Following up on September’s The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, The Witchlight Carnival Dice and Miscellany promises premium dice and other goodies for the world’s greatest roleplaying game. Like the other products in this line, The Witchlight Carnival includes 11 dice (2d20, 4d6, and 1 of everything else), a small fold-out poster/map, a number of square cards, and a storage box/dice tray.

The dice are a bold, glittery orange with the numbers a high-contrast blue, making them both attractive and functional. They’re distinctive in appearance as compared to the other dice in this line and might have my favorite aesthetic, although my favorites overall are in Laerel Silverhand’s Explorer’s Kit, with it’s oversize d20s. Similarly, the dice dray/storage box is gorgeous, with an orange-and-black butterfly theme. It’s sturdy, and has a velvet-ish lining to minimize clanking dice noises.

The mini-poster, on the other hand, was disappointing. One side has a layout of the Witchlight Carnival. Which could be a convenient handout, but The Wild Beyond the Witchlight already has a full-size poster map. The other side is just some art of the carnival. It’s fine as a picture, but it’s not functional and it’s not like I’m going to frame it and hang it on my wall, so I’m not sure what one would do with it.

All but one of the nineteen square cards is focused on a character or game found at the Witchlight Carnival. The front depicts the character/game with a marquee of the character’s name and a tagline. For the most part, these make handy ‘face cards’ to show to players as they explore the carnival, although a few might give away something about a character’s purpose or association. I think that face cards for published adventures are quite handy (a picture is worth a thousand words, as they say), although what would be really nice would be a deck that includes face cards for all of the NPCs in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, not just the ones from the Witchlight Carnival. The reverse side repeats that same image, although usually smaller or with a different crop, and includes pertinent text. For the characters, this text is a first-person description from Ellywick Tumblestrum (the planeswalker/bard first seen in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms). For the carnival games, this text is the rules for the game, should the characters happen to play it while at the carnival. They’re probably the most handy of the cards – the illustration of the game isn’t quite as useful as being able to easily show the players an illustration of a character, but it’s handy for the DM to have the game rules right there, while the character descriptions aren’t phrased in a way that you would want to use them in game. The nineteenth card has a random table on each side, one for a carnival prize and one for feywild trinkets.

Overall, The Witchlight Carnival is solid, but not great – some really nice bits, but not everything one might have hoped. If you’re in the market for dice and a dice tray, the ones here look really good. The face cards that you get are handy, but the product configuration means you get oversized face cards for a few NPCs, not standard-sized face cards for the entire adventure (which seems like it would be workable at this price point). The cards for the carnival games a really functional, but the mini-poster seems kind of pointless. Ultimately, The Witchlight Carnival has the most value for someone who’s going to be running The Wild Beyond the Witchlight and takes a liking to the included dice.

Promotional consideration was provided in the form of a review copy. Strange Assembly may earn commissions from affiliate links in this article.