Ye Olde Inn

While HQ dice use a pictorial approach which helps keep things fresh, I am thoroughly tired of six sided dice in general. I'm sure I can come up with rules on my own, as I've had to with adventure game books, but I wanted to know if anyone has come up with tried and tested rules for HQ using more than just boring dice cubes.

I still prefer d6's, but I've heard of some interesting uses for other types of dice in HQ (without necessarily going full D&D):

substituting D8's for movement

As Zargon I regularly do the following (though most recently I've been using Ribby's "mentorbot" to generate random numbers in our discord):

Random Monster (d8, d10, d12, etc, usually I list them in a certain order... goblin, orc, fimir, skeleton, zombie, mummy, chaos warrior, gargoyle... and add others depending upon the expansion used, excluding the final boss or even including him just as a ghostly apparition that tosses out a spell perhaps and then disappears). To me it works better than shuffling the monster deck and drawing one, but otherwise that's how you'd do it, or laying them all flat and picking one to turn face up.

Random Hero (d4... I don't own any d3's but mentorbot can handle it. d2 is just flipping a coin). See above.

Random item (like when one is being stolen) give them a numbered list and roll... granted it's not guaranteed to come out exactly to match one of your dice. You could double it up... 1 or 2 means first item, 3 or 4 means second item, etc...

Official quests don't often use these, but many homebrews (like the Evil Wizard Deck) call for "random this or that" and the dice can be a way to do that (otherwise Zargon can just pick someone any way he wants).

I wrote up an Alchemy deck list from RotDM. There are exactly 20 potions corresponding to each side of a d20. So you can roll a die to see what potion you get instead of drawing from the deck.

I did this so I can put the updated potions with purchase prices on them in a card binder page. Along with the armory cards, people have a visual armory/alchemist’s shop to look at, similar to the platform in the old NA version of the game instead of a deck of cards.

I'm sticking with the cards for my virgin play through the expansions, but for return campaigns that sounds like a good idea. Do you have a link?

I'm thinking of getting a set of blank dice, and then, for example, taking the total symbols from two HQ dice and placing them in a staggered fashion on a d12. I'd just use permanent markers and/or model/miniature paint for the symbols.