| FrankManic |
I just started a Skull and Shackles campaign and had a player ask about firearms. I hadn't really thought about it, so I took a look at the rules for firearms. Alkenstar has some interesting backstory and Golarion's "It's totally not 1759 Europe, guys, really" setting does have a place for various sorts of firearms. But I thought some modification was in order to fit things in a bit better with history (and the real-world tech tree) and keep guns from edging out any of the normal swords-and-sorcery types. Here's what I came up with.
The first firearms were produced in a distant city-state called Alkenstar some 150-200 years ago. While chemical explosives had long been known and rockets have been used both for entertainment and warfare for hundreds of years the quality of explosive powders has always been quite low. In a world saturated with magic the rockets and chemical explosives were seen mostly as curiousities. Wizards might be rare but explosive powder was complicated, difficult and dangerous to manufacture, difficult to transport, and useless when wet. Wizards, on the other hand, were quite stable and only mildly irritable when wet. Thus while alchemists' fire is well known and combat wizards are always in demand the pursuit of chemical explosive has languished for hundreds and hundreds of years.
What firearms exist are produced in the city-state of Alkenstar. Alkenstar is unique in being a place without magic yet surrounded by monsters. It is speculated that this has spurred Alkenstar to pursue more and more sophisticated forms of rockets and firearms.
Firearms remain rare everywhere, but are not unknown. The most common form is the hand gonne. A hand gonne is a cast bronze tube with a hole drilled most of the way through it. Another small touch-hole is drilled into the tube. The gonne is often mounted to a long wooden stick allowing it to be braced against the ground or held similar to a spear. Many gonnes have a hook cast into them so they can be hooked over a parapet or a railing to brace them when firing.
An alchemical powder from Alkenstar is placed in the tube with a small lead or stone ball. When a match is held to the touch-hole it ignites the powder and propels the ball with great force. These weapons produce terrifying noise and great sheets of smoke. They are reputed to be able to kill an armored knight from a great distance and even slay demons and other monsters. The truth of this is questionable – Gonnes remain very rare and are only generally only used by specialized military units. If they can be called common at all they are most commonly used to defend fortresses and mounted on large navy ships. Many speculate that they are little more than noisemakers, or an attempt to dress up old magic as some new discovery for politcal purposes.
At any rate they're fiendishly expensive. Only Alkenstar knows the formula for producing the black powder used to fire the gonnes. They tightly control the production and export of the powder. They also produce the best quality of gonnes – It's said that foreign knock offs are prone to exploding when used. On top of that Alkenstar will cut off the supply of powder to nations known to be producing knock-off gonnes, quickly making them useless.
This is the version my players get, but it's not the whole truth. Alkenstar is actually quite good at making guns. The hand gonnes, identical to the simple real world hand-cannon guns that were developed in Europe or China in the 13-14th century, has long been their state of the art and chief export product. It's fiendishly powerful, but also devilishly inaccurate. It can actually kill an armored knight in a single hit but the chances of hitting a knight with anything less than a massed volley are slim.
The best use in combat is to get a whole mess of them and use them as shock weapons. The noise, smoke, and damage will give pause to even the best drilled foot troops leaving them vulnerable to an immediate charge.
Larger gonnes and bombards can be used as siege weapons, either on the defense or on the attack, and some are mounted on ships as well.
As mentioned Alkenstar tightly controls the production of these weapons. They're less stingy than in the default setting - They'll sell half-inch caliber hand guns by lots of a hundred or a thousand, and powder to match, but they still command a fearsome price. They also deliberately sell adulterated powder - The powder is laced with alchemical substances to inhibit attempts to decipher it's contents or reverse-engineer the material.
Alkenstar keeps the good stuff for itself. Forty years or so ago they quietly developed a massive improvement on the hand gonne. The hook gun (Harqeubus) is fitted with a wooden stock that can be braced against the arm. The barrels use high quality metal that reduces the chance of bursting. Better manufacturing tolerances, along with the shoulder stock and the use of a fork to support the barrel, allow a degree of accuracy that actually makes targeting individuals somewhat productive. Finally the hook gun has a novel triggering mechanism - Whereas old hang gonnes required the gunner to apply a match to the touchhole by hand the hook gun has a small lever with a clamp to hold the burning match. By pressing a trigger the lever moves back to bring the match into contact with the touch-hole. This allows the gunner to hold and stabilize the weapon with both hands, again improving accuracy dramatically.
The gunpowder Alkenstar exports is flour - a dusty powder prone to separating in transit and absorbing water. The powder they use for their own purposes is corned powder - mixed while moist into tiny grains of consistent and regulated size. This increases the surface area of the powder allowing it to ignite much more consistently, cleanly, and with greater force.
The result is that Alkenstar's hook guns can use less powder and a smaller ball while being just as powerful as the older hand gonnes. This has been their state of the art for a generation, the secret held close to hand and used only for the defense of their nation.
Lately, though, there are rumors among the gunworks that something new is on the way in. Reputedly this new weapon solves the problems inherent in having to keep a slow match constantly lit and ready for use, as well as keeping the touch-hole dry and clear of obstructions. Supposedly the new mechanism doesn't use a match at all, and will fire consistently every time simply by pulling a trigger. If this is true it would represent a major step forward - Matchlock weapons are notoriously unsuitable for humid climates or use at sea as well as simply going out at inopportune moments. This new matchless mechanism could even allow weapons to be concealed without ones clothes catching fire or the distinctive smell of the match giving one away. The prototype allegedly incorporates the finest metallurgy and craftsmanship and is by far the most compact firearm yet produced in the gunworks, yet it retains much of the power of it's larger cousins.
There is one other rumor about this so called "Wheel-lock pistol". The rumor is that it's missing.
Which actually gets to the campaign. The wheel lock is more or less the first firearm in history that let's you do cool tricks - hand cannons and the harquebus were heavy, cumbersome devices that were tricky to fire and painfully unreliable. A wheellock pistol, by contrast, can be easily operated with one hand. It is also the first firearm that could be stored away ready to fire as all previous weapons required a burning match to ignite the powder.
For the purposes of the campaign hand gonnes are not common, but aren't rare, either. They're expensive, but not nearly as much as the default prices would suggest. Harquebus' simply don't exist outside Alkenstar. Alkenstar has only lost a handful of them over the years and they diligently hunt down any that escape them. Somehow one of my players has come into posession of one of the only Wheellock weapons in existence and fled across the face of the world to escape the wrath of Alkenstar.
The wheellock has a couple of advantages - For one it can be concealed. two - The clockwork mechanism of a wheellock gun is appropriate to the setting. Three - It's a very complicated device that requires a fair degree of maintenance, meaning I have a perfectly legitimate reason to temporarily remove it from play whenever I need to.
For day to day encounters both hand gonnes and rockets are going to show up. Hand gonnes are effectively noisy long-bows that have a chance to shake up enemies and do a lot of damage at close range. They pay for it by taking 3 full rounds to re-load and having a habit of exploding. For practical purposes they make a good opening argument and can be handy against fortifications.
Rockets will show up as moderately expensive, very unpredictable consumables. The default way to use rockets is to get a lot of them and fire them in volleys in the general direction of a bad-guy. They're primarily a ship to ship or siege weapon, though you could have some fun lighting them off in a cramped dungeon corridor.
For the purposes of the game the intention is to add some more flash and bang to things. Not quite at the level of the Age of Sail, but enough that you can expect clouds of canon smoke to occasionally obscure a ship and add some more variety to combat.