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I hear a lot of people complaining that guns just don't belong in a fantasy setting, and frankly this has always annoyed me. So, I'd like to share my views on it, and hear some of your thoughts as well.
Be warned; this post will be neither structured nor focused. I'm writing this as I think about it, so it's not a structured essay.
A common argument I hear is that guns are "imbalancing." This is the idea that, somehow, being shot through the heart with a crossbow bolt and being shot through the head with a bullet somehow differ in ways aside from how much of a mess it's going to make. Regardless of your position, I think we can all agree that the end result is typically the same: death. A bullet graze really isn't that different from being grazed with an arrow, and a punctured organ is a punctured organ regardless of cause. Also, some people point out that it's imbalancing to have a weapon that anyone can just pick up and shoot someone with. To this, I answer that that is precisely why crossbows were popular weapons in real life and why they are covered under simple weapon proficiency in-game; anyone can pick a crossbow up and shoot someone with it. So, I fail to understand why anyone would call a gun imbalancing.
I find that, for naval vessels, catapults and ballistae fail to excite. They don't evoke the same "coolness" of a galleon bristling with cannons, and well, a catapult on a ship which relies on complex rigging is just begging for something to go horribly wrong and makes no sense whatsoever from an engineering standpoint. What this has to do with my main point is simple: Where there are cannons, there are small arms. I've heard the argument of "Well, they just never made guns strong enough to not explode when fired." To this, I must also call shenanigans, because the setting includes magic. It you can't make the metal strong enough, it will most certainly be strong enough once the wizard gets through with it. Also, adamantine.
At this point, some may concede and say that alright, flintlock weapons are allowed. My counter to this is that flintlocks cannot be used as a primary weapon. This is because flintlocks need to be reloaded after every shot. You might say that well, you can always carry multiple of them. My counter to that is to ask just how many attacks one makes in the average fight. With the amount of time it takes to reload a flintlock (down to a move action at best, even with rapid reload), you simply cannot put out enough damage per shot to justify not being an archer and using the Manyshot feat, especially since no matter what, a character armed with flintlocks can only make one attack per flintlock before needing to reload. A flintlock user will be out-damaged by an archer every time, as the archer gets their full amount of attacks per round, plus those granted by feats. As a backup weapon, they're barely justifiable due to the cost of ammunition and the fact that there's always the possibility of it exploding. A flintlock weapon is essentially a bad crossbow with a hand grenade taped to it.
I've put a lot of thought into this. You may have noticed.
My opinion (and I stress, this is my opinion, and I am not trying to force anything) is that, in a fantasy setting, certain old-west-style firearms fit in perfectly. First off, the single-action revolver. Six-shot, closed frame, single-action weapons like the 1861 Navy and the legendary Colt Single-Action Army. As each bullet has to be loaded individually and each spent shell ejected individually (revolvers with a swing-open cylinder are ridiculously advanced for a fantasy setting, but most people think ALL revolvers are swing-open), reloading the full six shots on such a revolver takes two move actions, each reloading three bullets. Rapid Reload would reduce this to one standard action. Second, on the matter of shotguns... Double-barrel break-actions mostly, but if you want to get fancy, something like the Winchester 1887 lever-action rifle would fit quite nicely; for a -4 to hit, you could wield it one-handed (this is the shotgun used by the T800 in Terminator 2). Now, I should make special mention of shotgun damage. The only place I've seen it done well is in SpyCraft. To represent a shotgun's close-range firepower, shotguns deal multiple dice in damage (in this system, a 12-gauge buckshot shell deads 5d4; the buckshot part is important because this is what we're assuming the ammunition used is), but the shotgun has a relatively short range increment, and loses one dice of damage per range increment. Another point is that, as anyone who has has actually used shotguns will tell you, the spread is actually much too narrow (on non-ridiculously sawed-off shotguns) to hit more than one target. This is something everyone gets wrong, save for the people over at Crafty Games who are actually very good about these sorts of details. The lever-action rifle should reload similarly to the revolver, I think. Moving on to rifles, I propose five-shot bolt-action weapons just as the well-known Mauser Kar98k. I chose bolt-action pretty much exclusively because I like the style of working the bolt. I think it's cool.
With this said, I am looking forward to the Ultimate Combat with mixed anticipation and dread. I was woefully underwhelmed by the gimmicky gunslinger class and the disappointing firearms rules (see "bad crossbow w/ hand grenade" comment above), but at the very least we'll have airships and vehicle combat rules.