Home > Bibliography, games, WFRP, writing > Doomstones 5 – What might have been

Doomstones 5 – What might have been


The covers of Flame’s edition of Doomstones.

Hogshead’s 2001 title Heart of Chaos by Robin D. Laws was not the first attempt to wrap up the Doomstones campaign for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and solve the problem of what to do with the Player Characters now that they have all four Crystals of Power. When the campaign was adventures originally written for D&D, a concluding episode had gone unpublished.

While I was working on the WFRP adaptations at Flame publications, I started working on an outline for a fifth instalment that would tie things up nicely. I left it behind at Flame when I quit Games Workshop in 1990, and I had assumed that, like so many other things, it had vanished in the mists of time. But I was wrong.

A copy of my outline somehow survived in the archives of Marc Gascoigne, and recently made its way to me. I have no idea whether or not Robin Laws saw it while he was working on Heart of Chaos. There are some clear parallels between my outline and Robin’s final work (take that as a spoiler warning, if you will), but the similarities could be put down to the fact that some events and characters are obvious must-haves in a fifth and final Doomstones adventure.

Apart from saving the original Word file as a PDF, I haven’t done anything to it at all. It is just as I wrote it (though someone – probably Mike Brunton – turned it into a Word file from my original ProText file for Amstrad PCW and formatted it using Flame’s style of the time), so its integrity as a historical document is as good as it can be, for those to whom such things matter. Added later: But see the comment below about an earleir version on Gideon’s Awesome Lies blog.

Anyway, take it for what it is, make of it what you will, and I hope you find it interesting. Like everything else WFRP on this blog, this is completely unofficial and no challenge is intended to copyrights held by Games Workshop, Cubicle 7, or anyone else. Anyway, here it is.

Doomstones 5 GD outline – download PDF


And while you’re here…

Since 2020, I’ve been a director of Rookery Publications, a new indie TTRPG studio that I co-founded with some names that WFRP fans are sure to recognize: Andrew Law, Lindsay Law, Andy Leask, and Mark Gibbons. Our first product is available from DriveThru, and has garnered some good reviews so far. There is much, much more to follow.

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  1. Totsuzenheni Yukimi
    March 28, 2022 at 2:51 pm

    I think the original protext file might be the one on Gideon’s Awesome Lies blog here: https://awesomeliesblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/28/lost-warhammer-the-fifth-doomstone-2/ . It’s missing some of the text in the Word document but otherwise i think it’s the same word for word.

  2. March 28, 2022 at 3:06 pm

    You are right. I see that I even commented on Gideon’s post. So I must have taken a printout from Flame, and sent it to James ten years or so later.

  3. March 28, 2022 at 7:13 pm

    Yes, it looks like a revision of the document Toby Pilling provided to me and I posted on my blog. There are some small changes, but the main difference is that the version I previously shared seems to have been missing a second page of plot summary, as it misses the last three bullet points of the overview. I have written up a more detailed comparison in a note on my blog:

    https://awesomeliesblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/28/lost-warhammer-the-fifth-doomstone-2/#comment-4767

  4. January 15, 2023 at 12:32 pm

    Do you have any info on the other 3 books that were supposed to come out after Tahmurkhan?

    • January 21, 2023 at 3:49 pm

      Sorry, no. I didn’t even know about Tamurkhan until you mentioned it.

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