. While the system has a pretty steep learning curve, it scales really well compared to Dungeons & Dragons/Pathfinder, that is lethal on lower levels and boring on higher levels and it can relatively easily be adapted to work with a fantasy campaign as well, which was exactly what our group did for our most successful fantasy campaign that ran for 1½ years.

After its conclusion, we decided for our next campaign to return to Shadowrun's cyberpunk roots: The rain-soaked, neon-lit streets of New Seattle, where the global megacorporations run the world and are out to get you, if not the troll bike gangs get you first. However, very much like any shadowrunner worth his salt needs the right equipment in the form of guns, vehicles and cyberwear, a seasoned role player needs to put his gear in order as well. Shadowrun is a D6-system, so no fancy polyhedron dice needed here. For our fantasy campaign, I had used some very fantasy-looking 12 mm dice, but somehow it did not feel right for this campaign. Also, I got from another role player, that due to their small mass, 12 mm dice were actually more likely to roll ones, so I decided they had to go:

Tiny dice begone!

Thus began the hunt for some proper Shadowrun dice. While Qworkshop makes some very decent-looking 16 mm Shadowrun-themed dice for sale, it was not exactly the aesthetic I was looking for, but luckily on Amazon I found just the thing I was looking for: D6 dice with some very 80's-looking digital digits on them. A couple of clicks and a week or so later, my dice arrived:

If they played yatsy at the Tyrell Corporation, they would have used dice like these

I liked the sleek and dark design of the dice with its cold, white digital digits as contrast. The paint job was not perfect, however, and the digits of some of the dice needed touching up - good thing I have my acrylic paints and a steady hand:

Original to the left. Much better! (Japanese newspaper added for additional cyberpunk feel)

Now came the matter of the container. Most dice containers these days are medieval wallet-looking dice pouches with dragons and such on them, which are all well and good for fantasy dice, but would not match the feel of my digital dice. So off I was to the drawing board to design a container worthy of my new dice. First decision was to eschew the pouch aesthetic entirely for a container of cold, hard metal. I found a USB case I had lying around and used that for a few sessions, and while its dimensions were perfect, the plastic window on its front did not feel right:

Using a USB case as dice tin

So back on the interwebs again in search for a proper dice tin as well as some proper cyberpunk decoration. Most pages like Amazon and Etsy only offered relatively pricey tins with designs already printed on the lid, but luckily I was able to locate a British tin wholesaler called Tinware Direct that would ship worldwide and sell samples of their tins at a very favourable price. I found a tin with a solid hinged lid with the exact same dimensions as my USB case for less than £1 and very reasonable shipping as well:

Perfect!

Now came for the decoration. My first thought was to jump to the Tactical Neural Implant tumblr, print out some suitable imagery and stick it on the lid somehow. This would be troublesome, however, since I did not own a colour printer and a print on normal paper glued to the lid using normal means would quickly degrade due to wear and tear. I needed something more durable, more professional.

Back I went to the internet to search for some cool cyberpunk stickers, and my wish was granted in full on Redbubble, a web shop for products produced by independent artists, that ships worldwide and has an absolutely awesome collection of Cyberpunk-themed vinyl stickers in just the right dimensions for my small tin. After some browsing, I decided - being me - on two decidedly Japano-cyberpunk stickers: A design called Neon-Tokyo for the front of the lid and a raw, Ghost in the Shell-type design called CINAPS for the inside of the lid. One short week later, and the stickers arrived in my mail:

gorgeous designs and great quality stickers!

A few short moments later and my new dice tin was assembled. To prevent the dice from rattling around too much in the tin, I took out the foam bottom from the USB case and because the two tins had nearly identical dimensions, it only needed minimal trimming to fit in the new tin. This was the result:

I am very pleased with the result. I thought about adding some katakana or model train graffiti decals to the side of the tin to accentuate the cyberpunk feel, but such stickers that can be purchased in basically any 100 yen store in Japan are impossible to find here in Europe and in the end, I also ended up concluding that overdoing decorations could ruin the feel - sometimes less is more.

Is this the end? Probably not, I am already contemplating purchasing a larger tin with a larger surface area that can also double as a rolling surface for the dice and that can hold cool cyberpunk stickers with an even higher resolution, but that is a project for another day.