Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dice are among humanity's oldest tools for generating chance. Native Americans of the Great Plains region are speculated to have used dice since at least 12,000 years ago, around 10000 BCE. The oldest known excavated dice come from the Burnt City in south-eastern Iran, estimated to date from between 2800 and 2500 BCE.
Opposite sides of a modern standard die add up to seven by convention, a design documented as far back as Indus Valley civilization dice from 2500-1900 BCE. This arrangement requires the faces showing one, two, and three to share a single vertex, and it has been the standard for most of recorded history.
Precision dice are made from bars of extruded cellulose acetate with pips drilled to 17 plus or minus 4 mil deep and filled with density-matched epoxy to keep the die balanced. Non-precision dice are made by plastic injection molding with recessed markings and rounded edges. Casino precision dice are transparent to make internal weighting detectable, and each carries a serial number and casino logo to prevent cheating by substitution.
The modern tradition of using polyhedral dice in games started around the end of the 1960s, when non-cubical dice became popular among wargame players. They spread widely through role-playing games and trading card games after that. The fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons is largely credited with popularizing polyhedral dice sets in tabletop gaming.
Diceware is a method recommended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for generating secure but memorable passphrases. It works by repeatedly rolling five dice and selecting the corresponding word from a pre-generated list. The randomness of physical dice rolls makes the resulting passphrases difficult to predict.
Dominoes and playing cards both originated in China as developments from dice. The transition from dice to playing cards occurred around the Tang dynasty, which ran from 618 to 907 CE. This shift coincided with the broader technological transition from manuscript rolls to block-printed books.