Guns as the weapons of the Elite

[The_Universe]

If it's all the same to you, I think I'll live without Kings and the laws that they pass for 'my protection' anyway. Oh, and if its not the same you, I think I'll retain my right to appeal to the last argument of Kings anway.

Oh jeez - we're talking about a fantasy game where "hero" types make decisions like that for the "common" man all the time! Gimme a break!

I like republican democracy, too - but I didn't think were talking about instituting a cadre of elite gun-wielders in real life...

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Yeah, however I want the elite to be suitable for PCs, and a violently oppressive society just isn't going to go over well with my group. On the other hand, if there is a reason that the society needs to keep gun limited, and not just the obvious ones, it might be interesting to see what would happen with a group of young upstart PCs who buck the system.

Well, if you're going that direction...

What say firing gunpowder consumes a small portion of your soul or innate humanity.

So you develop an elite who know how to use as little gunpowder as possible as effeciently as possible in a fight to counter an enemy's souless hordes of powder-zombies and mighty gun-liches.

The elite are in turn watched by a strong church of gun forbidden clerics and monks.

Unless you know the proper rituals you don't really want to use gunpowder because it can zombify you and even when you do you're still at risk.

The horrible secret, of course, is that misuse of these rituals and gun-powder are precisely what have the chance of taking you down the road to being a gun-liche. The monks exist primarilly as a means to hunt down nobles who have gone that route and to fight gun-liches when they actually show up inside the kingdom or on the front lines.

The military rocks paper scissors of it is:

nobles beat powder-zombies, gun-liches beat nobles, monks beat gun-liches, and powder-zombies beat monks.

with the additional caveat that the church creates monks and nobles and the church needs peasants. powder-zombies are created from peasants and liches need powder-zombies as long as there is a church to counter.

It's a flexible enough formula that I think you can run it all sorts of different ways.

Plus I really like the idea of gun-liches.

 

[The_Universe]

Plus I really like the idea of gun-liches

Agreed. Gun Liches rock, and are already present in Privateer Press's Iron Kingdoms. Look there, and then see how close it might be to your own take on it. It doesn't have the crazy powder zombies (which are neat, too), but it does have some generally similar ideas.

 

[Storyteller01]

Stephen King's GUnslinger series is very close to this philosophy. Sure, there are gun and rifles everywhere, but the Gunslinger is the best there is.

The guns aren't muskets, but the users are considered elite warriors in their world (or they did when they were still around). The series runs constant flashbacks into the gunslingers training (which started when he was a child).

It's even a decent low magic (low tech??) campaign setting.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Agreed. Gun Liches rock, and are already present in Privateer Press's Iron Kingdoms. Look there, and then see how close it might be to your own take on it. It doesn't have the crazy powder zombies (which are neat, too), but it does have some generally similar ideas.

Plus you have those vermit that like the powder.

 

[Anti-Sean]

So, if the average gun is a matchlock and the elite are getting semi-magical brass cartridge carbines by constructing their weapons with alchemy (and requiring their members to study alchemy) and training for mounted combat then I could see it - easy.

"If guns are created with alchemy, then only alchemists will have guns."

 

[Stormborn]

Guns that steal your soul, or maybe guns that are powered by your soul. Neat idea Strangemonkey....sorry Doctor Strangemonkey. I also like the idea of monks who are the Watchers of the World, the check and balance against the guns and magic.

I definetly think that the elite have to be both the makers of the guns and the users of the guns.

Right now I am picturing guns powered by soul energy, long gleaming barrels of metal etched with arcane lines of glowing energy. A gem set in the base channeled through the barrel and activated by a small resonate hammer. Pull the trigger and it goes off. But the gem would have to be "charged" - perhaps through a long ritual that drains a point of CHA - and has a limited number of uses per day. Damage could be boosted, probablly at the expense of the weapon and wielder, by spending additional points of CHA. At the end of the day the wielder again conducts a ritual that allows for up to 2 spent points to be regained after 8 hours of sleep. Don't know the rituals, or don't perform them, the spent points never come back. The wielder grows more and more lifeless. Once it drops below a certain point the person becomes a "souless one" or zombie. But maybe there is a ritual to bond yourself with a gun or set of guns, you give up all your "soul energy" and empower the weapons forever, you CHA regrows, but you are never the same, souless and near immortal, and permanently evil. A Gun Lich. (Edit: Or maybe you sacrifice CON instead, becoming a more traditional DnD Undead type.)

But thats just me speculating like I do.

All of this is very helpful.

So, real guns or magic guns or whatever, how do the elite stay elite? How and why are guns not readilly available to the pesants? What does this to society?

 

[James Heard]

"If guns are created with alchemy, then only alchemists will have guns."

Or more probably, those that can afford to hire alchemists or the leisure time to devote to hobby-alchemy. With the stress on alchemy though, I agree that alchemists would become in much greater demand than "those guys who make those um, bags that make you sticky." If nothing else firearm-alchemy related logically to the demand for artillery by nations would ensure that. Cannon are more trustworthy than knights and wizards, and mostly cheaper. Which is yet another idea for an elite firearms society, those opposed on principle to artillery - which would make them knights and wizards (or knights and wizards) who see their jobs going the way of the dodo thanks to (relatively) cheap artillery pieces on the battlefield.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Guns that steal your soul, or maybe guns that are powered by your soul. Neat idea Strangemonkey....sorry Doctor Strangemonkey. I also like the idea of monks who are the Watchers of the World, the check and balance against the guns and magic.

So, real guns or magic guns or whatever, how do the elite stay elite? How and why are guns not readilly available to the pesants? What does this to society?

Thanks that's very kind of you. If you really wanted to complete the who watches the watchman cycle it would be monks watch nobility, clerics watch monks, and peasants watch clergy. With the horrible caveat that if the nobility every feel too threatened they could defect to the gun-liches in mass and thus screw the whole pooch.

There'd also be the issue of powder dealers wandering through the realm and addicting the peasantry creating small villages of powder-zombies in the rear lines all over the course of a single week if they do it right.

Hmm, well I'd be tempted to go with gunpowder fueling off of Con, but perhaps the rituals of the nobility distribute the effects or create a side effect where they boost CHA but hurt wisdom. So that gun nobles always need clergy around to defend them from enchantment and/or insanity but at the same time seem very healthy and beautiful.

That would fit a lot of the tropes of the wicked elite. Course if you simply distributed it between wisdom and con then you would hit the trope of the wicked decadent elite very nicely as well.

Then if you reverse the ritual or misuse it you start burning Con, Wis, and Cha while gaining a host of other benefits and that's how you start heading toward gun-lichdom.

I'd guess that the elite stay the elite as a result of their rituals, which you could either say work better with certain bloodlines or require years of training to use perfectly both of which would exempt the clergy as well as the peasants.

I'd also guess that the nobility had refined the rituals and their combat practices on their own time so that they in fact have knowledge that is secret or unavailable even to the church. Something that keeps the church from creating their own families of pocket nobility.

Among those noble rituals might be a set that lets you train units either to work around the gun fu or to work more effectively within it.

I sort of see this working two different ways at once:

- powder zombies work as in combat as massive units. Nobility counter this by being tremendous fighters capable of taking out loads of mooks at once. Monks counter gun-liches and nobility by being better at small unit tactics designed to take out one horrificly powerful opponent.

- Nobility counter powder-zombie armies run by gun-liches by being good at making units of trained men-at-arms and fortifications better at countering the mass-unit tactics of the enemy. Maybe wizardly nobility have the ability to run communications among units so that armies of nobility have the power to use dispersed unit, coordinated fire, and combined arms tactics more effectively.

- Perhaps this goes a step further and the road to gun-lichdom isn't so much characterized by an increased tolerance to the gunpowder and its tech, though it also does that, so much as to an increased ability to control the minds of powder-zombies. Perhaps the secret to the nobles abilities in fighting powder-zombies is that they can intuitively predict their tactics and the presence of gun-powder generally. Thus the connection between themselves and the gun-liches.

I'd be very interested in seeing the IK gun-liches.

 

[Stormborn]

Technically in IK they aren't so much Gun Liches as Iron Liches, part lich part construct. There are, however, pistol wraiths... the souls of gunfighters who hunt down the best and put them in their grave, almost as a means of species reproduction. Cool never the less.