Greetings Lost Dreamers! 

Today I'm here to talk about one of our very exciting add-ons: The Dice Vault! 

This is something I've wanted to put together for a while. Back in 2016, during my very first trip to GenCon, I bought a cool dice box from Wyrmwood. I still love it. As we were heading into this project, I wanted to create something new and special. 

When I set out to create a product like this, I spend a lot of time researching options, and ordering prototypes. I have to feel the item in my hands and determine if it is high quality or not. One of the things you'll learn about me is that I'm a cheap bastard. It's really hard for me to justify spending money on things, especially nerd stuff. Thus, if I am going to finally crack open my wallet, it better be worth it! If one of our proposed products do not meet my high standards, I will cancel it in a heartbeat. This is the story about how the dice vault was almost canceled. 

The first company I checked with was a company from China who make dice. They also had an option to make custom dice boxes. The cost of these boxes was very low and the profit margins were high. I paid to have a prototype made and it turned out looking like garbage.

This is made from bamboo and is very unpleasant. It looked bad, feels bad, and just is not the quality I wanted to see. 

After the failure of the first company, I decided I would just block them and never work with them again. There is another company that I found that also makes dice boxes so I connected with them and ordered a prototype.

This one also turned out terribly. The image just turned out so poorly. What's worse, is the stain job they did was so sloppy that they missed a spot on the inside. In my mind, this is the greatest indictment of the poor craftsmanship. If you're not going to do your best on the prototype, how can I trust you to do your best on 100 items? 

Tim taught me an Australian idiom while in Japan. "I didn't come here to fuck spiders." It means "I'm not here to mess around." It means it's time to get serious. Just as I was ready to give up on this part of our project I contacted Ravenwood. This is a small company ran by Robert Jones and his wife. They go to conventions selling dice boxes and we had a conversation about working together over email. This wasn't easy, I had to convert the image into a vector file. Rob and I were both dealing with the challenges of family emergencies and our day jobs. But in the end, he sent me two amazing pieces.

The dice box is made of Jatoba wood which is a dense hardwood with a reddish-brown color. It feels substantial over the cheaper bamboo. The profit margins on these boxes are much slimmer than the crappier versions, but that's not really the point. This dice box supports two American businesses and these items are handmade in a workshop. They are not mass produced in a factory in China.