Does your significant other love RPGs but you can’t tell a gnome from a dwarf? Let us help you delight them. Here are some gift ideas for the roleplaying gamer in your life.
Geeky Clean Soap
My boyfriend and I have been using Geeky Clean soaps exclusively for the past six months and love, love, love them. They’re handmade by the lovely Jess, who we met at GenCon. She’s passionate about soap and geeks and it shows in the creative and fun soap designs.
For the RPG geek, many Geeky Clean soaps come with dice inside! The Dungeon Crawler’s Pack is a good place to start if you’re new to Geeky Clean. It contains: Mana Bar (coconut), Health Bar (nag’champa), Cure Light Wounds (peppermint), Barbarian Scrub (spiced orange), and Zom-b-Gone Undead Repellent (lilac). Barbarian Scrub is our personal favorite of the batch. The orange scent is manly enough for guys but sweet enough for ladies and it has apricot seeds inside for some refreshing exfoliating action. There’s even a Gelatinous Cube soap with a miniature inside!
AvatarArt Custom Character Portrait
Has your significant other been telling you stories about their character every time they come back from game night?
I remember back in the days before I started playing D&D myself, I dated a guy who spent one weekend a month playing in a campaign with his buddies. Guys-only, of course. At the end of the weekend, he’d call me on his drive back home and tell me all about what their characters did. It was like hearing a movie (except second-hand, which isn’t nearly as good as watching it yourself).
AvatarArt.com does fantastic character portraits. I know because that picture to the right is my D&D character, Mielka Dawnhammer. She’s also known as the Valley Girl cleric of Moradin, tho I have to say, she’s grown up quite a bit in 18 levels, especially after dying twice and becoming a Divine Oracle.
ANYWAY! Enough about my character. The artists at AvatarArt.com are wonderful and work with the player to create a portrait that is a true reflection of the character, from their body type down to the little details in their armor or weapons.
You can order one as a gift. Sure, getting a piece of paper as a gift is a teensy bit upsetting, but once they read what it is, I guarantee they’ll be super excited to run to the computer and start emailing the artist all the details about their character.
Dice & Dice Bags
The great thing about the holidays is receiving things you love, but would never buy for yourself. Weird dice fall in this category for me. The majority of RPGs aren’t going to use a d3, d5, d7, d14, d30, or d100, but it is pretty awesome to have them in your dice bag, just in case. Check out this set of weird gaming dice on ThinkGeek.*
Speaking of dice bags, if you’ve noticed that your significant other’s dice bag could use some updating, I wholly recommend the bags of Marsbarn on Etsy. They are hand sewn, reversible, and have a flat bottom so they stand up quite nicely!
You can even order custom fabric combinations (but you need to do it by 12/5 for Christmas delivery, so go now if you’re interested). I’ve had a Marsbarn dice bag for two years and it’s still just as nice as it was the day I got it. My review from 2008 is here.
We gamers love our dice and dice bags; you can’t go wrong with them as gifts.
Critical Hit LED d20 Die
This item has a warm place in my heart because I watched it grow up from a glimmer in someone’s eye to prototypes to the finished product. It is probably one of the coolest and most fun RPG products of the holiday season, but I’m kinda biased.
It’s a hefty-sized d20 (a bit bigger than the purple Paizo d20 if your SO has one in their dice bag) and it’s a nice shade of Kill The Orcs red. The best part is that it lights up when you roll a critical hit (20). Check it out at ThinkGeek.*
This one makes an awesome stocking stuffer, too!
Help Us Out, Geek Friends!
What RPG related item would you want your significant other to buy you this year?
* Full disclosure: E works at ThinkGeek.
About e
i have one of those d100. warning to anyone considering buying one: it is almost a sphere, so it takes a long time to stop rolling.
Blinking…D20…must…have!!!
Yes! Thank you, thank you! You have saved my valentine’s day! I thought I’d gotten my fiancé all the dnd related stuff there was, but those flashing dice will round out the two pounds of dice I’ve already gotten him quite nicely! More motivation for me to get back to finish sewing his dice bag already!
Thank you!!!