Dice of Fateful Influence – GearAscendancy.com

From: Probabilistic Emporium

Description: The Dice of Fateful Influence is a finely crafted set of six dice, each made from a unique, shimmering material. Each die bears intricate engravings of ancient symbols representing the interplay of fate and chance. The set comes in a stylish velvet pouch with a drawstring, perfect for carrying and protection.

Lore: The Dice of Fateful Influence is rumored to have been created by a legendary gambler and trickster who sought to tilt the scales of fate in their favor. The dice are said to have absorbed the essence of countless fateful moments, allowing their wielder to temporarily sway the course of destiny.

Tier One Stats:

Fate Manipulation: When used, the Dice of Fateful Influence allows the player to roll an additional die alongside their regular roll for fate-based challenges. The player can choose which of the two dice to use for the challenge’s outcome, giving them a significant advantage in influencing the result.
Limited Usage: The dice have a limited number of charges, typically around five or six. Each roll of an extra die consumes one charge. Once the charges are used up, the dice lose their magical properties and become ordinary dice.
Short-Term Effect: The dice’s influence lasts for a short duration, usually a few days in the world. (Current session only.) This ensures that the characters cannot hoard the dice for indefinite use, encouraging strategic and timely usage.

Cost: The Dice of Fateful Influence are a rare and valuable item, reflecting their unique ability to influence fate-based challenges. They are not typically available for sale and are highly coveted by those who seek an edge in uncertain situations. In the case of the Oracle’s Crystal Goblet quest, Professor Thelos is willing to provide this set of enchanted dice as part of the barter for successfully retrieving the goblet.

Tags:

Manipulation: The dice are designed for manipulating the outcome of fate-based challenges, providing an edge in situations where luck and destiny play a significant role.
Limited Charges: The dice’s limited charges add a strategic element to their use, encouraging players to consider when to deploy their extra roll for maximum impact.
Unique: The Dice of Fateful Influence are a specialized and distinct magical item, making them a prized possession among those who appreciate the art of chance manipulation.
Additional: Chance Alteration, Destiny Shaping, Trickster Relic, Luck Enhancement, Temporal Catalyst, Strategic Reserve, Probability Bias, Divination Focus, Arcane Gambling Tool, Session-Bound Magic

Use:

The dice can be used in situations where the outcome depends on luck or fate, such as skill checks, saving throws, or any other challenge where rolling a die determines success or failure.
Encourage players to use the dice creatively, such as influencing negotiations, persuading NPCs, or turning the tide in a critical combat situation.
The dice’s limited charges add a strategic aspect, prompting players to decide when it’s most advantageous to use them and when to rely on their natural luck. This ensures that the dice remain a valuable tool in the characters’ arsenal.

Activation Perception of the Dice of Fateful Influence — When a die from the set is held, rolled, or activated, the artifact resonates with the layered patterns of potential outcomes and the subtle mechanics of destiny. Each sense perceives the influence of the dice uniquely, while extrasensory awareness reveals deeper threads of probability in motion.

Touch
- What is Perceived: The surface is unnaturally smooth yet textured with infinitesimal etchings. Each die feels slightly warm, adapting to the bearer’s hand as though already calculating its intention.
- Description: When a charge is expended, a pulse of resistance travels up the wrist—like tension released from a coiled spring. The dice seem heavier for a moment, then feather-light as one outcome slides into place.
- Positives: Allows the user to physically feel the weight of choice before committing to a roll. The grip subtly shifts to indicate whether this is a moment of high consequence.
- Negatives: The sensation may become addictive; repeated use may cause the user to hesitate before ordinary actions, craving the sensation of guided chance.
Sight
- What is Perceived: Before activation, the dice shimmer with a subtle inner glow—each surface refracting light as though made of colored starlight trapped beneath crystal. The numerals or glyphs subtly shift when not directly observed.
- Description: When rolled, the dice emit a brief flash—barely perceptible to most. To the trained observer, a halo of possible numbers spirals out before one collapses into finality.
- Positives: Visually signals that an augmented outcome is being influenced, aiding both dramatic timing and informed decision-making.
- Negatives: Observers without a die may experience afterimages or feel compelled to challenge the result, sensing reality has been altered.
Hearing
- What is Perceived: When rolled, the dice do not clatter like normal objects. They produce a subtle, harmonic ringing—each die sounding different, tuned to a distinct chord of fate.
- Description: The final number lands with a whisper, like a verdict spoken only once. For the bearer, the roll’s sound may momentarily echo with faint laughter or sobbing—resonances from discarded outcomes.
- Positives: Sharpens awareness of the moment’s significance. In silent settings, the sound may alert attuned allies that fate is being nudged.
- Negatives: Those who listen too closely may hear distant voices repeating what “could have been,” leading to doubt or obsession.
Smell
- What is Perceived: Each time a die is held before rolling, it emits a fleeting scent reminiscent of circumstance—fresh parchment, thunder in the distance, coins in a velvet pouch, or spiced wine spilled on silk.
- Description: The scent correlates with the intended challenge—subtle clues that suggest if the moment is one of conflict, charm, intellect, or deceit.
- Positives: Offers the bearer a subconscious read on the nature of the outcome being influenced.
- Negatives: The scent may linger, invoking nostalgia or misplaced certainty about a moment that never fully occurred.
Taste (ambient, abstracted through air)
- What is Perceived: As the dice are activated, a taste lingers on the breath—dry metal, honey-dipped fruit, or dusted velvet. The taste fades quickly after resolution.
- Description: The flavor reflects the character’s emotional investment—bittersweet for a lucky escape, sharp for a gamble poorly spent, mellow for expected but valuable outcomes.
- Positives: Provides sensory feedback tied to satisfaction or doubt, reinforcing instinctual understanding of chance.
- Negatives: After frequent use, non-magical food may taste bland by comparison, dulling sensory response for hours afterward.
Extra-Sensory Perception – Probability Echo
- What is Perceived: When activated, the bearer momentarily perceives a cloud of shimmering numbers and symbols hovering around the die midair—outcomes, each pulsing with different intensities.
- Description: The user senses which results are dominant and which are suppressed, gaining intuitive knowledge of what the universe “wants” to happen.
- Positives: Aids in discerning whether the moment is truly one worth altering, enhancing strategic decision-making.
- Negatives: Too much use of this perception can lead to analysis paralysis or compulsive risk evaluation.
Extra-Sensory Perception – Fate Displacement Awareness
- What is Perceived: As each charge is used, the user becomes aware that something unseen has been altered—an NPC stumbles two steps later than they should, a candle flickers at an unnatural time, or the wind pauses before changing direction.
- Description: These subtle cues indicate that one possibility has been overwritten, and the world has adjusted to compensate.
- Positives: Grants satisfaction and confirmation that fate has been nudged without immediate harm.
- Negatives: May induce long-term anxiety or guilt, especially if the player believes another’s misfortune was the price of their manipulated success.

The Dice of Fateful Influence are not merely tools of luck—they are instruments that reverberate through the threads of causality, echoing in the hollows of might-have-beens and should-have-nots.

Crafting Recipe: The Dice of Fateful Influence — Also known as the “Six-Sided Seers,” this enchanted set is born of layered destiny, calibrated chaos, and fine manipulation of temporal probability fields. The dice serve as momentary mirrors through which fate glances, hesitates, and decides differently.

Materials Needed
- Core Components
  - 6 Slivers of Crystallized Chance: Found in places where an improbable event occurred (e.g., where lightning struck thrice, or a gambler survived eight losses in a row). Each shard must be unique.
  - 1 Ingot of Veinstone Jasper: Mined only beneath fractured ley lines. Veinstone retains metaphysical energy and binds enchantments that would otherwise disperse under probability flux.
  - 1 Flake of Possibility Quartz (Refined): Transparent shard formed during a prophetic dream and harvested before waking. Used to etch symbols of influence on the dice faces.
  - 3 Drops of Moonshadow Ink: Made by mixing ink from an eclipsed cephalopod with powdered dream-charcoal and a whisper of one’s unspoken regret. Used for painting the glyphs.
- Stabilizers and Aesthetic Additions
  - Velvet Dice Pouch Lined with Silent Thread: Carries ambient fortune inside, muffling psychic interference and ensuring the dice remain attuned to subtle probability.
  - 1 Pinch of Dust from a Broken Game Board: Symbolizes risk and resolution. Ground and infused into the final varnish.
Tools Required
- Gyroscopic Forge-Tumbler: Rotates multidirectionally across six axes, harmonizing enchantments across each dice face while maintaining quantum integrity.
- Hexagonal Runescriber’s Compass: Inscribes nonlinear glyphs in self-aligning arrays, capable of adjusting to personal timelines of the crafter.
- Divinist’s Breath Funnel: A simple copper mouthpiece used to whisper potential outcomes into the dice during binding.
Skill Requirements
- Advanced Enchanting: Required to embed charge-based manipulation spells that obey fate’s rhythms and don’t collapse with re-roll logic.
- Runesmithing (Fate-bound script): Needed for engraving symbols of influence that respond to challenge-based probability patterns.
- Lore (Games of Chance): Ensures that the items created mimic authentic risk and do not trigger anti-luck warding from planar guardians.
- Chronomancy or Probability Theory (Intermediate): Helps balance the number of charges across dice and guarantees the enchantment is time-bound to a session-length window.
Crafting Steps
- Core Formation
  - Melt the Veinstone Jasper and add the Crystallized Chance Slivers one by one, reciting the Binding Hexasong of Fair Gamble as the forge-tumbler spins.
  - Separate the molten material into six molds—each representing one die. Cool them within a sealed warded chest surrounded by shifting sand (to represent changing outcomes).
- Symbol Engraving
  - Use the Runescriber’s Compass to carve arcane numerals or glyphs onto each face.
  - Dip a rune brush into Moonshadow Ink, tracing each engraving. This finalizes their capacity to act as fate vessels.
- Charge Binding
  - Whisper six unfinished thoughts of desire into each die using the Divinist’s Breath Funnel. These are not spoken hopes but subconscious leanings. They serve as the soul of the charge-count.
  - Roll each die once—whatever number shows becomes the number of charges for that die. The charges cannot be altered afterward.
- Stabilization and Alignment
  - Coat the dice with Dust from a Broken Game Board, binding them with a thin clear varnish composed of wax, oil, and diluted stillwater from a probability well.
  - Place them into the Velvet Pouch, knot the Silent Thread, and meditate for one hour without asking or answering any questions. If disturbed, the enchantment fractures.
- Result:
  - The Dice of Fateful Influence, a complete set of six unique dice, are now bound with charges to be used in fate-based challenges. When rolled, each die may be used to replace, double, or override one outcome per charge, depending on user intent and GM discretion. When depleted, the dice become mundane objects, still beautiful but no longer influential.
  - They do not determine what happens—they ask fate again, just in case it answers differently.

“The Gambler Who Rolled for the World”
(Recovered from the fragmented frescoes on the inner walls of the Vault of Cracked Odds. Scholars believe the tale was etched by five different scribes, each blindfolded and fed dice rolls to determine their brush strokes. Translated through recursive metaphor and syntax echo.)

In the age before dawn-light held direction, and before the stars learned how not to fall, there lived one known only as Even Wren—neither a king, nor a priest, nor a thief, but something stranger still: a gambler of consequences.

Wren wandered across the lands of Unsure Thought and Tangled Luck, where rivers flowed backward into possibility and birdsong was used to predict war. Wherever she roamed, she carried a small velvet pouch and laughed at outcomes that others feared to face.

In the courts of kings, she played for kingdoms with only a glance.

In the dens of thieves, she cast lots to bind betrayal or mercy.

In the temples of silent gods, she rolled bone and glass for penance.

But then came the Year of the Folding Moon, when all fates twisted inward. The land of Saṃsāra groaned with choices made and remade, overlapping until even the threads of the Mind’s Eye began to fray.

A terrible chance was coming—the Great Entropy Decision, a single roll that would either unmake the Pattern of Time or bind it in certainty forever.

And Wren, hearing the whispers of the Prophet-Knucklebone, climbed the Tower of Still Tosses where nothing falls and nothing is caught.

There, in a chamber with six winds and no walls, Wren opened her pouch. Inside were six dice, each carved from a different substance: moonstone, obsidian, bleached fate-bone, time-silver, sandglass-amber, and one made from the shadow of a laugh. She called them the Dice of Fateful Influence.

Wren placed them on the altar of Equivocal Silence and asked the Unseen Judge:

“Shall I roll for the world?”

The Unseen Judge did not answer, for it did not know what should be.

So Wren rolled.

Each die leapt from her palm and danced across the altar’s uncertain surface. They spun, reversed, flashed, and stopped. One showed a serpent, one a flame, one a crown, one a void, one a door, and the last… never landed.

It hovered, spinning eternally between sides, never deciding, never ceasing.

The world steadied.

The tide of fate paused.

The Great Entropy folded itself into a smaller box, one only opened in shadow.

Wren vanished that day, but those who seek the old paths claim the dice sometimes appear again—never all six, only one at a time, and only when the odds should not allow it.

It is said that to hold one is to feel the itch behind the veil of what should be.

To roll one is to dare the echo of Wren’s question:

“Shall I?”

Moral of the Story: The world does not always hinge on the roll—but sometimes, it listens to the hand that throws it.

Suggested conversions to other systems:

Call of Cthulhu (7th Edition)