It’s well known that the Doomstones campaign was adapted from a series for AD&D called The Complete Dungeon Master and sold by Simon Forrest and Basil Barrett under their Beast Enterprises imprint. A freelancer named Brad Freeman was hired by Games Workshop to re-stat the adventures for WFRP 1st edition, and the resulting manuscripts were passed to Flame for development and layout.

Not having read the originals, I had no idea what order they were supposed to be in, so I just picked one off the top of the pile and started. That’s how The Complete Dungeon Master 3 became Doomstones 1, and the order of the remaining instalments is equally random.

The Art

Like everything else from Flame, the art for Fire in the Mountains was largely reused from older publications, with the occasional bespoke piece from Tony Ackland and cartography and handouts from Ian Cooke. That’s why there are very few things to point out.

Let’s start with the cover. This John Blanche piece was created for an early Warhammer fiction anthology called Ignorant Armies. The human figure is based on Tim Pollard, whose house became a haven for Games Workshop artists, many of whom paid rent in artwork. Sadly, Tim died a few weeks ago, after a brief struggle with cancer.

This doesn’t really count as a joke, but take a look at the picture of the Elves in the section “The Twisted Lands” and see how many rabbits and squirrels you can find.

The Crystal

It was Mike Brunton’s idea to print the Crystals of Power as card models to cut out and assemble. I recall that he had a book on modeling exotic polyhedra, and the handouts for all the crystals were stolen from there.

Character Names

Like the art, the text of the adventure was largely re-used and I developed it at breakneck speed. This left little opportunity for adding or changing names. The only halfway interesting one I can find now is the Outrider Rutger Reiter: his last name means ‘rider’ and his first was probably inspired by the actor Rutger Hauer.

The Adventure

That’s not to say that I didn’t have any fun, though. I padded out the travel sections with encounters of my own devising – although the horribly clichéd gypsies were not my work. I particularly remember enjoying the Chaos-themed encounters in the Twisted Lands. Not too much earlier, I had done a stint developing Realm of Chaos, but I was unable to wrestle it across the finish line and that task was left to Mike Brunton before we went to Flame.

The Drum of Doom was a standard AD&D magic item, as I recall, and it was written into the original adventure. I re-statted it for WFRP and hoped no one would notice. I created the Glass of Scholarship as a short-cut to get around difficulties with written languages that cropped up here and there during the adventure.

And that’s all I have this time, although was always please feel free to leave a comment pointing out anything I might have missed!

Want to support my work?

If you’ve enjoyed the content on this blog, please consider supporting me by making a small donation. Here are a couple of ways to do so.

Thanks!

And Also…

August’s Monster of the Month is posted on my Patreon page.

The dullahan is a demonic rider from Ireland, who might be the ancestor of Sleepy Hollow’s headless horseman, Ghost Rider, and many others. This 5-page, system-agnostic, PDF monster toolkit includes:

Stat guidelines for d20-based, d100-based, and – through comparisons with common creatures from most settings – all other tabletop roleplaying systems.A full monster description with lists of basic and optional skills and traits.Three adventure seeds, covering fantasy, historical, and modern settings.

The Monster of the Month Club As a member, you can expect regular, in-depth treatments of creatures from worldwide myth and folklore—some familiar, some not—in a system-agnostic format that is easy for an experienced GM to use with the tabletop rpg system of their choice.
Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/MonsteroftheMonthClub, follow us @MotMClub, or email rpgmonsterclub@yahoo.com.