D&D 5E Introducing Guns to Eberron

The thing about gunpowder weapons in Eberron, is that even if somebody did bother to take the time to invent and improve upon them, they still wouldn't be any more effective (and probably considerably more expensive) than the magical weaponry and artillery that they already had lying around.

Also keep in mind that most of what constitutes "inventing" in Eberron is "Hey, look at this cool thing we dug up in Xen'drik, I wonder how it works?"

There's a business perspective here too. The thing about gunpowder weapons & artillery is that they require no magical components, and thus, no input from the Dragonmarked Houses. Cannith has absolutely no reason to promote or get into gunpowder weaponry and every reason to strangle any attempt to do this in its crib.

All that said, in my current Eberron campaign I've been setting up a potential future campaign using Blades in the Dark. I've dropped numerous references to the fact that in the Lhazaar Principalities, magic doesn't work quite right due to the entire region lying upon overlapping Manifest Zones to Mabar and Dolurrh. The Dragonmarked Houses have stayed away (leaving many in the Principalities to resort to piracy for resources) and they've ultimately developed their own industrial economy to bring their setting in line to the default setting of BitD. So, they have guns there, but they (and other inventions) haven't really made it to the mainland at all mostly due to a PR campaign from the Dragonmarked Houses (think the way the restaurant industry managed to get people to think about the McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit)

Staff of Forcebolt. Same as staff of Firebolt but it goes Boom! and does force damage. Call it a Gonne and you are done.

I'd just like to point out, there are optional rules for guns, on pp. 267-268 of the DMG. Not very good rules, but rules. A decent starting point at least.

My current point of view is that attempting to model guns accurately is a bad choice, and the smartest thing to do is basically give a Crossbow some sort of mechanical upgrade, and require special training to use it.

I.E.
Hand Crossbow - 1d6 - r 30/120 - light, loading
Revolver - 1d6 - r 30/120 - Light, Loading (6shots)

Heavy Crossbow - 1d10 - r 100/400 - Heavy, Loading, 2-handed
Rifle, revolver - 1d10 - r 100/400 - Heavy, Loading (5 shots), 2-handed
Rifle, Large boar - 2d6 - r 100/400 - Heavy, Loading, 2 handed
Rifle, Sniper - 1d10 - r 250/1000 - Heavy, Loading, 2-handed

Shotgun - 1d8 - Cone 30' - Heavy, Loading, 2-handed

And just gate gun use behind either a new skill (Gunsmithing) requiring a certain skill level to not have to make a malfunction check, or have a Feat for gun use.

I've toyed with the idea of guns in my home campaign which in many ways is Eberron-esque as far as how do you advance beyond the standard pseudo-medieval world.

However, if you look at the history of guns, I'm not convinced in a world where there's magic they would ever be invented. Sure it's easy to look at a machine gun and say "who wouldn't want that" but what people forget is that it took hundreds of years to get to that point. Early guns were little more than flash-bangs designed more to frighten than to be real weapons. In addition, cannon were around for quite a while before any hand-held weapons. Gunpowder existed for much of what we consider the "medieval", and was contemporaneous with full plate armor. It was also quite expensive and difficult to create.

So how did it become more common? Well, that required advances in basic chemistry and better ways of producing the components in large quantities. But what if those advances in chemistry were not possible because "magic"? Or what if the early artillery could be easily defeated by simple spells? Gunpowder is quite volatile and set off by a simple spark. It's not too hard to imagine creating a simple spell "spark" that could be used against the enemy to ignite their boom-powder if it became a threat.

So early gunpowder weapons would be less effective than fairly common war magic while being easily defeated and expensive in my world. Since early gunpowder based weapons were never perfected, modern firearms never had a chance.

Gradine said:

There's a business perspective here too. The thing about gunpowder weapons & artillery is that they require no magical components, and thus, no input from the Dragonmarked Houses. Cannith has absolutely no reason to promote or get into gunpowder weaponry and every reason to strangle any attempt to do this in its crib.

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The Houses do a lot of stuff that doesn't involve magic. Deneith has tons of mercenaries that aren't dragonmarked, Jorasco operates a lot of regular clinics staffed by people with the Medicine (or Heal in 3.5e) skill but no magic healing, and pretty much every reputable craftsperson is licensed by Cannith. So if gunpowder did work in Eberron, Cannith would have no reason whatsoever to try to "bury" it, but would rather be at the forefront of figuring out what you could do with it.

This is awesome stuff.

As a side-note, this was a 4E thread I rescued from the old Wizards of the Coast message boards, hence the "Originally posted by" bit at the top of each post.

I added the Renaissance firearms from the 5E DMG pg 267 to my game, with the caveat that gunpowder was made with powdered dragonshards. Since dragonshards are very much a limited item that the party was encouraged by many sides to find, it kind of fit the genre. As it is, the weapons were not so outrageous that they were more desirable than the magical weapons the party also had access to. I guess the point is, in Eberron, you can have a shardpowder pistol, or you can have a magic repeating crossbow that has bolts that erupt with alchemist's fire when they hit, and many people are going to go with that second, flashier, weapon.

Staffan said:

The Houses do a lot of stuff that doesn't involve magic. Deneith has tons of mercenaries that aren't dragonmarked, Jorasco operates a lot of regular clinics staffed by people with the Medicine (or Heal in 3.5e) skill but no magic healing, and pretty much every reputable craftsperson is licensed by Cannith. So if gunpowder did work in Eberron, Cannith would have no reason whatsoever to try to "bury" it, but would rather be at the forefront of figuring out what you could do with it.

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The reason that firearms replaced bows as weapons of war was because their ammunition could be mass-produced rather than requiring relatively skilled craftsmen.
Cannith doesn't do mass-production, and would probably oppose development of a weapon that would allow nations to mass-produce magic-equivalent weapons themselves without Cannith's influence/ability to charge them for it.

I know this is a necro thread, but...

Liane the Wayfarer said:

Originally posted by echelon_house:

One of the things that really makes Eberron interesting to me is how different it is from all of the other Standard Medieval European Fantasy settings, and a big part of that is the post-WW1/pulp-era atmosphere. It's a little hard to imagine how a 100-year continent-spanning war could take place without the invention of artillery, and a big part of pulp is the idea of handguns, which is why I think they have a place in Eberron.

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In some ways, Eberron is more advanced than 20th century society, and in other ways, it is more regressed because of the disproportionate nature of magic on the progression of their cultures. Gunpowder-based artillery has not been invented because there has been no need for inventing handguns with the ubiquity of wide-magic. Artillery and guns exist in Khorvaire in the form of wands of magic missile and fireball. It is also possible that they have been invented but are regarded as less efficient and redundant in comparison with wide-magic abilities.

IMO as an Eberron-enthusiast, guns are a big no no for the setting's particular wide-magic aesthetic.

Liane the Wayfarer said:

Either way, Eberron would be a nice fit for guns.

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Not according to the setting creator Keith Baker. He explicitly did not want guns in the setting.

Cap'n Kobold said:

Cannith doesn't do mass-production, and would probably oppose development of a weapon that would allow nations to mass-produce magic-equivalent weapons themselves without Cannith's influence/ability to charge them for it.

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Not yet. That's the thing with the Dragonmarked Houses, they are constantly pushing the setting forward with their innovations for the sake of a socio-economic advantage.

I concur with everything Aldarac said.

Guns don't exist on Eberron precisely because it's a pervasive wide magic setting. What this means is that there's a ton of low level magic (1st through 3rd level), but high level magic is much less common.

Why invent a gun when a wand does the same thing and is readily available? There was artillery in the Last War, just in the forms of Wands of fireballs or stinking clouds.

IF I were ever to run an Eberron campaign, and someone really, really wanted their character to have a firearm, I would just take the Hand Cross, change it to Bludgeoning damage, and drop the loading feature.

Yes, it would be a Colt "Peacemaker". I would describe it as a House Cannith prototype technology.

EDIT
personally, about the only official setting where I could see the wide-spread use of guns being a thing is Mystara.