Guns in Fantasy

Just limit it to black powder circa 1500-1600s. Matchlock arquebus and unwieldy bronze or iron cannons are the name of the game. Flintlocks, wheel locks and other advanced firing mechanisms are both rare and incredibly expensive, and repeating firearms are limited to volley guns with multiple barrels and a whole host of issues namely: being fucking heavy.

Guns are a touch unreliable, but hit like the heaviest of crossbows, at longer ranges, but also reload as slowly as the heaviest of crossbows.

I have an unyielding boner for Napoleonic fantasy, so it's preferred.

>I feel like they kind of take away the "mystique" of most fantasy settings
You better get some better fantasy settings then dawg. Like one with them written in already.

Guns work well if you don't make them game-enders for the setting; usually meaning they should be balanced against your magic system or have something to them to make them impractical.

I really like IKRPG use of guns; keeping paper cartridges dry is important for the low cost arms and the cash you can end up pissing away makes iron casings and making your own ammo important.

Handcannons as dragonslayer weapon?

Would it work?

What killed the knights was the humble pike, not the gun.

What's the mechanical difference between "thing that propels 9 mm pellets at a semi-automatic rate via magical force" and a conventional pistol? The only think stopping a Wand of Magic Missile from replacing the bow and pike as the standard weapon is the fact that it's a pain in the arse to recharge them.

Civil War Cannon=/=Medieval Bombards. What allows modern artillery to destroy fortifications in the first place are explosive shells which were pioneered around the point the Civil War began to pick up. In fact, what caused castles to decline was not their lack of ability to defend against modern artillery; castles were used heavily in the closing stages of World War II as readily available fortifications by all sides who could afford them and have done their jobs defending against occupiers beyond expectation - it's the fact that it is no longer economical to build castles versus the amount of protection they bring and the effort it takes to destroy them.

It was also not being retarded when it comes to infantry. You had spears when cavalry dominated in europe.

>guns in fantasy
Aww yeah. Gimme that.

Armour did not lose the arm race until pretty much the 18th century. Besides that, it became uneconomical to arm everybody with armour as armies grow bigger and bigger.

>unless your setting takes place in Rome

Ah yes, the old "throw a basket of snakes at em" corollary.

>tfw gunslinger in pathfinder is presented as "hella ep1c wild west cowboy who don't need no man :^)" and not just rugged frontiersmen/adventurer/mercenary.

Realistically? No.

Do I care? No, now bring on the cannon gauntlets!!!

I prefer guns in my fantasy.
If you're running DnD style pseudo-medieval fantasy, you can easily have your PCs using better guns than the matchlock muskets the infantry are humping around. Wheellocks and early flintlocks were around pretty early, even primitive breechloaders, they were just made to order and hella expensive.

If you get up around the industrial revolution, that's even better. Everyone and their grandma is running about with guns by now.

Westerns? Why not throw some shamans and demons in there to spice it up?

Modern times? Go Harry Potter all up in this bitch. And then give Harry a gun.

>especially since guns can easily snowball into more modern-day rapid firing beasts

Not unless you let it. There's a reason rapid-firing guns didn't come around for a long time. It wasn't until the advent of metallic cartridges that anyone could make a gun which could fire quickly reliably. If you're limiting it to matchlocks, wheellocks and snaplocks, no one is going to be making an AK-47.

Now the question is, in a fantasy setting, how do you make firearms scale with the PC? What kind of enchantments and such can one slap on a musket to make it a musket +2?

Since many people made their own bullets, I say the ability to improve making and handling bullets should be a factor. Bullets with less tolerance would be more precise but more difficult to load and more prone to jam the gun. Also, you have to get the right amount of gunpowder etc. After that it is becoming quicker with reloading and aiming.

I'm running a fantasy game with approximately Revolutionary War-era tech, so most armies feature troops with firearms. The forge-god of the setting lays a curse on anyone who attempts to advance the tech past that point.

In all honesty, I've got a very high fantasy post-apocalyptic game-world, which is sort of Faerun's Age of Magic meets Eberron meets Fallout. I'm still trying to work out if it makes sense that the pre-apocalypse world might have magitek equivalents of laser cannons and heat rays and shit, since they created warforged as soldier-slaves.

>Low-fantasy
Heck no. Low-fantasy should say low-fantasy for a reason. Get your dumb ass out of here.

>High-fantasy
Still don't really like it. I mean, are we talking Final Fantasy stuff here, in which case, I don't like or play those style settings at all? Or are we talking WoW and Magic: The Gathering? At which point, they're just giant, unconcentrated messes that pile on whatever trinket they need to appeal to as much of a fanbase as humanly possible?

Guns belong in settings where they actually matter. Late-medieval era fantasies where magic dragons and beasts of old are quickly vanishing midst an onslaught of human armies who've discovered terrible weapons that spit thunder and shatter stone, or early-renaissance to late-newworld settings where men march in formation of pike and shot, or when the rangers of old are transformed into frontiersmen of the new, replacing their legendary bows and arrows with the tremendously powerful pistol and musket.

Guns should not be some exotic oddity in a setting where magical swords cut trees in half and people with wands make mincemeat of giants. Guns should be a very real and dangerous thing. People should whisper about "weapons from the East that'd a hole through a knigh in full, shining armor", and in a couple hundred years, the most powerful nations would have a dozen or two cannons, and a hundred or so muskets. And in a hundred or so years from then? Muskets and rifles should replace the old analogues of the pas warrior. Fighters should be analogous with duelists and cowboy mercenaries, knights should be soldiers and trained guardsmen, rangers should be sharpshooters, or mountainmen of the land, wizards should be those who experiment with explosives and dynamite and the sort, and rogues should be quick-witted pickpockets, with a spring-loaded derringer hiding up their sleeves and launching themselves into his left hand.

THAT'S how you run a gun game.

Except that's not her backstory at all, what the fuck are you on about nigga

>should
>should
>should
>should
Yeah, well, that's just like, your opinion, man

Castles were king in an era where feudalism was the system of government. You built castles as a means to control the surrounding land - you could man it with men, and mass armies there if outright war was needed.

In more modern times, there was less need for castles to control land, since professional armies became more common. If you did need fortifications, those changed as well - instead of the square-shapes with high walls of castles, there was a more star-like pattern - for overlapping fields of fire - and the walls were shorter and thicker to stand up to bombardment, since height was no longer really an issue.

>Low-fantasy should say low-fantasy for a reason.

Aside from that, what's all this bullshit about guns being new, feared, exotic weapons that are instantly phasing everything else out? It's like you haven't looked at how guns became widespread at all or what social changes made them more viable and valuable, and are thinking a bad analog for real history makes for a great setting.

>I feel like they kind of take away the "mystique" of most fantasy settings and much prefer magic take the place of anything requiring gunpowder, especially since guns can easily snowball into more modern-day rapid firing beasts.
I audibly groaned.

Tell me OP, of all the anachronistic technologies that exist and have existed for centuries in your typical stagnant tech level medieval fantasy setting, why is it suddenly guns that change everything?

The key art conflicts with the lore, then.

In low fantasy? Hell no. IRL guns existed beside plate for centuries.

I think guns are grossly under-represented. Warhammer Fantasy is one that I can recall with gunpowder weapons.
I feel that they get a bad rep and that people tend to look at them by comparing them to their contemporary parts and not looking at them through the context of their time. People tend to make a big deal of the flaws but wave away any disadvantages other ranged weapons at the time had.

Anyways it irks me to see full gothic plate, Maximilien armor, halberds, etc in a setting but not gunpowder weapons which at the time period those things came about warfare had evolved into pike & shot and guns were a big part of that. The iconic full plate armor is a younger invention than guns, that's how distorted the middle ages are for most people.

My setting is semi-low fantasy where guns basically fill the roll that magic users would fill. It can work if you're clever with their implementation.

>If you're limiting it to matchlocks, wheellocks and snaplocks, no one is going to be making an AK-47

Mind you, there are such a thing as a semi-sorta bolt action muskets, using a fancy system with multiple pre-loaded chamber, which your players could eventually get, but those were hellishly expensive.

Also, you very well could allow them to make massive leaps to get an AK-47, but they then have to figure out where to get high-grade steel en mass, how to figure out the cartridge production, how to find financing for the factory, etc. and eventually they will just give up.

They didn't just exist alongside each other, advancements in plate armor happened SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE of guns.

We wouldn't have what D&D and PF call "full plate" without firearms.

Don't lecture me on history, you rancid swine. I KNOW about guns and how they came to be. I also know, for a FACT, guns actually were "feared" weapons on the battlefield and that though they did not "phase" everything out, they DID present new dynamics to a largely evolving era of warfare. Also, realize that I never once mentioned that guns "phased" anything out in the way that you implied me to say. I DID mention cannons that "spit thunder and shatter stone" and how that lead to the unstoppable march of human progress or some shit, because, "yes", when an army had their hands on a cannon, castles tended to get BTFO, which meant the army could then go unimpeded to conquer large swaths of land with a smaller force that could not usually do what they had just done.

I ALSO understand that as armies found the need for more and more riflemen (to combat the pike-length arms race), people began to commission for rifles on their own accord, leading to the "normalization" of rifles in the modern sense of it.

As for rogues and knights and wizards suddenly transforming into gunslingers and grenadiers and whatevs? So what? It's not "realistic" by any standard, but it fits a narrative we're all familiar with.

I meant Low-fantasy as in "pre-gunpowder grittiness" ala Game of Thrones, not "historically accurate, 14th century through 21st century analogue"

At that point they'll have an arsenal of magic equipment that'll outclass any firearm short of a tank cannon, so it's a fucking non-issue.

Yeah, I was thinking about those weird bolt-action muskets when I wrote that. They're expensive, sure, but PCs typically make money and then dump it right back into adventuring things, so I could see a PC commissioning something like that.

Would you happen to know exactly how expensive one of those would be? I'm kind of curious.

And yeah, there is just too much tech between musket and AK-47. High-grade steel, cartridges and primers, clean smokeless powder, etc.

A lot of the problem comes from the trend among renaissance-era artists to depict historical scenes with the people dressed in contemporary clothing and armor. Like, here's Jesus getting tortured by a fucking Conquistador.

While examples with such dramatic anachronism are obvious to the viewer, when you're looking at only a couple hundred years difference between the historical events and the style of the people's armor, the anachronism often goes undetected and leads to an erroneous view of what the Middle Ages looked like.

I usually portray guns as just a flavor choice over a crossbow. I use pathfinder and make them hit against regular AC but with a bonus depending on the firearm.

I also usually limit it to things like flintlock pistols and very rarely muskets. Also ammo has to be crafted and can never be bought.

I'll have you know plowing my Trireme into another is great fun. Not to mention fire pots, Greek fire, onagers, and ballista. So many options aside from snakes.

This.

Given all the other equipment abstraction that goes on in D&D/PF, there is zero reason what so ever that early guns can't just be crossbows that go bang instead of twang.

Eh.

I think you're misremembering some small things. While plate armor may have evolved to combat the newer introduction of guns such as the arquebus and the rifle, full plate simply existed as it did before then as well. There are great many reports of fully plated knights who commissioned such an armor for either ceremonial purposes (which are the "full" plate suits you often see in museums and stuff), and ones which were used for war, in which case a cavalry charge was an excellent opportunity to wear a fully-covering suit of armor.

Armor DID advance in stride due to the introduction of firearms, but for much of the majority of the armor's existence, their design often catered to the use of field jousting, battle on the field, and of course, knight-on-knight combat, which necessitated closed, hard-to-hit joints, reliable metal working, and deep pockets.

It is a period of great, technological wonder in the world of Landnameia. A new object, two or three entire lengths long, shaped straight on the outside with a hollow passage inside, closed out at the end. Mysterious powder provides for a loud, powerful explosion, and a swift strike which destroys its target surely.

We had procured these intriguing devices from the shrewd traders that had offered them to us. The most common intruders to our lands, however, are still the numerous orcs and their mighty, towering, grey beasts. How could one such "gun" prevail against such a vast horde? Hakpipi, the greatest archer among us, had counted twenty-three greenskins and their demonic mounts until the vile vermin had routed, and nine more as he pelted them with arrows on horseback.

Yes, but I've heard rumor Hakpipi sucks the long weewee

And then there's the cyclopi. Those fearsome beasts, human in all but amount of musculature and eyes, have mastered the crossbow. Their massive strength makes them naturals at drawing these powerful beasts. A human needs numerous tools to draw a cyclopian crossbow from the Odysai period; today, cyclops draw regular human ballistas for use in their warfare. Their bolts go far, and surely destroy whichever target they choose. The cyclops, each trained in the art of war since birth, have the complex mechanisms ingrained in their minds; they were bred to draw crossbows, just as we are born with a foot in the stirrup.

But Corak the Wise says not to discard guns. He mentions something about great wars ahead and threats that none of us have ever suspected. Tales exist of a wise man, who, not content with the design, is now seeking an improvement that will change the ways forever. Locals mentioned murmurs of something called a "repeater". It is said he now travels with a number of odd folk from all parts of human civilization, all of them eager to funnel their ill-gained gold into the project and, promised new, better guns, attempt to carve out a new era of domination.

Make gunpowder more common but worse than magic. Like in real life you can train a bunch of random people to shoot a gun but a wizard can blow them all up pretty easy

>Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
>roll gunsmith
>painstakingly learn new recipes and face constant threat of guns jamming and having shitty damage
>finally get your best gun schematic and it's a mediocre end-game weapon
>tech leaning characters can't use any magic so you miss out on good boosts
>at least you have grenades
meanwhile magicians
>level 1 spell Harm wins everything
>shitloads of utility

guns have no place in high fantasy

You have no place among rational thinking people.

Thematically, I like guns and more modern technology in fantasy as a sort of sign that the days of magic and mysticism are coming to an end. They're the tools of the rising, increasingly industrial powers of the world to fight against the more ancient and magical kingdoms.

Mechanically, I don't think anyone has done them right yet (aside from just as reskinned bows or crossbows) but then again they haven't done crossbows right either (they should be slower, more powerful bows but for some reason aren't) so I'm not really surprised.

>Runelock pistol instead of flintlock
>The lock just has a rune printed on it that triggers a magical explosion
>Upkeep involves less involved cleaning but a consistent re-drawing of the rune

I always preferred gunslinging to be an alchemist's forte.

Just run this.

Simple. There is no medieval stasis. The humans are happily living in enlightenment times, just discovering the wonders of liberalism, nationalism and separatism quickly putting their whole armories full of toys to good use.

I mean, whats so boring about it? Pike&shot armies are still thre, swords are still used, cavalry is still a huge thing and so on. It snot like there was nothing fun or interesting happening during the IRL timeframe between the fall of Constantinople and the Crimean War that could be stolen for modern-ish settings. There is more to fantasy games than endless tolkien rehashing. I'm fucking SICK of the constant medieval themes full of modern conveniences but autists blowing a gasket if some arquebus barely able to hit something 20 yards away appears.

Thats the reason guns should be nothing special in magical fantasy settings. Its just alchemy.

Bows and Crossbows are more reliable tho. And they are just as killy.

I think what most people forget is that swords remained in serious use for as late as WORLD WAR II. Poland, while not so brash as to actually charge tanks with lancers, markedly still had such men in active service - as did China, Mongolia and Thailand. Guns can exist in a setting for over half a millennia, long enough that artifact guns could be made and forgotten, and there would still be ample room for knights, fighters, barbarians, and wizards; political climate permitting, of course.

Why? Because of magic? I see no reason why not. Depending on how common magic is there is no reason why an alchemist couldn't develop gunpowder and see its potential. You still have people who aren't proficient in magic.
And if magic is common enough than what is the points of weapons? Why not just be naked and hurl fireballs at each other.

Didn't a Gurkha get a sword kill in Afghanistan as recently as a few years ago?

For me, the End / obsolescence of magic is the thing that turns me off of guns in fantasy. Guns can have their place, but not to the extent that no one would ever consider becoming a mage because real life tech gives better rewards for much less effort.

Its the same thing that makes me not want to really consider the military in super hero settings, because if the purpose of the campaign is playing heroes stoping the invasion of not-Darkseid, its not entertaining that there is nothing we can do that the US military could not do much better and nothing not-Darkseid's powers could do to let him personally stand against the modern military machine.

I don't understand - I thought that magic, for a lot of people, was a problem in RPGs. Being able to limit it or make it less effective with a level of technology seems like a good solution.

>For me, the End / obsolescence of magic is the thing that turns me off of guns in fantasy. Guns can have their place, but not to the extent that no one would ever consider becoming a mage because real life tech gives better rewards for much less effort.
What makes you think this is in any way a thing?

Those that tend to dislike guns, love magic.

makes archer characters pointless

The super hero vs. military you speak of underscores the conflict between martials and casters; it becomes clear really quickly that your average fighter is as hopelessly obsolete in a conventional D&D setting as he would be in a contemporary setting, and the only reason he's still around is due to cultural intertia-in universe and setting conventions out of it.

Replace "super hero" with wizard, and "military" with fighter (which is more or less what the two are archtypes of going as far back as chainmail), and you can see why people want to throw the military/martials a bone, because fuck you I want to play Captain America, and for Captain America to be a thing there needs to be a super soldier program coming from: you guessed it, the military.

One thing to readily note is that one thing that super heroes have that militaries don't is a lack of red tape; bureaucracy always makes a readily available excuse to neuter the military from making offensive actions, and it's Marvel's goto descriptor for why their force of flying aircraft carriers and thousands of Iron Man suits aren't necessarily as effective as just Iron Man, and why they can't help him, or the other heroes too often.

Magic is not the be all, end all thing of fantasy.

No it doesn't.

You'll find the two existed alongside eachother for a very, very long time.

Seriously why does everyone think guns just appeared one day as and everything suddenly switched to napoleonic tactics over night, then suddenly machineguns the next day?

Cause thats what american schools teach about history.

It goes Rome-Knights-independence war-(maybe)Napoleon-WW2 there

Yes. Archers completely vanished off the face of the Earth the moment the Chinese invented the first boomstick.

In fact, it would be especially foolish to think that crossbows would still exist in China itself!

well there is an alternate last step, where you solve everything with magic
bullets? magic shield
bombs? see above
disease? magical medicine

Magic muskets make me moist.

Magical medicine is bog standard in virtually every setting, which is why you need magical plagues in order for disease to even be a threat.

Still no cure for cancer, tho.

crossbows and catapults already provide strong ranged attacks, as long as you don't go full modern guns shouldn't be very different other than different resource requirements

Overuse of magic as handwaving is the 100% sure hallmark of shitty writing. A DM should be hyped as fuck about making this world work, eager to tell about small details and minutae about how things interconnect in the setting. "i dunno lol magic" is just a sign youre playing video game on paper.

I think 30 Years War tech is perfect for fantasy. You get guns, but pikes are still in regular use and most everyone has a sword. Allows for swashbuckling swordplay and a bit of gun-fighting fun times.

Pretty much the entirety of the 1600s. But I have a raging nerd-on for pirates, so I'm super biased in that regard.

The best medieval setting is the one where cannons have just started seeing use in war and the personal firearm is still in the development stages. It even gives you time for a generation of characters after that as whatever firearms have been developed can still have difficulty getting through plate.

My main gripe with blackpowder or gunpowder is once players get their hands on a barrel of it, it becomes the tool to solve everything no matter how bad of an idea it is. Though I have noticed players skip over firearms because they are expensive and generally have bad stats or tend to explode.

Guns improved because of discoveries in material and chemical sciences, along with Europeans wanting to kill eachother faster. Semi and automatic firearms only really became a thing after smokeless powder was able to kept from exploding itself. Blackpowder would gum up the internals of any semi or auto firearm real quick. Really just make sure an industrial revolution never happens or have fractious continentals in a setting and you should be fine.

Swordmans, pikeman and the like weren't made obsolete by muskets. What made them obsolete what a much simpler invention that made them redundant...

I liked how it was in Emperor of Thorns. There's only one gun in it, the main character finds it in an old world ruin, and it has Colt lettered into the side. He doesn't know why, it's not like it looks like a horse, and sometimes it jams, but it can drop an armoured knight in one shot.

I have them but my setting is Wuxia as fuck so dodging and deflecting bullets is absolutely possible. Usually guns are for mooks or incredibly specialized fighters. Many consider them a cowards weapon.

Warhammer fantasy roleplay handles it well, most people would go with a bow or crossbow over a firearm unless they were dedicated to using it.

Guns are neat. Guns + Magic is awesome. Usually OP as hell but awesome.

That screecap makes me fucking annoyed.
What a worthless goddamn GM.

Why use guns when you can use TOADS?

Why?

I mean, both the original item and the use of it seem sensible. Can't help the GM being a touch angry - it takes effort to rebalance all encounters for sporadic cannon fire.

>living ammunition

I like it.

>48-shooter
>Goddamn 48-shot percussion cap double-revolver
I'm gonna blow my hand off when I missfire, but goddamn this is gonna be fun. Stupid as shit, but fun.

This would be even better if the "clever" player was thwarted by the GM knowing conservation of momentum

Not ammo. The weapons themselves. Breed them, care for them, feed them specialized foods, seek out rare varieties or extremely slutty dragons...

Yeah because we all know for sure what happens to momentum conservation if we violate mass conservation, right?
Also, IRL breech-loading weapons became actually viable and mass-produced only in XIX century. Now I don't know on what time period that fantasy was based, but loading might have been a wee bit difficult. Oh, and if the ring projeted a radial area of effect, the bullet would revert to normal size before passing through it, so the first cannonball would take gun and ring with itself.
Fuck smartass munchkins

Yeah, but what would that acomplish? Telling your player "you're smart and you came up with a cunning idea but I refuse to reward you" isn't very sensible.

And if you want to complain about conservation of momentum in a setting with anti-magic rings, just have the missing momentum come from the cancelled shrinking spell.

Not him, but
1) Flintlocks are typically muzzle loaders, he wouldn't have been able to load the gun with the magic ammo unless he took the ring off it every time he reloaded.

2) The cannon balls would expand while still in the end of the barrel, destroying the gun and probably the ring.

3) They'd likely lose all momentum after expanding anyway.

Are you okay?
Why do you have such a hatred for interesting things?