How would a system work where there is early 20th century technology, bolt action rifles, airships, a few machineguns...

The moment you introduce guns into a setting, close combat in warfare is on its way out. Ranged weaponry is really good and guns are a fantastic crossover between ease of use, ease of production and destructive capabilities. People will just keep inventing and iterating because you always want a leg up over the competition.
By the time reach revolvers, bolt action and automatic guns, melee in war is dead and buried, unless you introduce some hard setting argument for it to be relevant. Secrecy and laws won't keep this stuff under control for very long, because it's just too damn good. Just look at nukes: They are idiotically destructive, insanely expensive to develop, create and maintain and very little practical purpose, because using one is tantamount to suicide. And yet so many countries have done so much to get them. Guns are way easier to get or make and serve a much more practical purpose. Once they exist to a very usable level, people will be head over heels for them.

One way is to make them forbidden or under the tightest control by an impartial arbitrator. That'd be a god, god-emperor or AI, because normal people wouldn't cut it. They have neither the reach, nor the tenacity to maintain such a ban and even if they did, within fifty years at most the entire organisation would be overturned or corrupted. This way, armies couldn't use them because the rulers and commanders would be held directly accountable by a higher power.

(cont.)

The second possibility is make them inherently less useful because of the combatants. If you have demons, robots or nephilim duking it out, guns are a shitton less useful. Guns are really damn good because they put a tiny hole into someone at a great distance and you don't need more than a tiny hole to incapacitate a human. If the combatants don't feel pain, are ridiculously robust to small injuries or are all around made up of magicstuff that doesn't care about shattered bones or ripped muscles, regular calibers aren't going to cut it.

Third way is to introduce some sort of defense that nullifies them and make that widespread and available enough to have an impact on warfare. They'd also need to be extremely robust and practically impervious to upscaled fire, because people would shure as shit try to just use bigger guns.

So basically, that's your options.

>airships

Shooting during a boarding action on a big bag of hydrogen is a very bad idea.

It could be helium or just hot air.

He said airships, not zeppelins.

Not if its full of life-saving helium!

>primers

Smokeless powder here, reminder that blackpoweder will gunk up your pretty, pretty semi-auto in short order, primers or not.

Nausicaä's setting had advanced forms of ceramic armour.

When large armies go to war, they use rifles and generally fight as you would expect in real life, but when adventurers (PCs) go on adventures they use swords and such.
This can be for any number of reasons, including but not limited to: guns being inefficient without massed firing, cramped dungeons not being conducive to firefights, monsters having weaknesses to "whatever", but not bullets, problems with logistics i.e. why carry all that gunpowder worth its weight in gold when it becomes useless as soon as it becomes a little wet, especially when a bow or magic will get the job done just as well and with less hassle/risk. Maybe some non-gun weapons are romanticised or have religious significance and people want to use them instead.
Pic related is a good (non-fantasy) example of how some people are just stuck in their ways and can't or won't change with the times.

>cramped dungeons not being conducive to firefights,

Didn't stop the Tunnel Rats in Vietnam

A hole in your balloon keeping your ship up, is a hole in your balloon keeping the ship up, regardless of the gas inside.

You could say that Salt Peter is very hard to find/reproduce. Without Salt Peter, you cannot make effective gunpowder as easily.

This is a pretty dope idea. Could extend into various other alchemical/modern medicine dolled out by the Church as blessings, indulgences, etc. to various nobels in exchange for tithes, crusades and such.

>The Blessings of Chemistry from the Tree Of Knowledge

Starts to sound too 'science/freedom vs religion' but it doesn't have to get that shallow.

As pointed out, Nausicaa had bulletproof ceramic armor that could only be reliably penetrated by swords of the same material. This basic principle- a defense that is mainly immune to guns but not close combat weapons- can be applied in a variety of different ways. Dune's energy shields, that stopped fast but not slow objects, for example. Just pick whichever variant feels right for your setting.

Rad more about how balloons work, a small butllet hole is not a problem.

It can literally be made from human waste/guano/manure.

You can refine potassium nitrate from urine. I'd have a much easier time believing that mercury is rare to the point where producing mercury fulminate on an industrial scale isn't cost effective.

Supressive fire, you can't effectively fight back when someone is shooting at you, small lighter guns don't exist due to precision machinery not being well developed so all guns are big, heavy and unyielding in close combat, the most commom tactic is supressing the enemy with heavy machinegun fire then sending more mobile melee units to flank and finish him off.

Maybe in this world guns are just kind of shit, and heroes and monsters can eat bullets for breakfast, while swords do more damage because reasons. That's how they do it in Final Fantasy, right?

Melee was common in WW1. In the trenches you didn't always have time to aim, so some German soldiers left their guns behind and just used grenades and shovels. The Brits were known to detach their bayonets and use them as swords, etc. Guns were fine when the enemy was running over no-man's land, but not when they reached your trench.

In Legends of Galactic Heores, they release an explosive gas that would ignite if a shot is fired. That causes them to take up melee.

Melee weapon are simply better than ranged options.
That's it.

Just make it into a shooter with some intense moments of close range combat. In that setting people do use guns more then swords. But the big different between the two is that the swords play in more memorable parts of the story. The first people she killed she used pretty much a crowbar to do it. The dual with the Princess, the kid getting his head cleaved, sword master being stuck in any enclosed space.

First for best girl.

She really was, I also liked mad-science emperor.

Check out Mythras/RuneQuest 6e. It's got rules for everything, and more than feels balanced. It's got a fair level of crunch though.

Nausicaa did nothing wrong!

Humanity deserved to die!

>[Archive] Burst of Knowledge
>[Branch] Blessings of Chemistry
>[Section] Fires Undoubted
>[Book] Powder Ignited
Now you have a labyrinthine path to find it in the church of Alchemy

This was kinda the case with early black powder.

A well made curass could deflect lead shot pretty easy but a full suit of armor is too encumbering nor reliable enough to make a big difference.

Bolt action rifles are much more powerful than that though. Unless materials somehow outran engineering and you have modern harden steel or composites vs century old guns.

>Unless materials somehow outran engineering and you have modern harden steel or composites vs century old guns.

A lot of fantasy settings have adamantium and mithril and titanite and whatnot...

Couldn't you just make bullets out of the ceramic?

That user got it wrong, I think. If I recall, all the blades were normal steel and what have you and they just used them like they did back in the day to punch through chinks in the armor, etc.

Oh, wait, maybe he was right.

Either way, if this was being adapted to a DIFFERENT setting you could just say what I said instead of having the same material be the counter to itself.

Rifles are long, slow-firing, and unwieldy within the confines of the trenches.

As such, melee weapons and personal armor make a comeback.

If that's a bolt action rifle then the artist has no idea how bolt action works

>early 20 century tech
>abundant use of swords and melee weapons
So the early 20th century

>early 20th century technology, bolt action rifles, airships, a few machineguns
>extesive use of swords and melee weapons
Trench raiding is an art

>Metal bullets deform when fired/hit.
>Ceramic bullets shatter.

Could take a quasi-exalted/FF8 route - anyone willing can bind some sort of turbo-fuck-you-spirit-tech to themselves and suffer huge penalties, but in exchange are tough as all get out for as long as they happen to live - so not long. Or have it slowly hollow their brains out. Still able to be taken down by sufficient numbers of 'normal' soldiers, but not easily.

>A pile of bullshit the OP had pretty clearly already considered as he was asking for ways to work with the shit you outlined.
Great contribution!

You could say that the alchemists used up all the easily accessible mercury early on in this world's history, trying to make the Philosopher's Stone. What little remains is either still undiscovered, or jealously guarded by mage guilds who need it for certain high-level enchantments.

I don't see anything immediately wrong with it, could be a single-shot bolt breech loader, rather than a bolt gun

Mercury being hoarded and monopolized by alchemists is a pretty good explanation of why supplies are limited if you want a slightly more fantastical reason for it's unavailability. It also has the real world tie in of mercury being used in the extraction of gold from it's ore. You could have alchemists controlling nearly the entire supply in order to keep their process of "transmuting" gold from stone secret.

So long as you hold that the alchemists aren't good enough to discover other primary explosives that could substitute for mercury fulminate.

The problem with the concept of advancing technology, then freezing it at a certain point/saturation level, is that it requires you to say that people stopped trying to overcome the technical problems, which is always going to leave holes for some 'clever' player to try and adjust to their own liking.

I would say that eventually they would discover the more advanced primary explosives but that could easily be placed outside of the scope of the game in the setting or maybe be a key component of it.

The issue there is that it requires bullet technology to come to a standstill, while they improve gunpowder and weapon design enough to have machine guns (as per OP's request). How do they develop something even as simple as a Vickers gun without having the bullets to fire it? If you say that they just recently ran out of primary explosive, then you raise questions about why everyone knows how to use swords, and why no one has come up with some sort of substitute to use with all these guns lying around. At best, they would regress to muskets using their secondary explosive before going back to sword and board (muskets leaving an opening for some melee, but not for it to be dominant).

>how would a system work where there is early 20th century technology, bolt action rifles, airships, a few machineguns, but there is also extesive use of swords and melee weapons?
>something similar to that is nausicaa valley of the wind and all the empires and warfare

Like WW1 where this was literally the case and the last war where officers swords and bayonets weren't just for show

You mean the war that proved the supremacy of firearms over melee, and even in trench warfare sidearms and bayonets were used more commonly than dedicated melee weapons (when people could even make it through the hail of bullets that murdered a thousand people trying to cross 50 meters)?

They still had the garden. While it most obviously preserved art, it had to have a lot of advanced technology stored there too. The guardian could fix people dying form radiation sickness, fix their lung to alow them to breathe purified air and maintan a cadre of advanced heedras. It probably didn’t have blueprients for god warriors, but the theory behind them was surely there.

Humanity was fine.

I've thought a lot, and honestly I think an underhyped approach, given that this is fantastical, you can change the fucking universe if you need to to the correct parameters.

Lets say it's a setting where all life uses ethanol based bodily fluids, and thus doesn't experience hydrostatic shock. There's still human looking people etc, with the same organs, but if a human from our universe chemically analysed them they would notice they are completely different. Correspondingly, guns are only useful to take a small chunk out of your opponent, which might be a part of them that they need real bad (Take them out if you hit them directly in the heart, really annoying if you take off a finger or a piece of their brain or something), but bullets doesn't shred their insides as the round tumbles through them. They'll bleed, but they'll bleed like if they got stabbed with a pencil, not with the ridiculous internal injuries (and exaggerated exit wounds) bullets inflict people IRL.

Fundamentally, a bullet wound ceases to be disabling by default now, bullets are mainly useful for softening up infantry before the melee charge where troops are actually capable of killing each other. In antiquity, flaming arrows were the only man-portable weapon anyone came up with that could reliably kill an enemy soldier greater than a half dozen paces away, and the modern successors in the form of the flamethrower and
incendiary shotgun are exactly as expensive, unreliable, and frowned upon by international convention. So everyone empties their magazines into each other, then takes out an axe or a sword and tries to hack and cleave through each other because it's the only efficient way to kill anything in the setting.

Machine gun can be a very board term, I assumed he wanted something along the lines of the Gatling or Agar gun and they'd be reserved for airship armament where the huge cost would yield equally large benefits. If he wants Maxim guns and swords that's simply not going to happen with any kind of coherent logic behind it outside of things like boarding parties and trench fighting. I also assumed that muskets would be alright considering he names bolt action rifles as possibly existing.

The musket thing was more that once guns are widespread, it's very difficult to go back to 'some guns but not many', and that it's very difficult to have advanced guns without having widespread guns.

I'm aware.

This isn't going to work out perfectly because it's an inherently nonsensical idea trying to be made at least somewhat plausible. The only real solutions are try and explain to a degree why a key technology doesn't exist while others do or just resort to magic which throws any kind of internal logic right out the window 99% of the time. The best you're going to do with the first one in this case is make firearms much less effective then they otherwise would have been relatively to the rest of the technology of the setting.

Too removed from civilication. I don't think they were programmed to take proactive role and without visitors it just sorta is while the rest if the world cleanses itself. I have more hopes of a random mutation to produce post-post apocalyptic humans.

The cynical way is just build the combat system to support what you want. It just does.

Another thought would be to just say that gunpowder doesn't exist. No one thought of it,or it just doesn't work. Instead some other substance works 'like' gunpowder. But this is difficult to make and/or has other qualities that simply make single shot musket the only option.

The option I went with was magic. Magic exists, but not everyone has access. One of the most common types of magic is defensive magics. Think ballistic body armor, but magic and super effective.

However, just as common is offensive (talking purely item stuff here) that cuts through the above magical protection.

The catch is that for something to be enchanted it has to be large enough to have decent size magic writing on it. So a sword is a 'yes' and a bullet is a 'no'.

Basically you end up with Special forces types having both of the above and lesser troops having a mix - most having none.

You carry swords etc that are enchanted for when you run in to the upper tier fighters - or monsters that work the same way.

>early 20th century
WWI.
>swords have to be effective
Still relatively easy. Late WWI cavalry tactics. Suppress the enemy with horse artillery and machine guns, then strike in three waves, each in a loose line formation, the last giving them cold steel with appropriate shock weaponry (ie swords).
>and no horses
Magic. The ability to move fast across machine gun induced no man's land or to protect against machine guns.

>could be a single-shot bolt breech loader, rather than a bolt gun
You are just stringing gun sounding words together without any idea on what they mean, aren't you.

Woah now son, that's for the planet to decide.

The manga was pretty refreshing for how Nausicaa ends up subverting her messiah role.

There were some early/mid 19th century bolt action rifles that lacked magazines, like the Dreyse needle gun. Similar to a Martini-Henry in terms of being single shot, but operated by a bolt action instead of a falling block action.

Humanity still has a chance, through Mutation, ingenuity, or salvaging the secondary sites like the Gardens they may find a way to survive without submitting to an uncaring electronic god.

Sup

First one was only good one though.

A few ways.
>trench warfare
>cost and rarity of firearms
>bureaucracy that makes use of firearms prohibited unless given special clearance

If you're really gonna go with that idea, then the printing press better not be a thing yet in the setting.

Magic shields (forcefield style or analog) or armor. That's pretty much all you need. Makes it so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to damage people at significant range.

Adamantine mesh reinforcing armor.
Gun kata experts dodging bullets.
Force fields.
Typical targets that don't care about a few bullet holes but are seriously disabled if you vibrosaw their limbs off.
Advanced fighting makes melee super effective in some situations.
Fast flying people are hard to shoot.
Teleport behind you.
Gunfire attracts demons

Like the Civil War, Spanish American War, and World War I.

You could go the Dark Sun route and have firearms (like magic and the Sorcerer Kings) be heavily controlled by a select few elite groups, very rarely being possessed by anyone outside of the nobility/dynasty/militant royalty.

Seems like the obvious way out, as has been said many times in this thread already, is to have a world where the chemical components necessary to make gunpowder are for whatever reason very difficult to come by, or something like that. Guns would still exist because technologically the society is on that level and guns are too useful not to make, but due to resource constraints they'd be few and far between.

Imo this seems more plausible than the "armour/shields that can stop bullets but somehow can't stop swords" route, assuming you want to keep things relatively grounded and not introduce a ton of magic or out-there technology.

And it's definitely way, way more plausible than firearms being widely distributed (in reach if not in number) while the method of making them is simultaneously kept secret. Guns are way too useful for people to just go along with mystical gun-monks or whatever being the only people who can produce them; every ambitious noble and general who gets his hands on one is going to do whatever he can to reverse-engineer it and start making his own.

Modern armies still train melee combat. Do they carry around swords? No, but bayonets and combat knives/axes are a thing.

This is like "missiles make machine guns obsolete on fighters" thinking again.

>Trench raiding is an art

Sun Tzu said that

Played in a water-world like setting once (with some islands, but they were small).

In such a world, even if the technology exists, mining the materials (both iron and coal) is hard, and distribution/resupply is even harder.

Of course, since it was a swashbuckling sea adventure, I just replaced it with a different exploding alchemical compound gel extracted from type of algae.

my go-to setting for a while has been to have humans have no weakpoints, being made of clay at their creation event only a few hundred years ago, they're still held together by their souls.

This has no effect on most normal gameplay, it just makes headshots and slit throats non-lethal, serves as in-universe HP and makes melee perpetually useful as large cuts are more effective than tiny holes or even fist sized holes.

Simple. A super metal thats hard to forge into bullets (impossible really) exists. Most swords and weaponry is made out of it, since the armor made from it is neigh impenetrable.

Its costly though so the avarage shlub is still gonna boot around in cloth and leather trying to kill other shlub. All with their sidearm if they meet an invicible rich cunt in armor.

God the setting turned to shit after 1.

I wonder if Ohmu, or rather descentants of proper Ohmu, left unatended by the crypt woudl eventually develop geniune civilization with politics, art, currency, socieal classes etc...

The end result is that you are pretty much inevitably going to have a setting that is just kind of nonsense.

You end up in a position where you either have an inexplicable situation or are forced to explain things either with "hurr magic", scarcity scenarios that have other wide reaching consequences outside of what you specifically want or have people acting as if they have subhuman levels of intelligence.

I didn't do any of that in basic. But then again I was a 13b.

>since the armor made from it is neigh impenetrable.

Then unless you go for fucking lightsabers it won't matter what you make your melee weapons out of, because a mere mortal won't be strong enough to push a sword through that armour, even if the sword itself would be fine with it.

Ceramic wouldn't be dense enough. Why do you think we make bullets out of lead?

Yes its badically a lightsaber that can cut trough a force field. It perfectly fits OPs idea than any other idea in this thread.

>implying a mortal is strong enough to push a sword through real well made plate armour to begin with

If I remember correctly, materials science and armor technology in Nausicaa was just about good enough that full plate had a chance of deflecting a bullet. In the film they refer to the armor the knights wear as being "Zirconium-Ceramic", which could mean that the armor is made of the same material as ceramic inserts in bulletproof vests. Lord Yupa wields Ohmu-Shell blades which can slice through it "like paper", indicating they it's an even stronger material which could potentially be used for armor.

I haven't finished the Manga so I can't talk about that as much, but if I remember correctly the world also had creatures in it like Heedra which were basically immune to bullets

Pic unrelated

Actually now that I think about it, in the Manga Lord Yupa wears Ohmu shell gauntlets, which can stop pretty much anything.

>Armor has advanced more than weapon technology for *fantasy/magic reason*, something melee weapons have an easier time getting past, so it's a trade-off

>People with melee weapons can *teleport behind u* or *zantadsu* bullets in half or something else that will give people the vapors

>Ranged weapons have enough drawbacks in reloading and/or aiming that if you don't make your shots count and aren't in an open field melee can get in range

>Guns and/or their ammo is just kind of rare so only people with money and/or from a specific group have easy access to them

Anyone else notice the similarities between Nausicaa's setting and Morrowind?

Ashlands and Blight are the Sea of Corruption only about to be inhabited by Ashlanders/Wormhandlers who are seen as barbarians by everyone else.

Large oppressive Theocratic society built on a lie which tries to stamp out heretics who still believe in an older faith.

Everything comes down do a giant death mech built by the ancients/Dwemer.

Weird bug armor.

>Weird bug armor.
I'm fucking sold.

Like this dude says, post-apocalypse

>SHTF-event
>Humanity reduced to few survivors
>Knowledge opreserved for some
>Too little people to rebuild modern infrastructure
>Small scale operations instead
>Lingering aftereffects of the event and human birthrates prohibit rapid human restoration