Is there any possible way to make a late medieval equivalent generic-fantasy setting with a plausible reason for gunpowder simply not existing?
>Bonus points: It's not that it hasn't been discovered, but due to some constraining factor even if it were it could not be produced or manufactured
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After getting absolutely rekt by ten dumbasses with guns and a whole magic academy full of dead kids, the Magic Guild cast a world Enchantment that prevents gunpowder from combusting.
Fuck the laws of physics.
gunpowder was invented exactly once, in china
the equivalent of a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters accidentally making shakespear
a world without gunpowder would have been quite likely
The laws of physics are slightly different, meaning that gunpowder doesn't combust.
Magic exists. Gunpowder hasn't been invented because the only ones that have such an interest into such fields are also the same sort that tend to find magic interesting, and they've learned magical ways to make burning sand.
I feel like that would have massive butterfly-effect implications.
The fantasy stuff would have much bigger implications. Introducing magic into a system fucks it up a lot more than a little powder not exploding when lit on fire.
Why would you care if gunpowder exists or not?
Someone a few months back did a breakdown of the various ways gunpowder could be explodiarily-intert and the chemical and biological implications of each. He seemed to know his shit. I dont think any of them allowed for humanity to survive.
Sometimes its nice to have a setting with no gunpowder weapons.
There's a really long way from gunpowder to guns.
Make up a system of chemical elements that is different from our own. For example, have a system where Oxygen does not exist, and combustion is the result of the release of phlogiston. There could be an upper limit on the amount of phlogiston that can be concentrated in a substance, and also a limit on the rate at which phlogiston is released from a substance. Furthermore, the propulsion of a projectile depends on the creation of a gas as a product of combustion. If phlogiston does not occupy space or exert pressure on solid matter, than there would be nothing to push upon the bullet.
Simple, gunpowder was just simply never exported to europe from china, that or the recipe for gun power was lost in the ~700 years before it was used in guns.
It's not a long way from gunpowder to bombs, petards and cannon.
My preference for this sort of thing is to have wild magic possess a tendency to ignite things that explode like gunpowder. Making it so that gunpowder and other explosives can totally exist, but are way to dangerous to make use of, as either making or storing it comes with a risk of it going off at any time.
Can someone find this?
There's not a long way from waking up alone in the wilderness to interstellar spaceflight either, assuming you know it can be done, how to do it, and get enough people to help you accomplish it. Point is, you don't know how to make bombs, petards, and cannon just by virtue of gunpowder existing, and you won't necessarily get people to help you make it even if you do. You can even have people actively undermining your efforts to do so. The ancients could've kicked off the industrial revolution two thousand years ago but ignored the nascent steam engine entirely in favour of other ways to accomplish what it was designed to do. It's not implausible to have a setting where none of this happens without you needing to introduce the lazy reason that there's just no gunpowder.
It just hasn't been discovered, or if it has it hasn't been popularised in your part of the world.
It's really that simple.
The world is incredibly wet. It's always raining, if not downright up ending swimming pools, and gunpowder never took off because it always failed to ignite due to the ambient humidity.
Simple, the air is carbon dioxide, your creatures breathe carbon dioxide. We're done.
It was never discovered.
No-one ever bothered, because magic already covers the role of blowing stuff up and crossbows already cover the role of peasants stronk.
Ancient wizard consortium changed chemistry so that making gunpowder requires a secret ingredient. This ingredient should either be impossible to make with current means, or making it triggers copyright enforcement golems.
GREETINGS CITIZEN
So it's not impossible, but you have to find an ancient recipe or get lucky, and then kill the wizard DMCA.
Simple. Due to the fact that magic exists and by extension, alchemy, the combination of charcoal, sulfur and potassium nitrate leads to a reaction that's several orders of magnitude more violent than normal black powder.
This makes it only suitable for explosives, since contemporary metallurgy doesn't allow for anything strong enough to use it in a controlled manner.
Here's two reasons:
>The formula is different in this timeline
The chemical makeup of what would come to be called "gunpowder" is slightly different in this universe, and the true discovery of it would not occur until the mid 20th century. This world will experience its industrial revolution and retain its castles and standing armies due to this.
>It exists, but is too expensive and can't be mass-produced.
One of the reasons that gunpowder changed the world, was that only strong nation-states (like Louis XIV's France) could afford it on a massive scale. Sure, it could be made up to be used in early bronze cannons, and it would make castles obsolete, but in this timeline, it's even MORE expensive to do so, making even a small detachment of cannoneers far too expensive for any but the wealthiest of monarchs. And due to internecine fighting, feudal Europe never consolidated into states powerful enough to afford standing armies with muskets. Until certain industrial techniques came along, gunpowder would remain a novelty.
Because it's expensive and not extraordinarily useful when you can have your army mages cast a bravery spell on your troops so the flash and roar doesn't affect them.
the bourgeoisie magic users that run society secretly/not so secretly due to their insane military advantage intentionally suppress weapon technology like guns so the proletariat doesn't have any chance to overpower them
Gunpowder exists, it's super rare. The cult who know how to make it don't understand it. They protect it religiously. Attempts to make fire arms always results in people's thumbs being blown off because metallurgy isn't up to scratch.
Lack of niter so gunpowder manufacturing is too costly.
There's his problem. He assumes minor changes to physics instead of massive ones. What if the world is a Platonist-Hermetic universe where everything is emanations of the Forms and all reality is composed of Substance and Form based on the Theory of Four Elements?
Under a completely novel reality which only superficially resembles ours on the surface level, you can say whatever you want in terms of how it works and what technologies are possible or known of.
Religious people (mostly everyone) think it's witchcraft and will drown you for it
The setting is underwater.
Laughingspongebobcampfire.jpg
I read a book series lately where a powerful archmage, seeing gunpowder and firearms as a threat to magical supremacy, cast a spell making it impossible for anyone else to figure out how to use them. The spell makes everyone in the world finds the idea of guns inherently ridiculous.
The recipe for Gunpowder technically works, it just is the alchemical mixture for creating a fire elemental instead.
Since its alchemy, and not magic, you don't actually have any control over the resulting elemental. Thankfully, such artificial elementals tend to burn themselves out pretty quickly.
It makes for a handy distraction, but its sort of worthless for all of the traditional uses of Gunpowder.
The world's been in technological stasis for 30,000 years, boy. No gunpowder is only the tip of the iceberg.
They figured out how to make reliable Air Guns instead.
Because God fucking said so it's that simple. Whenever someone invents guns he's summoned to Heaven, where God either wipes his memory or disintegrates his ass.
>I am a big fagbabby who cannot handle guns in my setting
Kys.
Smart people learn magic.
Rokugan has this simply by way of it being taboo in samurai culture. It was used at a couple points in the past, but it's banned by Imperial decree last I knew, and it's one of those decrees that people more or less actually seem to be observing.
This.
M A G I C
"Fuck you, God / a wizard / aliens did it, so there" is always a good answer in a fantasy setting.
If you're going to get hung up on this tiny detail and not the rest of the fantasy magic bullshit, then you're too autistic to play
I have a really hard time not making my characters just an up-jumped commoner complete with things like newly-awoken powers or just an extensive (usually recent) training regimen
>tfw no campaign where i've had the chance to shoot someone with a girardoni air rifle
Here;s the easiest one that doesn't fuck physics or resort to !MAGIC!
There's bacteria in the soil that eats or breaks down salt-peter (core ingredient of black powder), therefore it never accumulates, and Chinese (or whoever) alchemists never mix it with charcoal and sulphur. It's literally impossible to produce because it's always eaten.
And also no niter deposits.
Sulphur is extremely rare. Or saltpeter. Whichever.
Just because some special snowflakes can use magic doesn't meant it will stop the normies from wanting ways to blow shit up too.
I swear that all this "HOW TO STOP MUH GUNS IN FANTASY!?" comes about people people think that guns MUST equal things near modern day, or at least late muskets. No. Guns existed since medieval, they just sucked. They were really loud crossbows with a really REALLY long reload time, that were expensive to produce.
Good for the scare value of those booms but they weren't battlefield dominating. That took a long time to come about due to the fact that it took forever for guns to not suck. Previous to that, they were very niche. Put guns in your fantasy world. They'll basically suck, because they should.
Good ol' biology comes to save the day once again.
You'd kind of have to pull out how this bacteria is getting nutrition from potassium nitrate which as far as I know is pretty damn hard to extract energy from.
I think it's also important to note that in high fantasy it's generally less important to arm masses of peasants with guns because a lot of games with high powerlevels, or at least clearly fantastical ones, will have 'heroes' mowing through five digits of normalfags in full plate without even running out of breath and even noble knights can eat dozens alive.
If magic exist in your world... what would that gunpowder DOES exist, however, everytime it combusts, the energy it releases is so strong that it kill ''magic particules'' around it?
In other words, the use of gun powder destroys the magic around? I think it would be fun to see who's going all on magic and who's going in on gunpowder.
A Wizard would have Wished all the gunpowder in the world away long ago
No one has the idea to put it inside metal tubes. As doing so would be offense to the god of fire.
Any player who tries to do that vanishes in flame mysteriously
due to magical bullshit, nobody poops, so you can't obtain saltpeter.
Oh but that is easy.
Magic bacteria.
>Simple. Due to the fact that magic exists and by extension, alchemy, the combination of charcoal, sulfur and potassium nitrate leads to a reaction that's several orders of magnitude more violent than normal black powder.
>This makes it only suitable for explosives, since contemporary metallurgy doesn't allow for anything strong enough to use it in a controlled manner.
i like this
Why wouldn't you want gunpowder in your late medieval setting?
Don't you want to feel the triumph of reducing what was once the greatest fortification in the world into one big pile of rubble?
Let the old ways burn and a new King of Battle be crowned: The field artillery.
That... actually is really good. I like it, and will use it I ever have need of such a solution.
It doesn't work. Airguns are still a thing.
en.wikipedia.org
A bomb is just an enclosed device where explosive can combust and thereby explode
Any player knows to put gunpowder in a barrel and attach a fuse
>en.wikipedia.org
1779 is hardly the late medieval, buddy.
They also post-date the gun by literal centuries, and without the invention of the gun to begin with, it is unlikely they would exist at all.
The idea posited above is more of a delay than exclusion; with access to bigger, better explosions right from the get go, the call for smaller, focused explosions would take longer to catch hold (especially with more reliable, immediately accessible magical solutions), and the advance of metallurgy would be similarly neglected along that axis.
Gunpowder absolutely exists, it's just used differently. Guns will still exist, they'll just take longer, and they'll probably be invented by deeply unstable people, or potentially (depending on the setting) by a religious order, which is its own unique setting arc with SCADS of interesting possibilities.
Who do you think occupies the social role that philosophers and alchemists occupied in our medieval period? In a fantasy setting, it's going to be wizards. They're going to be the ones who flock to eccentric but wealthy patrons, who show up in court disheveled but holy shit you would not BELIEVE where this hole in reality I just made is connected. The existence of reliable magic drastically alters everything, and the general advance of technology is one of the things it would cripple the most.
In case it wasn't clear, the implication here is not that 'technology wouldn't exist because wizards', it is 'technology would primarily be advanced by wizards', and that would change EVERYTHING.
I also am getting sick of it. I've come to believe GM's are just idiots or otherwise autistic if the clockwork regularity of these threads is to be believed.
There are enough ways to balance guns and traditional magic. Or just combine them after a fashion, aka the gunpowder snorting 'powder mage"
>if you want a medieval setting without guns you're engaging in bad wrong fun and have autism and need to stop
squeeze the cheese baby
they only use it for fireworks.
Done, next question.
>but hurr durr why not just shoot fireworks at people.
Beyond the inherent dangers of something so uncontrollable and stupid, fireworks wouldn't necessarily fill any roll that a spell couldn't. A lesser mage with a low level lightning bolt or fireball spell would be more efficient and safer.
> but what about people who aren't mages, durr muh gunz.
Then maybe in your setting some geniuses did try to use fireworks. And lost a hand, or an eye, or an arm. By describing the horrific injuries you can get from something so untested and dangerous, you can steer people away from that.
After all, people use Guns rather than Fireworks when fighting modern wars. Remove the gun and replace it with magic, and there's your fucking answer you god damn /k/unt
It also eats Sulphur and charcoal to make gunpowder it's main source of energy.
If nobody poops, where does the bullshit come from?
Forgotten Realms does this.
Gods made the world without sulphur.
>that were expensive to produce.
In the 15th century they are to have been reliably cheaper than crossbows. For much of the 14th century though gunpowder was quite expensive, as prior to the nitre bed production getting started the saltpetre had to be mined, and the nearest mines were in India.
>which as far as I know is pretty damn hard to extract energy from.
It's widely used as fertilizer, so it's certainly not hard to use it as nutrients at least. It's also very easy to get energy out of it, which is a big part of why you use it in gunpowder, but I'll admit that I don't know how easy it would be for a biological process to use it for that purpose without accidentally exploding. I'd guess not very, but it isn't something I've ever looked into.
Partially this. There's also the fact that if your character can survive getting run through with a sword several times a week, there's no reason he couldn't survive getting shot in the same way.
If I smash a mace into your skull, your odds of survival are probably lower than if I shoot you with a standard handgun.
>gunpowder exists but has to be imported due to lack of ideal raw materials where the story takes place
Lack of sulfur or lack of soft woods would easily explain this.
>low-quality powders can be made but don't perform like the "imported stuff"
Folks in the area might be able to make gun powder from the hardwoods, or might have found a substitute for sulfur, but the powders burn quickly and cooler than the "imported stuff" and so can't be used in projectiles effectively. However they can be used as a burning agent or raw ingredient in potions.
>imports have become scarce due to issues with the supply chain
Foreign conflict is a great source of disruption to supplies.
When conjuring fire at a specific location is a low-level incantation that apprentices use to practice with, you probably don't want any amount of combustible material near you let alone in your weaponry.
The development of guns of some variety would be inevitable given the availability of resources, as would some form of industrial revolution. The principal danger of guns in fantasy isn't that guns are so much more powerful than swords and bows (early guns sure as shit weren't), but that the masses will get their hands on cheap and easy means of violence and self-sufficiency and that the whole romantic idea of kings, nobility, unexplored wilderness, etc. is in danger of dying off. There's a reason why crossbows were essentially banned by the Pope.
There'd be plenty of reasons for gunpowder to simply be banned or covered up, either by the crown or by the wizard's guilds, especially if they sat around and thought through the implications of widely-available gunpowder. To cover the inevitable demand, there'd be a substitute invented by alchemists that works just the same, but is deliberately expensive and requires some exotic magic-produced ingredient. Gunpowder would still technically be available, but not in the quantities for cannons, firearms, artillery or anything other than simple blasting charges to really have been developed.
A setting with air rifles but no actually gunpowder would be interested.
Combat would be a range. But apart from that society would still be mainly mediaeval feudal. You would still have castles (no cannons, you simply can't scale them up) and Knights (air guns would would cost a fortune and need a high degree of training).
I fucking hate mass reply posters
Limit it to 4 or under you waste