Short answers, pulled from the story.
Archaeologists uncovered a set of dice at the Burnt City in south-eastern Iran, dating between 2800 and 2500 BCE. These artifacts represent some of the oldest known examples of throwable objects with marked sides used for generating random values.
The word die derives from Old French dé and Latin datum meaning something which is given or played. The term snake eyes refers to rolling one pip on each die and traces its use back to 1919 according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.
Precision casino dice differ significantly by being made from extruded cellulose acetate bars sawed to ensure square faces. These high-quality dice feature flush markings drilled deep and filled with opaque paint matching the density of cellulose.
Modern polyhedral dice sets emerged around the end of the 1960s when wargame players adopted non-cubical shapes. Five Platonic solids form standard sets including tetrahedron octahedron dodecahedron and icosahedron alongside a cube.
Standard role-playing sets include seven dice: d4 d6 d8 d12 d20 plus two d10s labeled zero to nine and zero to ninety. Percentile systems combine these two decahedral dice to generate random numbers from zero to ninety-nine.