A blue dragon spreading its wings on a storm-lit mountain peak
Iron Code Studios

The Book of Dice

Get the Book — $19 Read the first 13 pages free Free character sheet

107 pages on the objects that run the game — where the shapes come from, how the table talks, every way to roll and what each one means.

Five Parts and a Fight

One volume, PHB-styled cover to back page: a cold open, five parts, two appendices, and a painted divider standing at the head of each.

Part I divider from the book: The Object, set on a field of flame

The Object

Part I — where the shapes come from

Nine solids and what each is for, the five that fairness allows, and the geometry of everything weirder.

Part II divider from the book: The Language, a figure at the water’s edge with a sword

The Language

Part II — how the table talks

The tongue of dice, and a field guide to the superstitions every one of us pretends not to have.

Part III divider from the book: The Rolling, two adventurers in colour

The Rolling

Part III — every way to throw

Ability scores, notation, advantage, the player’s rolls against the DM’s, and ten presets worth keeping.

The Table Is Set

Cold open

Five adventurers, one ancient red dragon, every rule of the table on display before a single rule is named — then a beginner’s on-ramp for anyone the fight just recruited.

The Hobby

Part IV — the editions and the rivals

The virtues of every edition from OD&D to 5.5, Pathfinder 2e against 5e, and the alternatives compared without flinching.

The People

Part V — why we keep coming back

Why D&D heals, the five stages of character death, initiative as tempo rather than order, and a defence of rules lawyers.

Two appendices close it out: The Directory, sixty-nine hand-checked RPG sites, and Build Your Own World, the spine of the book that comes next.

The Weight of a Game is Held in the Details.

This is not a blog post stapled to a PDF. Every page is set in the style of the books already on your shelf — part dividers, drop caps, tables that sit where you expect them, art that belongs to the chapter it opens. Print it, bind it, leave it on the table where the dice land.

“Dice inject uncertainty. Uncertainty creates stakes.”

— The Book of Dice, epigraph
A ringed hand writing with a quill in a leather-bound book by candlelight
The cover of The Book of Dice

The deal, plainly.

  • $19, once. No subscription, no account. Stripe checkout, then the PDF, straight away.
  • 107 pages, DRM-free. Yours to print, to keep, to read on anything.
  • The book grows. The Book of Worlds is next — every chapter we ever add reaches you at no charge.
$19
Buy the Book of Dice

Not sure? Read the first 13 pages free.