The third adventure in the Doomstones campaign, Death Rock was adapted from The Feathered Priests, an AD&D adventure in The Complete Dungeon Master series. It was re-statted for WFRP by Brad Freeman and I developed it for Flame Publications. Art was sourced mainly from the Games Workshop archives, with occasional bespoke pieces by Tony Ackland.

The Art

Like the cover of Fire in the Mountains, the cover of Blood in Darkness was reused from a Warhammer fiction title: in this case, Paul Bonner’s cover image for the anthology Wolf Riders.

There are no jokes in the interior art. Even Tony was unusually restrained. I think this was probably because Flame was still in its early days, and we were just rushing things through development and production as quickly as possible. However, in some of the full-page images Tony did take the opportunity to explore some ideas about the equipment and dress styles of the various Orc tribes within the Bloodaxe Alliance and the symbology of Verena in the monastery.

Like the previous Doomstones adventures, Death Rock ran a little short of the target page count, so some padding had to be added. Tony obliged with full-page (or larger) images of Radzog’s court and the forces of the Bloodaxe Alliance, which I annotated just as I had done for John Blanche’s troop images in The Enemy Within a few years earlier.

The Names

Radzog is another example of my thinking around nonhuman character names. Zog had started off in the Gobbledigook comic strip in White Dwarf, as ‘zog off!’ I used the phrase in a few pieces of colour text, and took ‘zog’ as a name element used for magic-using Orcs, including Radzog. The first half of his name was a word common in popular culture at the time: a truncation of ‘radical’ commonly used among skateboarders and BMX bikers to express admiration for particular skill and daring.

The two squabbling sub-commanders, Yuggum Mugrott and Mijull Negg were named after Napoleon’s Marshals Joachim Murat and Michel Ney, and Luggub Duvull was named after another Marshal, Louis-Nicolas Davout.

The Adventure

The adventure is changed very little from the original AD&D version, though I did take the opportunity to write a prophecy about the player characters in terrible verse.

Like Lichemaster, it offers a rather uncomfortable mix of roleplaying and mass combat, though for different reasons. The Feathered Priests, if memory serves, used the Orc army as a source of time pressure, but because this was Warhammer I felt it necessary to at least give a nod to the possibility of actually running the battle as a part of the adventure. I’ve never been satisfied with the result, and I’ve always felt that given a little more time to develop and test the necessary systems, I could have done a better job. But it is what it is.

The only new monsters were the Guardian Spirits, which I wrote up as well as I could in the time. I was hoping to do more with them (and with some of the other creatures that appeared for the first time in the Doomstones campaign) in my pet project that never happened, De Bestiis Chaotic. More on that here.

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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.

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