LOST WARHAMMER: THE STONE CHICKEN

This is part of a series of posts looking at unpublished content for Warhammer. The first post in the series can be read here.

It was 1988, just over a year since WFRP and WH40K had been released. TSR UK’s Imagine magazine was gone by this time, but its former editor Paul Cockburn was now editing White Dwarf. One of Imagine’s many good points had been “Brief Encounters” – short, 1-2-page adventures showcasing a particular monster or situation – and Paul (or someone else in GW management) had the perfectly sensible idea of doing the same thing with short WFRP encounters in White Dwarf. They were called “Compleat Encounters.”

I loved the idea, all except for one thing. I wasn’t allowed to write any. Nor was anyone in the GW Design Studio. In a move that foreshadowed one of my greatest frustrations at GW, it was decided that all the work would be farmed out to external writers. We were to write briefs, but not encounters.

It’s already on record that I wanted every miniature in the Citadel catalogue to find a place in WFRP. As I set about churning out briefs (which, to be honest, took just as much time as if I’d written the encounters myself), I turned to the miniatures catalogue for inspiration. One of my early efforts featured a renowned sculptor who cheated using a cockatrice; it was written (by whom, I no longer remember) but as far as I know it was never published.

– Graeme Davis, ‘Terror in the Darkness’, personal blog (11 December 2014)

Davis has since remembered more about the piece about the cockatrice.

It was called ‘The Stone Chicken’, and it was written (I think) by a new freelancer called Hugh Tynan.

I saw the manuscript once at the GW Design Studio, but for unknown reasons it never made it to Flame and I wasn’t able to find it since. Which is a shame, because, although I wasn’t crazy about the title, it was a solid adventure and I would have liked to use it.

Hugh, if you’re still out there, I’m sorry.

– Graeme Davis, email (5 May 2024)

Tynan had written a number of articles in White Dwarf for the Judge Dredd RPG (in issues 80, 83, 88 and 90), but to my knowledge never had any writing published for WFRP.

The adventure’s premise resembles Robert Chambers’ story ‘The Mask’ in The King in Yellow (1895), in which a sculptor uses chemicals to petrify living things. Davis, however, does not believe that was an inspiration.

I hadn’t read The King in Yellow by that point, I’m pretty sure, and as far as I can remember, the idea was my own. It’s such an obvious one, though, that I’m not surprised someone else had already come up with it.

– Graeme Davis, ibid

For more on other articles in the Compleat Encounter series, see this post.

Title art used without permission. No challenge intended to the rights holders.