Firearms and alternatives to gunpowder

[Samloyal23]

[MENTION=21432]Samloyal23[/MENTION]: We're talking about a fantasy setting where you are going against conceits and where you have individuals that are working for hundreds of years to improve the item... When looking at rifling I found the following shrapnel round from a Russian cannon:

This looks like the kind of thing I could see a Dwarf making up in a workshop. You have a group of people who could easily come up with ideas on spin and rifling. They have to have fire to harry spellcasters, who are orbital platforms on two legs. I'm just not seeing why you cannot follow into a Modern form of firearms and have too many issues. Let them reload slowly, have breaks, etc. but they should be more gun than crossbow. "Blow things up" is on the Coat of Arms for the Dwarven Empire after all .

Slainte,

-Loonook.

That's something to think about, but I don't want this running wild and turning into sci-fi. If a player with a dwarf artificer character wants to research it, I might let him, but I want to start within the Renaissance era level of tech for weapons. Remember, dwarves are also very conservative and traditional, they often do things a certain way because "it's always been that way"...

 

[Samloyal23]

So you're thinking they have to be cold iron (as opposed to regular iron or steel, or brass or bronze)?

Rules for enchanting cold iron items are already in the game.

My campaign has two subraces of Dwarf, Iron Dwarves and Obsidian Dwarves. The Iron Dwarves have natural resistance to magic because they live in mines thick with an anti-magical metal which they use extensively in all of their creations because of its hardness. They use it for almost everything. So I'm assuming most of their weapons are made of it...

 

[Samloyal23]

This was hastily written just now, not at all sure about the numbers. Thoughts?

This hard, anti-magical metal adds to the quality of a weapon or suit of armour. Weapons fashioned from envisjarn have a natural ability to suppress the flow of magical energy. Items made from this metal have a natural SR of 10 and radiate an aura of 1 foot per 5 pounds radius that causes spells cast to have a 10% failure rate. Armour made of envisjarn gives a wearer spell resistance equal to 5+ the AC bonus of the armour’s type.
Items without metal parts cannot be made from envisjarn. An arrow could be made of envisjarn, but a quarterstaff could not.
Only weapons armour, and shields normally made of metal can be fashioned from envisjarn. Weapons armour and shields normally made of steel that are made of envisjarn have one-third more hit points than normal. Envisjarn has 30 hit points per inch of thickness and hardness 15.