"But Michael," I hear you croon, venom and phlegm dripping from the thousand-thousand teeth of your thousand mouths, "fantasy games shouldn't have guns in them. After all, it would be unrealistic, and ahistorical". False I name thee; Deceiver I name thee. Dueling pistols are older than dueling rapiers. Europeans had cannons before they had "plate armor". Shields were still in use when the first grenades were thrown from city ramparts upon besieging armies (I've been challenged on this point, and have softened my original claim of "shields were used against grenades" because of a lack of historical sources thereupon. Please see this painting for a depiction of the British Grenadiers fighting Highlanders equipped with targes, though sadly it doesn't depict the Highlanders being grenaded. If anyone has a source for a man with a shield getting blowed up with a grenade, I would be grateful if you left that in a comment). There could be nothing more historical than a Fighting-Man with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.
"But Michael," I hear you rasp, tomb-voice emerging from somewhere in your eyeless face, "guns are inappropriate for my fantasy D&D-alike because they are too lethal and overpowered". Counterfeiter! Liar! I know for a fact you aren't doing a Dwarf Fortress-style modeling of nerves and arteries and internal organs. I know you're rolling 1d6 for the damage of a one-handed sword. That a ball from a .70 caliber musket might cause a more terrible wound than a blow from a saber I'll grant you, but I deny that there's such a magnitude of difference that they can't be modeled in the same system. If you've got a troll that swings a 2d6 big-ass club, you can handle a handgonne.
"But Michael, but Michael..." you hiss, dying, melting in the light of my logic like that little monster dude at the end of that Christmas horror movie from the eighties, "I can't think of another objection. I'm so weak..." That's right. Weak and pitiable. Go back beyond the leaden gates, dissembler.
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| Source: Historically Accurate Gaston by Wickfield |
The one-handed firearm (a pistol, par exemple) is like a one-handed sword, except it deals double damage. If your one-handed sword deals 1d6, your pistol deals 2d6. A two-handed firearm (a musket, if you'll allow) is like a two-handed sword, except it deals double damage. If your &c deals 1d8, your &c &c 2d8. Muzzle-loaders cannot reasonably be reloaded during the close-quarters skirmishes common in D&D-alikes — for argument's sake, let's say it takes one minute (or ten 6-second rounds) to reload such a gun. A Fighting-Man with multiple attacks will need to wear a brace of pistols (which is a good idea for anyone, really). Most firearm-wielders have a bayonet to stick in their musket for the 2nd round of combat onwards, converting the weapon into a short spear.
Powder itself is a bit pricy, and not available in huge amounts in rural areas. Cities and markets where one can buy healing potions, lamp oil, mirrors and other high-quality goods are where you go to buy powder. You can also buy lead shot there, or you can buy a little mold and a bar of lead and simply cast your own balls over the campfire each night, which is practical and adventuresome. Don't need any complicated rules for it either. It's lead. You heat it up and it melts, it's not rocket science. "Hey DM, while the cleric is propitiating his god and the wizard is examining that goblin spellbook, I'll tend to my gear and prepare some more bullets."
A gun will blow open the lock of a chest or door, though this (obviously) makes a loud BANG! and will provoke a roll on the Wandering Monster Table. Firing guns in combat may provoke morale checks from wild animals, or attract intelligent creatures' allies from neighboring rooms, depending on the nature of the current dungeon. Normal people can't reload a gun while at a dead sprint away from 30–300 kobolds.
Smoothbore muzzle-loaders aren't as accurate as modern rifles, obviously, but they aren't totally hopeless. You can hit a man-sized target at twenty or thirty yards with a little training. Whatever rules you use for the ranges of your "shortbow" or other common, non-insane-specialist ranged weapons (not warbows or arbalests) will be fine.
And there you have it, my friends. That was every rule you need to add basic firearms to your game. To those of you for whom that satisfies: go with G_d. The post is now over.
But... what if, like me, you're a pervert? What if you want more rules? I've written down every Gygax-style rule I could think of in a few hours. Feel free to use or ignore as many of these as you want.
Fouling
Before the advent of modern propellants, guns were a messy business. The residue from early gunpowder (mostly soot and unburned powder) is called "fouling". The thick, chalky layers of this mildly corrosive fouling renders a gun less accurate, and if left on the metal will quickly (as in, over the course of hours in a humid environment, and no longer than a few days in any human-breathable environment) draw water which will permanently damage the barrel.
It's essential to clean and maintain your firearms. Properly cleaning a muzzle-loader might take as long as an hour, so most adventurers will want to leave that chore until they make camp at night. Every time a gun is fired between cleanings, it suffers a -1 penalty to further attacks made with it that day.
Lubrication or grease (this gentleman recommends two part lamb's tallow to one part beeswax, or if you're too cheap or lazy for that one part beeswax to one part olive oil, but absolutely never Crisco) keeps the fouling more "sludge and slime", less "carbonized substance on a grill", so it can more easily be swabbed out. Gunmen who take a little extra time in the loading can thus reduce or ignore the accuracy penalty.
Projectile
For most of history there wasn't really a distinct category of "shotgun". If you don't want to put one big lead ball in your muzzle-loader, you could put in a couple of smaller ones, or a lot of tiny ones in a little wad of paper, or some goodly rocks. A real, cast lead bullet, which the shooter has filed the lumps off of so it's almost round, is a piece of masterwork ammunition. Most people are assumed to be loading their guns with sand and twigs and bits of birdsnest.
In modern firearms, silver bullets are entirely the wrong density, and will tumble and keyhole badly. This isn't a concern with a round ball fired out of a smooth bore. Go ham with the silver bullets, I won't stop you. They cost about 2sp each (which is to say, if you melt down two silver coins you'll have one silver musket ball).
Propellant
Most historical firearms use a "black powder" (not called so at the time, I think, it was just "gunpowder" because it was the only one that was around) made out of six parts saltpeter, one part fine charcoal, and one part sulfur, or thereabouts. But this is a fantasy game, not historical fiction. We can use other propellants if we want. The most common alternative in my games is "red powder", a gritty crystalline alchemical substance which can ignite when wet, produces brilliant red light but no sound or visible smoke, and (being slightly less powerful) imposes a -2 penalty to damage. "How can it fire when wet? The ignition system of the gun is the same, so unless it's a dangerously reactive substance the water is still going to put out the spark or match. And how can an explosive be silent? And if red powder is less powerful, why don't people just load their guns with slightly more of it?" Shut the Hell up. Shut your fucking mouth.
Mechanism
So far, everything I have described has been assuming guns that use what is called a "flintlock" ignition mechanism. In such a mechanism, a spring-loaded hammer holds a piece of flint over a pan which contains a small amount of powder and has a tiny hole into the back of the barrel where the propellant and projectile sit. The pan has a steel cover, called a "frizzen", which keeps the priming charge from just... blowing away. When the trigger is pulled, the hammer falls, which strikes the flint against the frizzen, which both lifts the frizzen off the pan and strikes sparks, which ignite the small priming charge, which in turn ignites the propellant. Wikipedia has some cool gifs of this.
An immediate precursor to this is the "matchlock", where instead of all that complicated (and difficult to manufacture with hand-tools in a blacksmith's shop) business with a frizzen and a flint and what-have-you, your ignition system is a piece of slow-burning fuse. When the trigger is pulled, the spring-loaded hammer falls, which touches the "match" to the priming charge, which in turn ignites the propellant. This system is vulnerable to rain, or fog, or wind, or being jostled, or the gun coming into contact with the ground or someone's hand or a wall or something, or bad luck. Slow matches burn about an inch a minute, so you also have to worry about lighting it before the fighting starts, but not so long before the fighting starts that you burn all your fuse without a chance to fire your gun. Also, the ignition of the priming charge will sometimes blow out your match, so you need to keep both ends lit to re-light the business end, which doubles your burn rate... really, if guns weren't so effective, they'd be too much of a pain in the ass to use. The matchlock was more-or-less the default for about five hundred years of firearm development in most of the world. For a simple rule: keeping your matchlock combat-ready has a direct monetary cost. Let's say that an hour of slow match costs as much as an hour of lamp oil, just to have a number. More importantly, slow matches are immediately doused by any amount of water, and go out on a 2-in-6 when in the presence of strong wind, heavy mist, and any sort of magical blast of ghost bullshit. Real pain in the neck. And don't forget that, obviously, you cannot conceal a matchlock underneath your coat or in a boot.
The immediate successor to the flintlock was the "caplock", in which the touch-hole juts out of the gun and is capped with a little metal hat that contains some fulminant (a material that explodes when jostled), and the spring-loaded hammer strikes the cap, which &c &c &c. This has two enormous advantages: you don't need to worry about your stupid pan (if you've heard of "flash in the pan", that comes from pre-cap firearms when it would be possible for the priming charge to go off but not set the actual propellant off. Big disappointment. Also you're going to die now), and you... actually, every second reason I was going to give basically stems directly from that first one. Pans and ignition systems are so terrible, and caps are so much better. So much more reliable. So much faster to load. You can carry a caplock derringer in your purse, and the powder won't spill everywhere, and the match won't go out, and the stupid flint won't fall out. It's superior in every way. Buy yourself a capgun, my adventuresome friend.
Smoke
Go watch this video. It's less than seven minutes long, you attentionspanless zoomer fuck. Do you notice that, before a gun goes off, you can see the gun, and then after a gun goes off there's a giant impenetrable cloud of white smoke? Do you notice that by the end of the battle you can't see dogshit because the whole field is covered in a giant impenetrable cloud of white smoke? And all of this is happening in an open field in broad daylight Have you ever set off a firework in a 10' wide, 10' high stone corridor? How's the air circulation on Level 4 of Egregorius' Pit of Despair? "Not excellent," you say. I see. How about the lighting? "I've gone and set a stick on fire and am now holding it around the height of my belly-button in my wavering off-hand as I run," you say. Maybe you shouldn't have brought that firearm to this dungeon crawl.
Well, that's about all I have to say. Go read the gunman class, and check out G24 in the sidebar, and hit "like" and "subscribe", and wash your vegetables before you cook with them. You don't know where they've been. Goodnight.
Sir yes sir, off to add firearms to my game.
ReplyDeleteHell yeah. You tell 'em
ReplyDeleteLove firearms in fantasy. Great post!
ReplyDelete