Firearms in medieval fantasy settings

It blows my mind that during the 14th century medieval cities had guards with firearms. It's also strange that during the 15th century when plate armour design reached it's peak was also the time firearms became more common.

I think it's because as we grow up we never see medieval people with firearms in movies, documentaries, video games, books and even history textbooks for schools never or almost never mention it.

Only a peasant would use mundane firearms. Nobility would have enchanted firearms primed with superior alchemical powders and fired using trigger activated runes.

AFAIK the two things are related. Chainmail apparently (yes, I know the term is itself an anachronism) works like a hot damn against slashy and pokey, particularly if well padded. Less well against a screaming ball of hot lead.

problem is those guns were match lit and you maybe got a couple of shots off before something happened and you couldn't use it for a while. Also powder storage was in it's infancy. Not to mention metallurgy and this was during the era of the manor system still.
While cities could have guards with guns, it was rare in other places.
the matchlock muskets of the mid 1500s killed the knight, not the wall mounted handcannons

Changes in economy, society and military tactics killed the knight. Guns just waddled in afterwards to sign the paper.

I'm down with it.

I think its pretty rad personally. However, most people don't like medieval medieval fantasy, and don't mean it when they say medieval fantasy. They mean Gygaxian fantasy and firearms are something of a poor fit There

Mine has them. Mostly handgunners used to guard governmental buildings and fortresses in the border provinces. They're not generally useful outside of those situations.

Except for the Southern city states, they do weird stuff.

Mandatory for me.

...

Gygaxian fantasy is based more on Conan books than medieval Europe.

Rarely done properly.
Ultimately the drift towards firearms was made due to the simplicity of production and due to the dwindling supply of yew and other woods from which bows could be fashioned from.

With no great war looming in the horizon, even if the power of firearms was recognised, firearms aren't so much a force multiplier as much as a force equalizer and as such, they're nowhere near an I-WIN button that certain people seem to think they are.

Mass Levies paired with firearms on the other hand however are terrifying and ultimately what changed the face of warfare.
When normally under feudal rule each family gives a single son to the military service in at the lord's pleasure, the guy that takes all the menfolk of the nation fit to fight into war and hands each of them a musket finds himself in a situation where he has possibly even 10 times as many men.

>Guns just waddled in afterwards to sign the paper.

Untrue, guns had been big for generations before knights started to leave.

I don't think he denies that I just he is just saying they weren't the sole killer of the knight or the most influential.

I enjoy them. Then again most of my settings temd to have a renaissance bend to them.

Real muskets didn't show up until didn't show up until late 16th. Knights and pikemen remained the staple of combat till well in the 17th

>It's also strange that during the 15th century when plate armour design reached it's peak was also the time firearms became more common.
Early firearms had trouble piercing plates from a distance. It is what led to the creation of the muskets
>major, the enemy is using heavier armors than our guns can Pierce and they're too far away !
>well just get heavier guns that can shoot farther you idiots !

>What do you think about that?
Dwarves only. They are the engineers of the world.

Humans too busy fighting each other / fighting orcs / gnolls / goblins / elves / dragons to develop technology past the Dark Ages.

The issue is that guns are shit weapons for medieval adventurers. They only really work well for guards and soldiers.

D&D books should add early guns to the possibilities for militias though.

What about the more clever Orcs, Gnomes, Artificer Elves, Dragons, and so on?

If anything, rifling would be an Elvish invention while Dwarves invent the cartridge.

Do we like it yet?

You know what words like "logistics" and "food" mean?
Mass levies were never a thing until the modern times.

Highly inaccurate so you will need to compensate with massed fire

I think you should fuck off to /k/

/k/ doesn't know shit about history. Its just American Culture Gun Club, with lite 20th century history.

/k/ is a magical place

Besides, /k/ isn't this particular brand of stupid to post this crap. They're mostly GURPS players anywhere.

Honestly at this point it's more of a subversion for a medieval setting to not have gunpowder.

>medieval fantasy

>isolationist ultra hardcore traditional curmudgeons with a boner for craftsmanship and manual labor are the engineers of the world
>humans constantly being at war retards their technological progress
Tonight, on Opposite World.

That's more due to everything non-magical automatically being shit in d&d. Adventurers would find petards and portable artillery extremely useful if a level 3 wizard didn't make both superfluous.

>takes 2 rounds to reload
>same chance to blow up as to crit
>kills mages tho

Just laying a hand on a firearm gives wizards a severe headache. Being shot with one, instant loss of concentration.

Just laying a hand on a firearm would give my wizard a raging hardon. And when he has a hardon, he likes to make sure everyone in range knows.

Any technological contraption tends to randomly break down in presence of a wizard, while causing great feedback. Wizards of particularly great power can hardly approach a wagon without getting a toothache or axle breaking. A gun, a crafted suit of armor, any kind of automation that doesn't involve sticking demons inside little boxes or enslaving elemental spirits tends to do worse.

According to your shit setting, you mean.

Actually muskets had problems with piercing plate too.

In ye olde dayeths, if you wanted a guy in plate dead, you used a small caliber cannon.

By that logic, every wizard in the world should immediately die because magic is disrupting the thousands of sensitive physiological processes that keep him alive.

Arcanum had good ideas but the basic premise was retarded as hell.

Also, I imagine wizards would love guns.

>so alchemist, this thing shoots lead balls right?
>that is correct
>you mind if i take some of those handgonnes from you for experimentation?
>be my guest

The next day:
>i blew up all but this handgonne, but now it shoots screaming burning skulls straight from hell

Life is created by gods, it's not technological.

I've been wanting to run, for quite a while, X-Crusade, a campaign where mercenaries in the 1400s are hired by a baron to deal with all the demonic and/or fae abductions that are seriously wrecking his barony.

His brother, a scholar who went insane and is essentially kept under house arrest at all times knee deep in books and telescopes, is the only man capable of seeing these things for what they are, and functions as your science officer.

Basically, a campaign about using small pike, shield and shot formations (Tier 0 firearms being stuff like Handgunners, at exhorbitant cost you can import some early matchlocks, research provides other shit) to kill ayy lmaos, and racing after low flying UFOs in horsedrawn carriages with Ballistae on top to try and down them.

I think firearms are good if you can keep them at a sufficient level of shittiness that there's still a reason to use other weapons on more than half your dudes.

I love powder fantasy. To keep things balanced I generally make sure to include a large amount of specialty arrows to give bows/crossbows versatility compared to raw damage. I then make the guns much less practical specifically in an adventuring context. They're heavy, you have to carry powder, shot, ball, cleaning supplies especially if it jams, and a lit match in a container on your waist. Much more stuff to worry about (especially with encumbrance).

So guns see limited use in a player character's life, outside of maybe a fancy new high tech wheel lock pistol to open fights with.

...

The hell is this?

GM Juggler Ideon MK-TTGL?

>same chance to blow up as to crit
That's literally retarded. Quite possibly the most retarded misunderstanding everyone seems to have about old guns.

They only rarely blew up if they were poorly made and over charged with powder. They misfired and could jam up very frequently though, and a jam is perfectly acceptable for tabletop crit fails because it would basically render the gun useless until after the fight was over, considering you need to literally bore a screw into the lead ball and yank it out with a special stick.

Check your organic privilege fleshfag

What's the point where you start having explosion danger?

Obviously in the alchemy lab, and in the gunpowder storage. But when does a cannon get big enough to become an explosive danger?

Even small cannons can blow up if you over fill them, likewise if they're poorly made. Getting a barrel that could hold together the stresses of a powder charge was one of the first major hurdles in firearms development.

Alright, where's the point where something stops being 'created by gods' and becomes 'technological'.

So George the elven handgonner won't lose his hands if he fucks up, but Billy the ogre handcannoneer will lose his hands if he fucks up?

Ask your local clergy. Wizards are like children, mucking with things they don't understand and can't hope to control. Pelor be with you.

Ye olde blacksmith definitely knows how to make an industrial quality cannon barrel with no structural flaws. The gunpowder is always expertly made to a nationally enforced standard, and the end user always carefully pours in the correct amount even while ducking from orc arrows.

Yeah, I bet all the different religions are going to agree on something that you can't even define properly, and that's before bringing the druids into the story. Now, since I've never caused steel plows to explode or got sick from being in proximity of cured leather, ima just assume it's all bullshit and go build a great weapon for my favorite gang of ruffians.

Being an atheist is a Chaotic Evil act. Prepare to be smitten, fiend.

>he doesn't know that all the gods are just projections from the far realm

You fool, you'll doom all our souls!

They did well enough IRL that we stuck to firearms at the expense of everything else.

Do you randomly break your players other non explicitly poor craftsmanship weapons all of the time as well?
George is a terrible elven name but yes pretty much. I personally prefer making overcharging a mechanic. Turns jams into explosions, but you get some bonus damage out of the risk.

That said most ye olde firegun accidents occurred while loading, if there's still an ember in a barrel as you go to load that gun you might lose a hand, or potentially launch your ramrod quite the distance.

There is only one true God, his temple is the foundry, his will is the hand that shapes steel, and his ire is canister shot fired into a tightly packed formation. Build a big cannon TODAY! That would please him much.

>enter dungeon
>feel like an icy hand touches your back
>there's a load of ramrods stuck in the ceiling

I think I just found out a new way of implying a magical trap that fumbles your rolls.

>Actually muskets had problems with piercing plate too.
Not in 1602 and at less than 50m they didn't.
T. Genevan

Munition plate doesn't really count.

>most of the plate used doesn't really count

Really?

Munition plate was never designed to be bulletproof as far as I know.

Therefore, it makes no sense to discuss munition plate when you're talking about plate that can handle a few bullets.

>blacksmith
Why would anyone buy a gun from a village tool maker and not a professional armorer or gunsmith?
>The gunpowder is always expertly made
Are you implying you can fuck up powder to the point of it being so good you accidentally overcharge as opposed to that being a leading cause of jams?
>user always carefully pours in the correct amount
There are tools for measuring powder charges for one, for two generally I expect people to be able to pour less than twice the amount they need in under pressure, just like the overwhelming majority of significantly less trained not player character soldiers had to for centuries.

>implying the hands of gunsmiths aren't guided by His cubic holiness
>implying firearms aren't His divine creation

Ave Nex Alea

Neither were most armors at the time. A bulletproofed helmet in 1602 weighs 16 kg alone ffs

I highly doubt that.

Also, that's of no importance in a fantasy game, since a wizard can just take a 30 kg helmet and make it weigh jackshit by enchanting it.

On a side note, why the fuck are fantasy armours always such bullshit.

>oh this breastplate decreases all magical and elemental damage by X!

A truly useful fantasy armour would be something like a tournament plate suit enchanted to move like water, be as light as feathers, allowing sight and sound to travel freely to the user, and with magical air conditioning.

>feels like i'm wearing nothing at all!

Firearms work pretty well when you're besieged. You have cover to reload in, and the enemy will have to come to you, were the gun packs quite a punch. As a result, they spread quickly with town militias in the 15th century.

Then as a king or some such goes to war, he starts hiring mercenaries, preferably those with some sort of training already. Many of those will be ex-milita, and thus he gets gunners. Choosing what kind of troops he wanted was a luxury many didn't have, the landsknechts for example were create largely so the Emperor could get some decent pikemen.

>Munition plate was never designed to be bulletproof as far as I know.

I don't know how common it'd be, but "never" we can scratch at least. The Swedish army's cavalry breastplates in the late 17th century were bullet proofed, tested with the standard infantry musket at twenty paces.

As for muskets vs plate in general, it's definitely one of those "depends" questions. Some plate is thicker than others, material type and quality differ, the angle of impact makes a big difference, gunpowder could be of varying quality, and so on.

So we're rather shuffling probabilities here than absolutes. More and better armour will increase your survivability, but it won't render you invulnerable, and it'll come at a cost in both coin and encumbrance. Meanwhile a more powerful gun will increase the chance of penetration, but it won't just sail straight through everythign at any range.

>encumbrance
That really shouldn't be a problem in a "realistic" fantasy scenario though.

What he said.

The point with the gunpowder is probably less that one batch gets extra powerful, and rather that at some point sin history gunpowder tended to be very fast spoiling, leading to a highly uneven quality when it reached the user. If you then fail to test it properly or otherwise mix things up you could end up using an amount suitable for a very poor powder (a few days old) with freshly ground powder and oh dear... Making matters worse the gunpowder for much of the 15th century was very quick burning, meaning very high peak pressures and an overall interesting life for gunners.

Barrels around this time may also be made much like, well, barrels. Longitudinal iron staves and bands around, all forged welded together. Now forge welding was a very widely used and mastered technique, but even so, having the weld introduces the possibility of a bad weld, and that's not what we want when trying to squeeze maximum performance out of an uneven-quality, fast burning* powder in a cannon. A number of them were also breech-loaded, adding even more potential failure points.

Moving on to decently cleaned out saltpetre, controlled-graining powder, and cast muzzle loading bronze barrels should have helped a lot.

*my spell checker wanted Brunei here.

>That really shouldn't be a problem in a "realistic" fantasy scenario though.

For as much as the "needing a crane to get the knight onto his horse" and such is bullshit, armour encumbrance wasn't a non-issue in reality, especially as we get to the heavy cuirassier suits that you need if you want plentiful protection against firearms. At that point you may be looking at something perhaps twice the weight of a "knightly" harness. Far from everyone appears to have thought the extra mass to fend off close-range bullets worth the bother, and as such while the maximum thickness found in armour increases in the firearms period, lighter armours continue to be made.

Eventually of course, in the second half of the 17th century by and large I think, we see a great drop-off in armour use as most people stopped finding it worth the bother at all. That kind of battlefield environment might not be what we're looking at for a fantasy setting though.

>Eventually of course, in the second half of the 17th century by and large I think, we see a great drop-off in armour use as most people stopped finding it worth the bother at all. That kind of battlefield environment might not be what we're looking at for a fantasy setting though.
That's the point where the kind of "high value" commander/knight/noble leaves the front lines and moves to the back right?

And neither bows nor crossbows function well in the rain, with bows especially having a shelf life. Yet neither of these things factor into any rpg as far as I'm aware. Why should guns be treated differently?

Can you dry wet gunpowder?

Will drying unfuck the damage to a bow/crossbow?

yes

It's pretty hard to both command and fight, and as such I suspect many medieval commanders would stay back as default as well. This isn't Dynasty Warriors.

If we look at the 17th century, that definitely seems to be the default, but at the same time battles can be chaotic, and either situation demands something else, or the front lines will come and find you. With basically every officer on Gustav II Adolf's flank dead at Lützen he had to run in and take personal command there, and that killed him as well. At Lund Karl XI had his forces split in two, and as the infantry needed their morale bolstered he ended up speeding right through the entire Danish army with just 3-5 bodyguards (accounts differ) to go show them he was alive.

The strict lead form the front/"hide at the back" split seems to me like a more modern idea, and one that may come less form historical research and more form the class conflicts of the last century or two.

In sieges yes it it works very well. Especially since the firearms in the 15th were more like handcannons. No matter how cumbersome the weapon it is almost negated in a siege

4.5 rounds a minute is what a marksman can achieve, but it is by no means easy in the 1300's. The labor of matchlock and wheel lock arms puts a severe damper on fire rates. You're also leaving out setup and the margin for error being things like your fucking match going out or an issue in priming, or accidentally setting something on fire.

Chainmail makes the whole situation worse since you have a hot ball of lead going straight through and carrying broken links into the wound along with it. Didn't stop people from using it all the way up into the mid 1600s.

>Yet neither of these things factor into any rpg as far as I'm aware
How does it feel playing in such a shitty setting?

>setting
are you acoustic

>are you acoustic

QED

>which shatter on impact without doing much damage
>because stupid wizards can't into physics

I am someone else though.

Are you fucking retarded?

It was the reason why Napoleon became so fearsome.
The fact that he simply had such a ridiculously high quantity of men.

True, logistics do factor much into whether or not you are able to wage a campaign in anywhere but the immediate vincinity.

video games do not improve the density or hardness of bone

So you are in fact retarded, on top of being an underaged uncultured newfag.

>but now it shoots screaming burning skulls straight from hell
>straight from hell
I don't think hell obeys the laws of physics user

they would obey once they enter our world though