Rune dice are any dice (or sets of multiple dice) which may be used for divination systems based on either the Elder Futhark runes, the medieval Irish Ogham, or another alphabetic writing system, such as the Greek alphabet, the modern English alphabet, or the Hebrew Alefbet (Ktav Ashuri). Rune dice may even feature a fictional orthography like the Aurebesh from the Star Wars films, the Tengwar, Cirth, or Sarati from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, or a neography like the Theban alphabet developed by Johannes Trithemius, or the Enochian alphabet developed by John Dee. Some rune dice are purpose-made for tabletop roleplaying games, like the rune dice produced in the 1990s by the Flying Buffalo company, which represent a fictional alphabet with no precedent in any work of literature prior to the production of the dice.
Divination using an alphabet to represent a fixed set of possible answers is found in several ancient cultures; the Greek Alphabet Oracle, for example, dates back to the city of Olympos in Lycia, which has stood abandoned in ruin since at least the 15th century CE. An inscription on a wall there gives instructions for how to cast the Greek alphabet as runes, in a manner similar to other cleromantic systems, like casting bones and metal charms or tokens formed into symbolic shapes. Historic rune casting methods consistently involve many separate objects of similar size and shape, like pebbles, pieces of clay, or small staves of wood, with one alphabet letter painted or carved into each one. These are either thrown onto a casting mat together at once, with their positions relative to each other informing the divinatory reading, or else they are pulled from a bag one at a time, with the diviner only pulling as many runes as they feel are appropriate for the breadth of the question being asked.
Rune dice develop this basic format of divination in a direction which introduces both strengths and weaknesses to the process. The most obvious weakness of rune dice is that they cannot potentially display every possible combination of runes, so there will always be some groupings of runes which never appear within the same reading. The reason for this is simple: some runes are on different faces of the very same die, and are not repeated on other dice within the dice set, making their simultaneous appearance impossible. In divination systems which only require one rune to be output, like the Greek Alphabet Oracle, this is no problem at all, since multiple runes at once is not a goal of the process. In divination using the Futhark, however, this is a significant narrowing of possible readings, and the only workaround is to roll the dice multiple times to give every result a chance to appear.
The most obvious strength of rune dice is their greater portability than an entire bag of runes, which may be very numerous and very noisy to carry around. An Ogham die with every stave engraved on its many faces can be tossed into a purse or pocket without hazarding that one might accidentally drop and lose one of the many staves in a set, and without having to sacrifice inventory space to carry a whole set of staves.
Elder Futhark runes account for the most readily available mass-produced rune dice, and they come in many forms: eight-sided dice that divide the runes into three "aetts" (groupings of eight along specific related themes), six-sided dice which ignore these divisions entirely, and specialty dice with one face for every rune, sometimes also featuring a blank face (the contraversial "Wyrd rune") to account for a non-answer from the runes.
In researching for this writeup, I was amused to discover there are many dice designed for the English alphabet, intended to be learning tools in children's reading classrooms. Some of them account for the natural frequency of each letter's occurrence in the language, while others give every letter an equal probabilistic representation. The Scrabble board game has tiles with one English letter apiece, distributed in probabilities which approximate their frequency in the language. Flash cards for children learning to read have a similar useful quality as a random number generator for the alphabet. It occurred to me that there is no modern "English Alphabet Oracle" which treats this orthography as a set of runes, and - seeing no reason why that should remain the case - I have taken it upon myself, for my own amusement (and hopefully yours as well), to develop one.
Iron Noder 2023, 24/30