New merchandise now available in my Cafepress store!

Also check out the official line of Dragon Dice merchandise at SFR's Cafepress store.

	When SFR, Inc., first introduced these dice at Origins in 2001, they were called Elemental Dragonslayers. Their rules varied slightly from the white Dragonslayers in that they could permanently slay a dragon of their color and they could also generate results with their logo faces even when not fighting dragons (this property made them very much like Dragonmasters, as compared to Dragonlords). Most of the prototypes were only available in limited quantities at Origins 2001 and GenCon 2001 a month later. The Reds sold out the fastest. As I recall, the Red with black ink prototype variant was sold out first - just after the exhibit hall opened on day two of GenCon. The red prototypes had also sold very well at Origins and consequently became exceedingly hard to find. Red and Blue prototypes were produced both with white ink and with black ink, the black ink run being quite a bit smaller as I understand. While Red, Green, Gold, and Black varied only slightly in shade, the prototype blues appeared to have been made with two distinct colors of plastic - a royal blue and a much darker blue. Side by side, as in the picture above, the distinction seems fairly clear. Another thing to note is that the Black prototypes tended toward three forms - extreme marbling on the SFR face and a fairly clear ID (seen above), extreme marbling on the ID face and a fairly clear SFR face, or the very rare grey-speckled variant which looked rather like obsidian. The production run was released a couple months short of a year later, with most of the new dice sporting Gold ink in place of white. Most of the plastics were at least subtly different, with Red, Blue, and Black being closest to their original colors. Production Green was a bit darker and more opaque, and the production Gold plastic was RADICALLY different. Where the Prototype Gold had been a very opaque gold metallic (much like the Gold Dragonkin Champion plastic) marbled with white, the production run equivalent was a more translucent plastic marbled with metallic gold. One unfortunate result of the change was that production run Golds tended to be darker and rather hard to read (owing to their black ink), while the prototypes had a far greater contrast between gold/white marbling and black ink. (See the picture above.) In addition to the plastic changes and ink changes, the final production run dice had their faces oriented differently in most cases. While the prototype dice had the SFR face opposite the ID, most production run dice (all the Green, Red, Black, and Gold I've seen) have the SFR face one face to the right of the ID. There are possibly many more mold orientation variants among the production dice. I, for one, have two Reds with slightly different face layouts - one has swords to the left of the ID, the other has shields to the left of the ID. The production run sets were sold online through www.sfr-inc.com (and are still available there now) as well as being sold at conventions like Origins 2002 and GenCon 2002. Apparently in the past few months, there has been some serious talk of renaming the 'Elemental Dragonslayers' as 'Eldarim Dragonhunters'. Eldarim reflects the fact that they are from an Elder meta-race - the same race as Dragonlords, Dragonslayers, and Dragonmasters. There has even been talk of producing more Eldarim units, but I have no idea what the status of that might be currently. The name Dragonhunters helps to differentiate them from White Dragonslayers in the same way that Dragonmasters are distinguished from White Dragonlords. If you are seeking Dragonhunters of your own, especially Prototypes, you can check out my eBay auctions (for those and other dice) or email me (arcbat@hotmail.com) for more information.
	The update above seems to have been made between 2003 and 2005. The information is correct, but not up to date. Update: 23 July 2008 Here are some pictures of the three major Black Dragonhunter marbling variants. Most Black Hunters are either marbled heavily on the ID face (Slashed face), with a fairly clear Logo, or marbled heavily on the Logo, with a fairly clear ID face (Clear face). The third variant (Obsidian) is very rare, and consists of very light, bluish-grey marbling, spread sparsely around all the faces. Slight surface pitting is also common with this variant, which appears to have been caused by bubbles in the plastic.