I was asked to give a talk about anything at all, and thought about how there's a twentysided die in the Louvre from ancient Egypt, but none from the middle ages. Yet somehow in the 21st century, everyone seems to know what a d20 is. How did that happen?

The history of dice is in many ways Folk History. People who were there tell stories that physical evidence contradicts. Fact checking everything revealed so many rabbit holes, and sent me looking all over the place. That said, Jon Peterson's Playing At The World blog was invaluable for it's collections of photos of dice from the 60's and 70's, and the dive into the life of Fredda Sieve. The photo archives of GaryCon were also irreplaceable when it came to artifacts from Midwest Military Simulation Association.

If you'd like to listen to an interview with David Wesely on a train to GenCon telling his version of this story (among many other things), check out this episode of Clyde L Rhoer's Theory From the Closet podcast: https://archive.org/details/TheoryFro...