Apotheosis Studios does work in prose fiction, graphic novels, and video games. Our main work is in Tabletop RPG. We write many adventures for 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons to level up your tabletop roleplaying experience.

To play games like D&D, you need dice. Some games may use different dice, and some may not even need dice at all. But Dungeons and Dragons has been using the same set of polyhedral dice for almost as long as the game has existed. Dice mean everything to us. I have many friends who are proud Dice Goblins, collecting the prettiest and shiniest dice around. The math rocks go click clack.

Level Up Dice bring some of the prettiest and shiniest dice out there, made of exotic materials around. I talked to Alex Abrate, one of Level Up Dice’s Founders, and here’s what he had to say.

Exclusive Interview With Level Up Dice

Level Up are known world over for some of the finest dice in the world of gaming. Your dice are made of some truly exotic material, and your storage and accessories are equally stunning. The world of dice is well populated by gaming titans, but Level Up have levelled up to become a real market leader. But no company starts as such. How did Level Up Dice roll up on the scene?

That's a great question! So, it was August 2015, and I had just come out of running a contact center, and I was on sabbatical. I had about four weeks off before I was going to look for another role and I thought I'd design a board game and write a book, as you do on a sabbatical.

About two weeks in, I turned to my wife Nadia and I said, "you know what? I deserve a fancy set of dice." and she was like, "yes, you do", and so I jumped online and I went searching for the fanciest of dice out there - there wasn't much, but I found one place at the time. I felt like it was not only extremely expensive for what I was going to get, but they had a turn around time of about nine months and I'm a 'now generation' person; I want things now... I didn't want to wait nine months and so I stood up in a bit of a huff and jokingly turned to Nadia and said I could do better than that.

She replied back saying "Yeah, you could" and then went silent. She was, as far as I could tell, deadpan, serious.

And then I was like "No, no, no, no, no, I'm joking" and she just sort of waved me away and jumps on her laptop and starts typing away furiously.

And I'm like "Honey, what are you doing?"

She's like "No, no, one second".

At the time her mum was an importer and exporter of semi precious stones between Russia and China and was currently in China at the time. Nadia finished typing what she's doing and she goes "Cool, You're going to go to the Chinese consulate tomorrow and pick up a visa. My mum's over in China at the moment and I want you to go meet some friends, family and colleagues over there in manufacturing."

"And you can figure out how to make dice."

and I was kind of like what, yeah?

"You leave on Wednesday." This is like Friday, so literally about a week after I had sort of joked about making Dice I was on a plane to meet the manufacturing side of our friends and family and figure out how the heck you make dice, and that was 2015 August or so. By October I had started making our first dice.

Level Up Dice — Ionized Chip Orange Cat's Eye - image by Level up dice

The dice themselves are beautiful. The range is so diverse that any gamer can truly find their perfect set. What makes the dice truly unique is the fact they're all made with very heavy metals, precious stones, and even bone, while most producers still use resins. How has sourcing these kinds of materials for dice been challenging?

Materials come from all over the world and up until 2020, I was personally doing a lot of travelling and sourcing materials myself. It's amazing what you can get from all over the world.

We've sourced Damascus from Pakistan, Mokuti from Japan, we've gone into northern Siberia to get Charoite as a stone. Sourcing is a challenge because there's only so much you can do without actually being there and seeing the material itself.

Let's talk about stone for a second. Metal is a bit easier because you can get it melted down and consistent, but stone, you don't really know what's inside. It's like a Kinder Surprise; sometimes you could crack open a stone while you're working on it, and there's nothing in there, or there's a completely different stone, so you know, get quartz living inside Amethyst. When we when we go hunting for materials we have an ultrasonic scanner that helps us also look into the larger pieces and see if there's any density changes.

In the last couple of years, material sourcing has been very challenging. Trying to do it all via a Skype connection or a zoom call and figuring out if it's a good material or not is extremely hard, coupled with the current state of shipping and getting things around the world, its become a big challenge now. We've been quite fortunate in that I am a bit of a hoarder, so I've been collecting lots of materials and lots of stone that I figure we'll use eventually, meaning a lot of that stone horde has gotten us through the last couple of years.

I'm really keen to get back into the hunt in 2022. You never going to know what you might stumble on, what new material you could play with, so that's really exciting for me, and you know, it's a challenge, but it's it's fun. Like a treasure hunt!

Another important detail about the dice, that many players often forget, is the typeface of the numbers on the dice. It's easy to settle on one font and use that as the house style, but the care and attention to make a specific set of dice unique is another thing that makes Level Up Dice unique. A common theme I see is using angular, digital looking numbers on your metallic dice to give them a sci-fi feel, perfect for the right kind of sci-fi RPG. How does finding the right style of numbers influence designing your dice?

We do all the design inhouse and we aim to release 3 fonts every year. We have a sci-fi inspired font, a fantasy inspired font and then we have what we call a round font, which is a font that is based on standard-style, easy to read fonts. Our first Sci-fi font was called Sci-fi, (yeah, super original). We called one Frontier, another Blatron. We've got a fantasy one called HP - they're all done in house and I spent a bit of time finding an amazing typographer who did a masters in in font design at Uni, so that we could actually have these designs created and the importance of that is that when you're dealing with dice, especially your standard 16mm Set, that's a small surface area and you're also dealing with very specific tools that can engrave or etch or print these different numbers into materials. By having someone in-house, who understands the limitations of the tools we use, it means that when we create a font, we're creating a font specifically designed for dice as opposed to it being "oh look, we found this font online, I wonder if this is going to work with our dice?" and then we have to modify. So as far as that's concerned, it's finding the right style of numbers, but it's more about finding the right individual to create the right style of numbers for dice specifically.

You offer a diverse range of dice and gaming accessories that appeal to many of our fans, and to us right here in the Apotheosis Studios team. Your partnership with Curious Empire has even allowed you to branch out into apparel? How was that new line of business been serving for you? Is there an item you create that the team is particularly proud of?

That's a bunch of good questions in there. Partnerships, I think, are an important aspect of Level Up Dice and we've partnered from day one, when we were a small fledgling company of one back in 2015, 2016. One of the first things we did was find local artists in Australia and go "hey you make an amazing pouch or you make a really cool dice tower, let's work together" and that's really the symbiosis of our community, of our industry. It's working together and achieving greatness together, so as far as that's concerned, I think it's really important to do partnerships of all kinds of levels, and it helps not only you grow, but also it helps you learn and understand. There's been a lot of times where I've learned from a partner I've worked with, that they may have figured something out that works better or not. As far as how that line of business serves us, I feel like it's ingrained, it's symbolic. I think I've said the word twice now, but it's symbiotic with Level Up Dice.

We flourish because we have amazing partners as well. We work with the best, we find the best and that way when you come to us, you know you are getting the best, which of course is really important to us as well.

As far as anything we've created recently that we're very proud of, last year we decided to have a look at the section of dice accessories that deals with storing dice; your vaults, your chests, your hex chests, dice vaults, etc. We we took our R&D team and sat down back in January 2021 and had a nice brain jam and we said "well, this is what's currently on the market, it's been on the market for about five years, nothing has really changed. Is this the best possible rendition of dice storage?" and after working through that, the answer we came up with was no. We found two fundamental flaws that we felt could be improved on; the first one was that all these different cases had two pieces, so when something fell, or if it was in a bag and it got shifted around, these two pieces had a higher probability of coming apart, then your precious dice fall out everywhere. The second thing was that nearly all these receptacles of dice opened up vertically with magnets. So what happened was you'd have this lift that happens, and then this reverse inertia when it actually comes apart from the magnets that could cause your dice to fly, and you've got an expensive set of crystal dice in there you don't want them to go flying and fall and break on the ground. So we put our minds to it and we came up with four ideas but we've only released two (as a bit of a special information for you right now) so far; horizontally opening, single piece-designed vaults.

We have our Duel Case as we call it, which opens up in 2 directions, left and right horizontally, so you've got no no worry about the dice flying, and it's still produced into a single functional piece, so that if it falls, it's not going to fall apart. We also released our Switch vault, which, as the name implies, looks very much like a sort of switch knife. It swings open horizontally again and reduces those two problems that we believe the exist in the market, and that's something I'm really proud of personally, because our team didn't just go "let's make something for the hell of it", we sat down and we looked at a current product and thought, what can we do to improve it? And then we followed through. It was about six months of R&D and then we were able to deliver to the world our new horizontal opening cases.

The Level Up Dice community is well represented, and the conversations had with fans is rewarding to see. Your company website talks of a lot of great interactions with the community The one with the fan in Green Arrow cosplay is a particular favourite. We here at Apotheosis Studios know how beneficial a blog is to building a community. How has fostering a community by building a blog and other social media presences helped build the name of Level Up Dice?

So blogs, social media, personal presence - are vital to any brand these days, so much so that not only have we (in 2022) set up a community team, with two amazing individuals who are going to be bringing the Level Up Dice community to its next level, but I also gave them a task to create a person, if Level Up Dice were a person. What would be their behaviours? What would they like, what would their mannerisms be? Because your brand, your face, is a being.

The way you blog, the way you communicate online, the way you interact, all of that, is a character really. It's a person and it's important to make sure that that person is likeable, approachable and people want to be friends with them; with Level Up Dice. They want to interact. They want to know more.

Is not only vital, but I think the only way to really look at community and our place in it. You know my two amazing new community managers, one of their big goals is to not only understand our friends, followers, fans (the F’s. I guess we will call them), but also to make implementation changes in the business for them if there is a pain point that.

Community has or there's something they don't like or they want changed. If there's something that could be done differently or better or they really enjoy than having some empowered managers in the business that can go "This is what our community wants, these are our people, we will make these changes" is very important. It is vital for any company to really listen to its its customer base, its fans.

So I guess to to answer that question it is super vital, super important. If You haven't got a community you haven't got a business these days.

It's important in business to admit when something isn't right, and no idea is a winner every time. We gamers can be particular with how our dice feel and whether they meet the tone of the character they're for and the game we're playing. Was there ever an idea or product that you can recall that didn't work or wasn't a good idea? What happened to it? How did the company learn from the minor setback?

So many ideas don't work. And yeah, there's an idiom that says that for every hundred ideas, one of them is a winner. And that's really true, you know? I personally am a creative, and I surround myself and my team with amazing creatives, and we come up with ideas all the time. In fact, every single person in our business, be it someone who's in charge of customer service to someone who's doing the warehousing is more than welcome to come up with an idea and see if we can make it work, and I've designed an R&D team specifically to test those sort of projects, so we've had lots of projects that haven't worked. This is probably the one I enjoy talking about the most, because it's really a two-parter and it just shows that things can go wrong and they can go wrong for the reasons you least expect, but sometimes you can turn it around. So as I'm sure everyone knows, we do these amazing dice where we Ionize the numbers on stone or the patterns and they get this really nice rainbow effect through all the numbering. So we were developing this process back in late 2016 and we spent about 11 months on it, off the top my head - it was around 11 or 12 months - working out how we're going to plate our stone dice with this really cool electroplating ionization, where we stick titanium molecules onto them and we had taken a clear quartz die, and we coded the whole thing in this ionization and bam, we had this amazing rainbow dice made out of quartz crystal that unfortunately looked like it had an oil spill over the whole entire thing. You couldn't actually see it was clear quartz. About two weeks before we finalize and figured out the exact process and made it something that would be functionally successful to make in larger quantities, a couple of other companies in the industry who have nothing to do with stone released a zinc alloy metal die that had the exact same look. It wasn't the same design or the same method because they were using a zinc alloy and they were plating it, but If you put their die next to a clear quartz die that was Ionized completely, it looked exactly the same - but ours cost twice as much because it was using quartz, crystal or amethyst, whatever you put as the material, as opposed to a zinc mold. So the 11 or so months we worked on that project, and I think it was about $20-30,000 in R&D costs were completely gone. We couldn't release that product because it just wouldn't sell, there may be a few individuals that go "Oh cool, this is a clear quartz die underneath this", but fundamentally it was the exact same die as far as look and feel. So we had to shelve that project and oh well, that's that's the way being an innovator in the business is, not all of them are going to hit, and sometimes you're going to lose money and time.

About a year and a bit later I was working on another project and which led to our raised Obsidian, which was one of the biggest splashes we've ever made in the industry, and there was a crossover with the process we were doing with the raised obsidian where I went back to the ionization project we had and I was like "Could we fuse some of the process of that one into our raised Obsidian process?" and I played around with it. What you see now being sold for Level Up Dice and so many other companies, who have now taken it on board as well, is the fruition of a failed R&D project from 2016/2017 that didn't go anywhere because of a competitor releasing an amazingly good product at half the price. It now allows us to deliver what we see as one of the most beautiful types of semi precious stone sets we do, which have the amazing ionized glyphics and numbers. So even though there are going to be failed projects, you never know when that failed project may come back as a potential success story as well.

You've been partnered with Apotheosis for quite some time. The continued support has allowed us to take on some of our most ambitious projects yet, and for that we are grateful. As an independent developer of Dungeons and Dragons, we were a perfect fit, and as a team, we wouldn't think of sitting down to test our modules without our many sets of Level Up Dice. How did that sponsorship come into being? What drew you to us?

So I'll answer the second question first, 'cause I think we got drawn to each other, and that's something that happens in this industry; when you do awesome stuff, you find people who also do awesome stuff and then you say "hey let's do awesome stuff together" and I feel like that sort of is the road map of awesome stuff that has happened in the tabletop industry. But if I had to place the blame on anyone, it would definitely be Satine, who when we first met, which was the first PAX Unplugged, 2017 over in Philly, we ran into each other and there was an immediate like "Oh my God, you're like me and I'm like you, even our hair and nails look similar - we have to be best friends!" and then when we started talking and getting to know each other, we realized how similar in a lot of ways, we think, and we look at life and we act, so we became instant friends and she definitely guided us towards Apotheosis in regards to a a longer term relationship. I feel like I, I'm nearly 100% sure she did the same thing to Apotheosis back, so if there was anyone to really thank or blame for this relationship coming into being. It would be Satine 100 times over and I'm I'm super glad that she did, because as I said she and I have very similar taste. If she likes something that I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it as well, and I, you know, we've loved every single project we've done with Apoheosis as well, and I can't wait to show the rest of the world what we're doing with them this year.

Every business is looking at this new year with a lot of hope and excitement. There's plenty to expand into with our hope that 2022 won't roll the natural 1's of the two years prior. What can we expect from Level Up Dice this year? How much can you tell us about your upcoming releases and projects?

Well, we plan to give everyone a D20 that only rolls 20s, so that we won't have any more natural ones. Uh, because boy, were they a couple of challenging years. This year is really exciting and anyone who works for me will tell you Alex doesn't get excited, but there's so much to be excited about. We have a lot of projects that have been funneling through our R&D team that are going to be released this year that I'd love to talk about, but I don't think I can get our complete reader base to sign NDA’s. That said, I will sneak peek a couple of things and then get in trouble from my PR manager later.

The first is that we released a product called the Glyphic Blind Bag, and last year we released season two and season two was amazing. People absolutely loved it. We had 30 or so designs in there and it really inspired people to collect dice as a collectible object, not just as a rollable object and we have been working extremely hard with four artists to design the season 3 Glyphic Blind Bags. Every single die in season three has been designed exclusively for the glyphic blind bags, so you wouldn't find any of these designs on any existing sets or anywhere else, and they are absolutely stunning. Every single one is an art work and I can't wait for the world to start exploring and seeing what GBB3 is about to offer.

And you bloody well know I'm going to go out there and collect the whole set as well.

I'll finish off, because I believe this is our last question, with a bit of a a cheeky sneak peek; we are launching something big at PAX East in April!

HHH

Now we want to hear from you. HHH...? HHH...? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG. On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree.

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