Guns in a fantasy setting

[Umbran]

One way to deal with it is to go the Deadlands route - allow firearms become the dominant weapon, and magic does the things firearms can't...

 

[Ashrum the Black]

I'll add in that a look at firearms in the Iron Kingdoms is really worth a look. Gunpowder is an alchemical compound, and they even the playing field for the common man to compete with the spell casters and the mounted knights. The down side is that they take blasted forever to reload most times after firing. They are also very expensive to make. This means that only a few people have them, and they normally only get a few shots off.

I had a npc wizard that walked around with a brace of pistols in an Iron Kingdoms campaign. Should have seen the players faces when he popped a fireball spell and then proceeded to shoot the villains in HtH with them with his guns. Man it was simply cool.

-Ashrum

 

[Cat Moon]

One of the supplements for 2e was a campaign setting(?) called "Red Steel", and it was a sorta musketeers-like setting with red steel, red stuff which gave people mutations and red powder which was gunpower all interlinked into the setting. It seemed like a fun idea.

I could easily see gunpowder being an alchemical product.

Atually Red Steel came from depletetion Cinnabryl. Cinnabryl was used to help offset the drawbacks of Leagcy Abilities. Smokepowder was used for firearms in Red Steel.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Of course you do realize that with magic and firearms existing side by side, warfare might not completely resemble warfare of the 18th and 19th centuries.

With the number of potential supernatural allies and interlopers who fly, tunnel, swim, shrug off normal weapons, etc., I've always thought of Fantasy warfare rapidly gravitating towards a very modern WW1/WW2 type model.

And Harry Turtledove's 6 (huge) novel Darkness series is a perfect example of that. Dragonriders become the pilots while innovative generals figure out new ways to project their air forces into normally inaccessible areas; necromancy replaces nuclear warcraft; controlled leviathans become the submarines of the world, and so forth.

Well worth the read.

I mean, think about it- who would design a castle that looked like the ones of Europe (big, open courtyards, uncovered battlements) when any time a dragon, wizard, or other flying foe could rain down death from out of bowshot? (Look up the Hildebrandt cover art for Dragon #49.)

Instead, while there might be some above-ground and uncovered structures, battle architecture would probably go subterranean and involve more trenchwork (a la WW1). There are, after all, fewer tunnelers than flyers.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

Kobold Avenger,
problem is, things are *never* static.
Once you have the tech for those...it will evolve as other techs improve.
A rifled barrel percussion rifle is very accurate, note the buffalo guns.

In my games, things change over time...
Way I look at it, we 21st century humans cannot really comprehend "alien", by this I mean, anything not like our world and time. We're "locked" into our world view.

In my homebrew setting, a quasi-Roman empire has legions fitted with adamantine weapons/armour, mined over millenia by condemend slaves. Adamantine lasts for many many thousands of years of use, each piece is numbered and thefts always recovered and drastically punished.
This gave the empire a massive advantage, along with organizing a military wizard schooling and integration system, so each century would have a 5+ clerics and 1 or 2 wizards.

So, mixing our world history, with some D&D stuff, things coudl turn out, odd

In my settign the nation who have magical-pistol usign wizards is sort of like early 19th century USA, traders extraordinaire, where magic and odd technoglogy (not our tech, more like gnomish stuff that works!)

 

[Obryn]

If you can find them, one fun guns-meet-fantasy series is Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame.

It's a pretty fun series, besides.

-O

 

[mmadsen]

Kobold Avenger, problem is, things are *never* static. Once you have the tech for those...it will evolve as other techs improve.

Yes, gunpowder could evolve as rapidly as it did in China.

 

[frankthedm]

In a fantasy setting, i want guns to be notably hazardous to thier wielders.

 

[Pbartender]

Realistically, the thing that gunpowder did was make it a lot easier for untrained peasants to easilly be formed into militias. A gun is point and shoot--it takes practice but no where near the same amount of training it took to use a longbow, a lance, a crossbow, etc--or in a fantasy setting anyone who uses magic.

You know, a lot of people say that, but it's not exactly true.

The skill it takes to fire a musket and hit a target is roughly the same skill required to shoot a crossbow and hit a target. Both require less training to fire than a typical bow and arrow.

However, a muzzle-loaded firearm requires more training to load both properly and quickly. Remember, in warfare, soldiers with ranged weapons rarely take aim at a paricular target. Instead, as a group, they aim in the general direction of the enemy army and let loose with a volley as a whole. In that instance, being able to fire off as many volleys as possible in a period of time starts becoming more important than accuracy.

That's why later town militias would generally get clobbered by professional armies... The professionals had the training to reload faster, fire more volleys, and had the experience to not run away as soon as the bullets started flying.

 

[Umbran]

Kobold Avenger,
problem is, things are *never* static.
Once you have the tech for those...it will evolve as other techs improve.
A rifled barrel percussion rifle is very accurate, note the buffalo guns.

Well, let us consider - current thinking is that gunpowder was invented in China in the 9th century. And while there's some suggestion for recipes for its use in war following that, cannons didn't show up in in Europe until the 13th century, and matchlock rifles don't come along for anyone until the 14th century. And barrel-loaded muskets were still the usual form up until 1870 - that's the 19th century! One thousand years, and they're still using flintlocks!

So, while we might say things aren't static, by no means does that say that things actually move quickly.