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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Leatherhead" data-source="post: 7530331" data-attributes="member: 53176">It's a holdover from previous editions of the Forgotten Realms, back when it was still largely written by Ed Greenwood. Supposedly, some time in the past, Mystra (the goddess of magic) rewrote the laws of physics so that Black Powder (What we call Gunpowder) wouldn't combust. Maybe this was to stop players from doing the cheesy thing where they "invent" gunpowder. Or maybe the inclusion of guns was just too much of a strain on the verisimilitude on the setting. Or perhaps it was due to guns having the potential to threaten the Magic-User supremacy that was rampant at the time. But either way, guns and bombs were effectively banned from the setting, even if you somehow managed to bring them over from a different world. And most of the D&D worlds don't have them to begin with,  including the setting that really should have guns: Eberron. (Though they still exist in Spelljammer!)But anyway, during the Time of Troubles (which was the first in a series of world-shaking events that happens to the FR setting every time the Edition changes), Gond (the god of gnomes and inventors) hid on the island nation of Lantan while things blew over. In return, he taught the Lantanese how to cheat the ban on gunpowder by making the "totally not gunpowder" alchemical equivalent known as Smokepowder. And even though Mystra didn't hack reality to make it fail this time (presumably because TSR wanted Spelljammer Players to have some way to use their guns in FR) the other mundane governments of the world looked at the stuff, realized it was a threat to their rule, and banned it at their level. While a legal ban wouldn't get rid of the stuff, it did effectively prevent it from falling into the hands of the common masses, where it would cause the most problems.TL;DR: It's literally just gunpowder but more rare and "alchemical" to prevent the common abuses of it.</blockquote>

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