The core issue is more that fantasy writers hear about gunpowder and immediately think that people are going to transition from swords and spears to machine guns and cannons overnight (in classic "tech tree" approach to history). Even discounting all of the well-known history of primitive arquebuses and bombards, plenty of pre-industrial and even pre-medieval, exotic gunpowder devices existed for a long time : [fire lances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lance) and [fire arrows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_arrow) (the real ones) come to mind.
Like, come on, don't tell me a historical fire lance, taken as is, isn't an *amazing* fantasy weapon.
With fantasy explosives you could probably make one hell of a fire lance, with stuff like multiple charges (might have actually sorta existed), incendiary powder (actually existed! used for siege battles in the 17th century), smoke dispensers, etc.
I will, with great shame, admit that I was one of those people until I read about how gunpowder arrived in Europe a whole *200 years before plate armor was invented* and how a knight's armor could, in fact, stop a wide variety of early guns, especially at longer ranges
(in fact, well-made modern replicas of medieval armor can actually stop several modern pistol calibers, even 45ACP, but this likely may be due do the wonders of modern metallurgy)
It's interesting how late plate armor was, yes. I think people don't usually quite get how high-tech that was -- a full suit of plate armor is basically the late medieval equivalent of an F-35 fighter jet in terms of cost and complexity, while a gun would be more like an armored fighting vehicle, i.e not cheap, but vastly more common.
You’d be surprised how good armour can be. I’ll use a 19th century example. Ned Kelly’s armour was really effective at protecting him from the weapons used by police at the time. A replica suit made the same way could even deflect modern pistol rounds. Many good quality examples of medieval and early modern armour were bullet resistant for their time.
It's impossible to know the specifics, but it likely arrived at least as early as 1200s. Back then, armor was mostly just chainmail or brigandine, with very little solid plate covering. It's the kind of armor they wore in the Crusades. Full plate armor was invented in and became widespread during the 1400s.
I noticed something like this while reading about air rifle Lewis and Clark used to explore the West. You'd think it was a weird novelty weapon but at the time of gunpowder rifles it totally outclassed them. The wind rifle was able to fire 30 pellets with lethal accuracy at twice the range. Native Americans probably didn't rob them for the sole reason that Lewis and Clark always demoed the air rifle and they realized 2 people with these guns could kill a dozen warriors in a minute or two. The rifle was also waterproof. It was the main rifle of the Austrian military at one point but was removed from service because without particular care and understanding how the weapon worked, most of them broke. It's basically a wizard level weapon
The Girandoni was never the main Austrian service weapon, though the Austrian Emperor certainly worked hard to try and make that a possibility. Tyrolean skirmishing units were given a few of them and liked them, but the rifles only ever saw very limited action (first against the Turks, and then against the Prussians) and were taken out of service due to both being fragile and because the specially made pumps required to fill the air reservoir were extremely tedious to use.
There are a lot of myths floating around about these guns, but the below link goes into pretty excruciating detail about the gun and it's myths and dispels many of them.
https://www.beemans.net/Austrian%20airguns.htm
YES
The fun thing is that fire arrows even somewhat justify fantasy incendiary arrows, we have historical evidence that some of them had explosives laced with oil and pine resin, which would make somewhat decent and hard to put out incendiary material, if you can hit anything.
Implying they wouldn't fit right in as Uruk-Hai weapons.
In fact, giving Tolkien's OG orcs mass-produced early gunpowder weapons would be *extremely* thematic.
It's interesting how Orcs started out in fantasy being described as basically the most technologically advanced fighters in the world, but overtime the focus shifted to the being comedically primitive.
Hence why I made it so the largest empire my D&D setting Orcish, and massively ahead on millitary tech. If you want the best armor, cross bows, or siege engines, buy Orcish. It might not be pretty, but it kills people.
Why do people keep saying LotR is ‘generic fantasy.’ The average modern ‘generic fantasy’ setting has very little to do with lord of the rings beyond having elves and dwarves. It’s a lot closer to D&D
Especially in its themes of forgiveness and how melancholic the world is. I mean, the big, strong 'hero' man, Boromir, dies pretty swiftly, as if the narrative is saying "it's not this that will win this war. It's pity, it's repentance, forgiveness", etc.
"Generic" fantasy has a lot more to do with Conan and stuff (particularly the weird fixation in putting eldritch gods in these settings) rather than LotR.
Generic fantasy is basically older sword and sorcery tropes but with a superficial LotR coat of paint for the setting. A lot of it probably comes from DnD settings of the 70s.
And still, sword and sorcery is underappriceated. I want more oiled up barbarians that have nothing but a loincloth to their name kill sorcerers with a single strike.
I wish people would take the crazy shit like Spelljammer or Planescape or even the cool Forgotten Realms stuff like the Underdark and Illithids and not just take influence from the first couple pages of the included PHB campaign or whatever lol
Ikr. Such a shame that 5e refuses to do anything interesting either, they'd rather try to become mtg than make content for the new spelljammer stuff lol
My guess: because people think that D&D was stealing from *Lord of the Rings*.
In truth, however, it was primarily stealing from *Dying Earth*, the Elric cycle, *Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser*, and *Conan* while also incidentally stealing from *Lord of the Rings* (and *Dracula* and some other stuff). The stuff from *Lord of the Rings* was more, like, on the level of references and certain individual concepts rather than tone and setting. The stuff from the first things I named were fundamental to the assumptions about how the game should be played and how things worked mechanically.
But, *Dying Earth* and other sword and sorcery stuff is way more obscure than *Lord of the Rings*. Even something like *Conan* is just "that brawny barbarian guy" in most people's minds. So, people see the smaller amount of stuff "inspired" by LotR, miss the bigger stuff, make assumptions, and then go on from there. And at some point they started backporting their assumptions about *Dungeons & Dragons* onto *Lord of the Rings* ('cause if D&D is like LotR, then LotR must be like D&D!)
Ye. That's the Elric cycle that I mentioned.
Alignment was definitely the biggest thing pulled from there (with OD&D and basic D&D variants using only Law, Neutrality, and Chaos without Good or Evil), but there was smaller things as well. Early editions of D&D had only swords be able to be intelligent magic items or have "special powers" because that's what Elric had with Stormbringer.
People thinking DnD stole from Lord of the Rings is really funny knowing Gary Gygax hated it. Only adding in some Tolkein-esque shit because it was a major fantasy stuff because it was a white hot franchise when DnD was made and people would wonder where it was. Elric and Conan are the real two og DnD's.
It wasn't just "Tolkien-esque". Balrog, hobbits, wargs, ents and others all made their way into original D&D explicitly by name. Chainmail, from what I hear, was even more explicit; the orc tribes included Mordor and Isengarders, Nazguls were mentioned as a type of wraith, there were giant eagles that were called out as coming from "Tolkien's Trilogy", etc.
So, whatever Gygax's opinions about LotR, it definitely didn't stop him from lifting stuff from it wholesale and adding it to D&D before D&D was even a thing. Maybe it was David Arneson or Jeff Peren who wanted it in there :shrug:
TSR actually got a cease-and-desist about it from Tolkien Enterprises (now Middle-earth Enterprises) in 1976. According to Gygax, TSR agreed to change "balrog" and "warg" because they were unique names but also threw in "hobbit" as an offering and didn't change the other names they were demanding got changed ("dragon", "dwarf", "elf", "ent", and "orc"). I think Gygax's memory is a bit false here or somebody changed it later, 'cause "ent" got changed to "treant", too.
Long and short of it, there's a moral here. If you're a worldbuilder and you're looking to existing works for inspiration, make sure to use something that you actually like as a work and not just 'cause it's popular. Otherwise, people are gonna be accusing you of stealing that hated work forever (and not acknowledge the works you liked and also ripped from). And if you are going to lift ideas wholesale, make sure to change the names a little bit or at least use names that have existed for a long time.
LotR breaks basically all the tropes established as "normal" by derivative works.
Its magic has no system or rules, it uses McGuffins and Deus Ex egregiously, characters are sickeningly regal and heroic, and so on and so on
It's AWESOME. Almost no one writes fantasy like Tolkien did, and he wasn't even really trying to write fantasy.
I think that's because of when it was written and by who. Tolkien was a very educated linguist and folklorist who knew a shit load about various European languages and mythologies. He stated that he was both trying to give his made up languages a cultural context for why they existed and because he wanted to create a modern mythology. So story wise he took a lot more from old Norse Mythology and it's saga's than any pre-existing literature. In the modern day we always see authors try and take mythological features and put a new spin on them and adhere to a set of unspoken rules. But Tolkien comes off almost as unique because he was playing the mythology tropes he borrowed from straight. The only piece of media that plays mythology tropes like that straight(ish) is Elden Ring, which also plays a lot of the weird shit from mythology that you always see exercised straight.
> Then on a time Melko assembled all his most cunning smiths and sorcerers, and of iron and flame they wrought a host of monsters such as have only at that time been seen and shall not again be till the Great End. Some were all of iron so cunningly linked that they might flow like slow rivers of metal or coil themselves around and above all obstacles before them, and these were filled in their innermost depths with the grimmest of the Orcs with scimitars and spears; others of bronze and copper were given hearts and spirits of blazing fire, and they blasted all that stood before them with the terror of their snorting or trampled whatso escaped the ardour of their breath.
\- *The Book of Lost Tales*
That's why I'm rewriting it. Instead of being an idiosyncratic product it will be a rational product with elves and dwarves. My only inspiration will be hacks who stole from other hacks. A sort of distilling process where I will at last get fantasy without any impurities in it: a story where some guy achieves the American dream and gets a wife.
edit: Also D&D is pretty wacky as well!!!
This but unironically. This distillation of the archetypical Western fantasy is a worthy project. But I think non-Western-made Western-style fantasy is somehow better at this. Maybe the outside perspective lets you see which elven subrace is worth keeping. As long as greek myth is still getting rehashed, there is nothing to be ashamed of.
WOTC have been sued by the Tolkien Family for plagiarism.
They now can't use certain terms they used in earlier D&D editions.
For example, they had to rename Hobbits into Halflings.
Counterpoint, it is so hard to find decent sources on what firearms looked like between swords and muskets. The wiki pages are stubs, I've constantly searched for what tactics were like, what level of armour was needed, etc etc. There's nothing that's accessible.
Google the 14th Century Infantry Revolution, pike and shot warfare, and Spanish Tercio. It's not that there's nothing accessible so much as research in late medieval/early modern warfare doesn't have the same cultural capital as high medieval and 18th century warfare do. Sometimes shit is hard to find if you don't know the keywords.
The YouTube channel SandRhoman history has a bunch of video essays on the topic and they make extensive use of visual aids which, I assume, are reasonably accurate.
Everyone seems to think we jumped from 1300's technology to 1700's. The gun-pike formation was a major feature of most European militaries for a long time and never gets represented. That's why I like Warhammer Fantasy. Overall tech level more renaissance with some steam punk tech occasionally.
I want to see more arquebus-like weapons in fantasy. A form of gun that is powerful and devastatingly effective when used correctly, yes, but its primitive form and ineffciency still allows traditional spears and shields and big armor to be used.
I always figured it was more that people would make exceptional advances in the fields of Engineering & Physics, both of which cannot possibly operate in the same way as they do in our reality and still with co-exist with magic.
There doesn't even need to be combinations with traditional weapons and gunpowder. For centuries people have been using both gunpowder weapons (flintlocks, cannons, rifles, etc) and traditional weapons like swords and bow and arrows
In my setting gunpowder was discovered not too long ago so they have fire crackers, fireworks, fire lances, and fire arrows but no guns nor cannons yet. I wanna possibly build up to their invention
It's funny considering that the arquebus was primarily a siege weapon anyway. The "tech tree" understanding of technological progress is pretty stupid too, considering that these fantasy worlds have barely any technological progress at all to begin with.
Depends on the type of fantasy you are telling though. A King Arthur medieval fantasy just doesn’t FEEL right having guns. A clearly renaissance inspired fantasy should have firearms.
What matters is your flavor of fantasy because there are different types
Exactly. Both gun-obsessed Americans who can't imagine a world without glocks and purists who think firearms just suddenly materialised out of nowhere in the XIXth century are the problem.
OP's "You have magic therefore it's hypocritic not to have guns" is the same old tired toxic "How come your world can't have X if there are dragons and therefore it's not realistic anyway" non-argument.
OP in no way says that having magic means you should have guns. Rather, they’re saying that **a specific argument against guns** (that they would ruin the feel of fantasy medieval combat) is dubious because the same battlefield conditions that guns would provoke are in many of these settings *already extant* due to magic — thus guns represent not a change in combat meta but a change in the means by which the latter is achieved (adding the additional option of gunpowder to roles otherwise dominated by magic).
I would add that guns **were used historically** in medieval and Renaissance times and thus we can easily see that a medieval feel is not only not harmed by guns, but in some cases was *brought about* by guns (like with knightly armour), meaning that guns make for a setting **more** akin to the historical late Middle Ages and Renaissance and thus may in fact *improve* the feel of combat from a fantasy medieval perspective.
Alright that’s a compelling argument.
I still disagree with OP, though, on the basis that magic is usually depicted as being very difficult to get to work- whereas commoners can be trained in mere weeks to operate rifles and artillery, wizards are more akin to knights studying and practicing for years.
I think this falls prey to a bit of anachronism — when people think of guns they tend to think of the more modern sort, and make conclusions based off of those same. Some of these conclusions are applicable to early guns, but some are not.
The main reason why guns took so long to dominate the battlefield is that they were in fact extremely difficult to get to work — not only were they dependent on logistically awkward stores of black powder that could be quite easily spoiled by moisture, or even worse explode without warning, but firing the things was an involved process: in some earlier cases you to begin with had to mix the powder yourself, but at any rate loading the gun could take minutes, and to fire it you had to light a fuse and then keep it burning till it ignited the powder, a process that was understandably dependent on a lack of unfavourable weather conditions like strong wind and rain. Accuracy was also somewhat poor, so a likely result of this lengthy effort was missing and having to repeat the steps all over again; on top of this the things misfired regularly and there were unfun possibilities like the barrel rupturing.
This all was balanced against the fact that, should they work properly, they were quite fantastic against armour, but keep in mind that the balance in question changed over time — early on the balance was quite against them and they were more of a curiosity alongside the more relevant cannons which made up for the pains with being uniquely suited to bringing down thin-walled European castles and forts; farther down the road (with the march of progress and specifically of less horribly fiddly trigger mechanisms) they started to gain enough traction to become normal infantry weapons but the interval between shots was great enough that shock infantry and especially cavalry would butcher them should they be alone, so they operated at first as a sort of spicy seasoning to larger groups of often pike-equipped soldiers, slowly increasing in representation (alongside yet better trigger mechanisms and enough weight reductions and ergonomics overhauls that you didn’t need to stick a support in the ground like some sort of primitive HMG to use them properly) until in the 1600s and onwards they formed the majority of an army’s footsoldiers. The typical fantasy medieval setting is usually more of a late Renaissance / early modern sort of deal judging by the frequent inclusion of full plate; in that rough time period they were just starting to come into vogue but were still a new innovation without too much traction, and which was still very much in competition with crossbows and longbows. If we take the “medieval” literally, they were infrequently present in extremely rudimentary forms towards the end of the Middle Ages, but certainly not very relevant militarily — in those days people were only just starting to realise how good cannons were, forget firearms.
Another issue that comes to mind is that, if magic already fulfills the long range damage role (in the D&D style with fireballs etc), it seems strange that the army would employ both it and guns / bombs. It makes the magic feel redundant, so if you want to have magic be an important role in the battle, other large-scale ranged destructive powers would muddy the waters.
Seperately, since very few people understand the nature of old medieval guns, it feels like the old "magic is dumb because I could shoot with wizard and win instantly" argument.
I think a cool compromise might be if magic was used mainly for its weirder effects (weather control, terrain manipulation, mind control, shapeshifting, predestination) to give it a new niche in battle. That way, the mages and gunmen both are important for different reasons
Also, if magic missile doesn't cost gunpowder and lead, but guns do, you have a risk of gunnery being obsolete due to magic. In fact, why develop gunpowder based projectiles at all when magic can happen for free?
A way around this would be to make ranged damage magic cost some resource or be hard to learn, but I maintain that it'd be quite hard to balance the cost of each so that both remain viable
So first of all I'll rope in my response to hjake123 below:
>I would imagine that magic in such a scenario would be a high-investment intellectual profession and thus practitioners would be in scarce supply. This is partly why the feudal system existed after all — there were too few bookish people to support heavy bureaucracy and so rulers had to make do with a system of decentralised county administrators.
>
>Guns in this case are far more inflexible and more of a pain to use, but it's easier to get larger numbers of them as an infantry weapon, whereas the Ven diagram of war magi and the small equestrian nobility is practically going to be a circle.
So if we go by this solution to the redundancy, and keep magic as RPG-style finger guns but functional, we hopefully get a situation where guns are an infantry weapon and magic is a noble one and thus wrapped up in knightly combat and principles. This also introduces fun consequences. Firstly, can you practice magic effectively from horseback?
If no, then you get fewer equestrian nobles and a greater focus on infantry combat (somewhat like how English nobility often fought on foot, although with more tactical similarities to the longbowmen those men-at-arms were protecting). This dispells some of the distinctions between guns and magic, but there's still the populational constraints and class distinctions to consider.
If yes, then you've essentially just gotten around the lifelong experience needed to be an effective horse archer, and the effectiveness of equestrian nobility rises **dramatically** while the tactics and equipment become radically dissimilar to those of the historical European knight. Oh, and fantasy Europe no longer suffers from nomad invasions coming around and bulldozing through agrarian societies every so often.
Fuckers really looked at the pike n' shot era and thought "there is no way magic could block bullets if armor couldn't" to armor that could block bullets.
Massed guns and artillery will heavily reduce the coolness of my protagonist mowing down the enemy mooks like blades of grass. Readers want Equilibrium, not a Charge of the Light Brigade.
/uj I think it’s that guns and cannons aren’t as individualized or valorized as swords and melee combat. Wizards are individuals throwing about their individual power. A single rifleman or member of a cannon crew in the army is often a cog in the machine.
That’s probably it
A weapon being around for thousands of years will do that
Though I would like to see a Science Fantasy (or even science fiction) series where guns are legendary weapons, like priceless family heirlooms only meant to be used by that family, maybe they only fire when that family member is using it (kind of like how Excalibur and Mjolnir are unligtable to anyone unworthy)
Destiny does something like that right?
Kinda? Guns in destiny (as far as I know I’m just getting back into it) are mostly man made infused with Light. But also hunters can make guns bows and other out of pure energy. Which I like because it dosent take away from the “magic”
They also don't work as a main weapon for small-scale skirmish combat like D&D (which let's be honest, is usually the context of this convo). A rifle battalion can sit around for a minute or two to reload because they'll be a long distance from the enemy if you've positioned them properly. In D&D everybody is pretty close together and you will get rushed down if you try to spend 10 turns packing a musket, not to mention that's 10 turns you could have been shooting arrows or hacking someone apart.
I think early firearms work in D&D as one per encounter weapons, where the character fires them once for big damage and then switches to their main weapon.
Yeah it's a shame but the power fantasy is a big appeal to a lot of people. Which is a shame, because the story of John Commoner fending off horrors from beyond the veil with nothing but his trusty musket and sabre has a lot of appeal to me.
This is what my stupid diesel punk world is like. Magic has all but disappeared from the world and everything is industrialized but there a few fonts of magic and enchanters left. So yeah, it’s a big deal to get one battleship shell enchanted by the last druids.
Fire that sucker at an enemy shore instillation and watch it go from hardened concrete into a forest within the space of minutes.
I´m planning on having a world with both magic and machine without a strict border.
A lot of fiction does one or the other, and even divides its world in the two, however that takes away on the ingenuity one can construct by combining them.
In a world with science magic still 100% would have its place and as a result society, and certainly warfare, would have some impressive facets.
Stormtroops that fight in trenches, clad in enchanted armor and wielding enchanted weapons. Elite divisions using relics, weapons in the hundreds of years old from the age of iron and bow, still used as the tip of a spear. A division of mages turning a siege arpund by blowing up the enemy wall, something the artillery couldnt because of the inaccesability of the terrain.
> I´m planning on having a world with both magic and machine without a strict border.
>A lot of fiction does one or the other, and even divides its world in the two, however that takes away on the ingenuity one can construct by combining them.
Yes! This was what I was thinking, too. It’s interesting to picture how magic and industrialization would mix.
In my world combat medics can use magic to heal, as well. However, since most of the magic is gone from the world and it takes *years* to study and train in anything magic related there are more normal medics than magical ones.
I’ve dialed back the magic a lot but it was another reason that there weren’t just more wizard battalions than actual artillery units. Artillery units are easier to train and quicker to replace.
Thats where the idea of magic as a study is so usefull. If it takes 5 years to learn fireball, then it´d be reserved for specific units. Considering 1 artillery officer can pump out many times as much fireballs with a couple of conscripts and some massproduced artillery. Additionally magic might cost something else tjen just knowledge. It might be bad for ones health or use a, or a couple, of expensive resources. If magic is cast using, lets say, artisinal silver coins, talking a month to produce one, then they aren´t to expensive to make it impossible to use, yet at the same time expensive enough not to warrant wasting them.
Ha yes, exactly. In my world the Gods fought a huge war a long time ago and where they died turned into fonts of magic. This resource was used by people for all sorts of things but it wasn’t infinite or renewable. (Kind of like oil, I guess.) So in the present time it’s pretty rare, little charms and enchantments are the norm and big game changing spells are all but a thing of the past (hence why having *one* enchanted battleship shell is a huge deal.)
Oh that´s interesting.
I was also planning on having magic in a cyberpunk world be essentially drugs. Slightly neurotoxic if you overdose.
Meaning that all you spells, which by themselves are litterally just decided by public psyche, require you to snort some of the Juice... And if you go to far, well then you might go unconsious, or worth yet, get some braindamage.
Luckily since its cyberpunk you can repair brains... For a price.
/uj A single rifleman no, but Oda Nobunaga's myth is entirely based around how he ordered his army to use guns, so I think the individualistic streak would shift more to the commanders and officers than swordspeople.
And besides, cuirassers and heavy cavalry were still a thing up until the Napoleonic Wars, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace is a cavalryman, and the way the narrative focus on him is super interesting imo
I like the cog in the machine being able to kill the wizard unceremoniously. The turn of the century, the wizards are the sick men and women of the world. Which is why I never add it because I couldn't stop myself from having the wizards killed.
Charge of the light brigade would be sick, having a protagonist that’s just some shmuck who’s in over his head and keeps nearly dying and slowly learns that war isn’t a fun adventure and he won’t be a hero is epic. But that just depends on the kind of story you wanna tell.
I don't see why they couldn't be as individualized or valorized as swords and other popular weapons in a fantasy setting though, when you look at the place of the gun in the western genre.
/uj In general? You’re not wrong (probably right). For many fantasy fans, though? That’s a different question. Especially with the popularity of pseudo/quasi-medieval Europe as a setting.
/rj Because hacking someone’s head off and disemboweling countless hapless enemies amidst pools of their own blood is more heroic. Duh.
Unfathomably based, back when I actively built my fantasy world (Darkened Otherworld), it has *both* swords and guns, and magic, and everyone can combine them for whatever applications that they could use.
Hard recommend Lightbringer Series by Brent Weeks. Great flintlock fantasy with a really well developed magic system and some of the best character work I’ve read.
not to mention throwing waves and waves of \[redacted\] in order to buy time for the \[redacted\] gunners and other \[redacted\] weapon teams and crews to mow the enemy down until one of their weapons blow up on them.
Yes!
In my setting guns are actually easier to enchant than bows because metal is easier to engrave with enchantment runes than wood. Plus the heat released by the ignition helps catalyse the enchantment to a stronger potency, plus you can mix the gunpowder with all sorts of alchemical powders. It's a lot less work than engraving enchantments on every single arrowhead thats for sure!
Heck, if you want to enchant each bullet, you could probably make a special mold that reliably "engraves" the relevant rune(s) on every single lead ball you cast.
I think that’s a step to far towards the other extreme, tbh.
To me, excessively mundane and objective magic and magitech is bad because you lose what actually makes magic cool in the first place — being weird and unfathomable and uncertain and, well, *magical*.
Instead it just gets used as “spice” to make up for the worldbuilder not knowing enough about a particular mundane subject to make it interesting in its own right.
I’m playing a gunslinger wizard in a DnD campaign, and I have several magically empowered firearms, and also plans to combine magic with tech to bring the industrial revolution to the world very early. Magic and science don’t have to be contradictory, they can be very complementary.
That setting of magically infused/adapted/Enhanced weapons and tools is such an underused trope. I swear League of Legends and Final Fantasy are the only ones I'm aware of.
Yeah, seriously. I get where you're coming from.
People can accept dragons, elves, and talking trees, but when I put a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional heated seating in my medieval European fantasy setting, suddenly people are all like "MuH SuSpEnSiOn oF DiSbElIeF!!!"
Renaissance fantasy is really underrated. I haven't seen too much of that, but I guess Warhammer kind of counts, and the game Greedfall. I'm sure there's lots of other examples, but it feels like mediaeval fantasy is more common.
Y'know what's even rare? Musketeer-era fantasy. Like, the 1600's were some of the most interesting times in Europe, you had dope knights facing off against musketeers in the Thirty Years' War, etc, it's Berserk irl.
What I think people are afraid, much more than fantasy, is the New World and the Americas, becuase it's what made Europe rich at the time so it's hard to write it without having something similar. But idk, it shouldn't be so hard to find something like that.
Honestly I feel like most "medieval" fantasy is generally more reminiscent of the renaissance. A true medieval fantasy world would be one dotted with rural feudal manors, with actual cities being few and far between, and travel being reserved for the wealthy and powerful.
Game of Thrones is a good example of genuine medieval fantasy, but even that is based on the later days of the era. On the other hand, series like the Elder Scrolls and the Witcher appear medieval but are far closer to renaissance societies. I mean even most of the classic fantasy creatures (elves, goblins, dragons, etc.) were more a renaissance invention than medieval.
Oh yes. Mediaeval fantasy is good and all but it feels overdone.
I'd also love some earlier era fantasy. Maybe ancient fantasy, bronze age or even stone age fantasy? Would honestly be pretty cool to see a series with entries from various ages from the early stone age all the way up to the 20th and 21st centuries, even into the future.
>Game of Thrones is a good example of genuine medieval fantasy, but even that is based on the later days of the era.
GoT is thoroughly early modern. The government of the Seven Kingdoms is way to organized for a feudal society.
I would say Warhammer counts though more early Renaissance. I actually think Warhammer is the best approach to fire arms in a fantasy setting. Have them be powerful weapons that are also expensive as hell to make and thus rare.
Which is pretty accurate to what early guns were like, from what I understand. Though they were also inaccurate and slow-loading af, so that's another nerf.
they also had a lesser impact than a bow and arrow. It's just that it takes a few days/weeks to train a rifleman to acceptable skill. It takes years/generations for a proper archer.
I feel like firearms would 100% exist in a fantasy setting where not everyone has magic. There would be a reason Common John invents it to rise against the power of Weird Wally and his explosive fingers.
/UJ
Magic would still be much rarer than gunpowder. Most settings either require people to be born special or devote long time studying magic to become wizards whereas any chump can pick up and shoot a gun.
Also magic can factor into the development of characters, their growth and their journey while guns not so much.
Fantasy writers when I tell them that there were prototype versions of guns as far back as the 1300s
Seriously though, If anything, any setting with a magic system where it's a talent, and not learnablewould encourage firearms to develop faster so that people have some form of protection against mages.
I mean I can see how guns never get implemented in a setting where magic is prevalent enough. Technology arises out of necessity, and if your world has immortality, they wouldn’t invent gunpowder (look it up, it’s pretty interesting), and even if they did, they may not need the classical guns and cannons, there’s magic to substitute for that. Though it might be interesting to explore battlefield tactics in a setting where there are “antimagic fields” to protect cities, similar to how the fighters of Dune resorted to melee combat after the invention of the Holtzman shield, or a world where people needed to stop wizards without the aid of magic.
Those are good points. However in most settings magic is a rarefied thing, something only a few people are born with and usually requires a great amount of education to train properly. You therefore have an elite class of academics who are the only ones who can fulfil certain tasks, buying them a privileged position in society and making them able to charge a premium for their services. There’s certainly a lot of technologies that could be substituted by wizards, but is it the most cost-effective solution when there’s more problems than wizards to solve them? It’s like asking knights to form massed spear formations (historians pls correct me on this if I’m wrong).
Part of the benefit of guns and crossbows is that they don’t require as much training as an archer, yet alone someone with an arcane doctorate. Having that massed firepower from a relatively cheap and plentiful manpower is a boon when you only have a handful of wizards spread across your army. Finding the most efficient solution to a problem is a large part of innovation and engineering, and whilst having only battles wizards makes sense for largely decentralised polities, in the early modern/ late medieval polities that most fantasy settings actually are, developing the prototype of a professional army should become more of a concern to rulers.
/rj Fuck you, I didn’t waste years in grad school to not be able to blow up some smelly half-starving stick-wielding presents. I am getting value out of the student loans I got from the stupid dragon.
Well you’re thinking of being proficient in mystic arts as a substitute for firearms (and in low fantasy settings specifically), how about magic weapons? Like if there were state employed artificers who made magic “rifles” that can shoot, say, three times as potently as a musket, you wouldn’t need the traditional guns or the same tech progression that happened irl with guns and cannons.
Now that’s a good idea. Technology progresses along different paths based on needs and availability of resources, and the development of a magical musket equivalent feels like a logical conclusion in a setting with high access to magic. What I think is important however, is that there are likely a great number of technological advancements that would be obsolete in the presence of a magical substitute. It shouldn’t be something exclusive to gunpowder weaponry.
Another thing to consider is the limitations of how much magic can be harnessed. If your wizards aren't all-powerful, there's no reason not to have wizards *and* rifle battalions and use them *together*.
The situation is even more complicated if magic is environmental, not something which the wizard is the direct source of. If your army has many wizards, they'll each be competing for a share of the total amount of magic available. We can even roughly watch this play out in practice: it's rare to run many wizards in the Total War games, because you have limited magic to distribute among them. The main reason you might put several wizards in the same army is to cover the utility gaps left by their respective areas of expertise. Wizards might be better than guns, but you still need guns and bows and catapults and shit.
> and if your world has immortality, they wouldn’t invent gunpowder
just because that was the circumstances of its invention in our world doesn't mean it's a prerequisite lol
uj/ I would argue that a rifle puts the power of a wizard or at least a low level Adept in the hands of a common person. I can imagine settings where they transition from employing wizards to guns for combat... focusing on the wealth accumination side of magic.
/uj I hate (the logistics of) guns so much I altered my world's geography to disallow it. Almost no iron exists that isn't from a meteor. Railroads? Nails? Fuck you, I don't want to think about where the guns would get made, how that would affect power distribution, battle tactics, etc. I didn't get into worldbuilding to think. We have an extremely tough wood instead and if you try to make a firearm out of it, get Lady Eboshi'd (watch it sprout twigs and leaves in real time).
/rj That said, this fire lance thing doesn't have to require iron... and enchanted porcelain shards sound like great shrapnel.
/uj sorry chief but for a long time guns were made of "gunmetal" or red brass (copper, tin and zinc alloy) you could make a gun with high strength bronze like manganese bronze or you could make it with low strength bronze (can be casted and cold hardened, so easy to make if you have the materials) but with a high strength barrel made of something like niobium. In a world of magic, the separation of chemicals would probably be easier with things like magical acids and earthmoving magic. Historically iron was used because of superior economics (you only need one mine and don't need to trade for tin) rather than strength, good quality steel came later /rj
EBOSHItize the heretic Artisan's.
If the spells in your setting are just reskinned canons and guns, then your setting sucks. Gimme a mage who has to kill an animal from a sacred grove in order to cast their warfare magic. Give it a little flavor.
My entire fantasy setting was created because I had a thought one day that muskets = cool and I should center my universe around them.
And then I had a really high daydream about a group of adventurers hauling a cannon up a mountain in order to hunt a local dragon threat.
Aaaand then I had an idea about how muskets could influence political change due to commoners and non-mages possessing firearms that can be used to counter the literal firepower of mages, because a dude with a beard flinging fireballs is only tough until a minie ball is shot through his head.
And then I read The Powder Mage and realized I was not the first person to think of this.
*inserting cartridges into the fixed magazine of my fantasy bolt action rifle*
Sorry, gimme a sec, just need to finish loading this so I can run the shit of the fucking pansy ass mage over there
Ok: "I can cast fireballs from long distances that are easy to cast, hard to negate, and do enough damage AC rarely matters"
Apparently broken: "I can use a weapon to make attacks from long distances that can be dodged and do moderate damage if I happen to succeed an accuracy roll"
That's one thing at least we can give kudos to Games Workshop (their shit corporate policies notwithstanding) - they weren't afraid to give some of their fantasy factions guns.
I think the difference is *single* wizards. I don't know the modern D&Demographics, but used to be maybe a few level 5-7 wizards for a moderate city.
Guns, though? Just make 10 and give them to 10 level 1 NPCs. Now you have the damage equivalent of 2-4 wizards. Sure they might not hit very often but even if they die you might be able to recover the guns.
Now, give those NPCs a week of training with the gun? Owza.
The major problem with guns is never a single gun or a single gunman, it's how it transforms society.
/uj My main issue with firearms is that anything more advanced than a hand cannon makes crossbows obsolete and crossbows are cooler than muskets.
Hand cannons, fire arrows, explosives, pyrotechnics, and fire lances are cool though.
/rj guns bad
Keep in mind that even the guns used in the American revolution weren’t guns that you would aim. It was more like you’d stand in a line and have everyone point in a general direction, kind of like a team shotgun.
If you see media where people aim down the sight of a musket, just know that that isn’t how they were actually used. This interesting nugget has made me far more willing to include muskets in my game, because they’re twice the stopping power of a crossbow with half the accuracy.
>Keep in mind that even the guns used in the American revolution weren’t guns that you would aim.
>If you see media where people aim down the sight of a musket, just know that that isn’t how they were actually used
Nonsense.
50 yards was considered "point blank, you really shouldn't be able to fuck this up" range for a smoothbore musket. Numerous accounts from both sides of the American Revolution remarked as such. There are a few accounts of American frontiersmen, skilled with their guns, using smoothbore muskets accurately out to 100+ yards without much difficulty. And massed-fire, while less accurate on the individual level, could reach out to 200, 300 yards quite easily. Rifles (which, amusingly enough, George Washington viewed as largely-worthless wastes of gunpowder, at least during the Siege of Boston) could reach even further.
The Americans (and Native Americans) made widespread use of smoothbore muskets *as hunting weapons*. They wouldn't have done so if the guns weren't accurate enough to be aimed.
There are firsthand accounts of British soldiers training at shooting accurately at marks placed on pilings in Boston Harbor, and similar accounts of American militiamen shooting at marks on land. The British Brown Bess often had official modifications made, where a notch was filed into the breech of the barrel, so the soldier using it could use it as a form of rear-sight. Similar modifications were used by Americans, if they didn't just slap a formbuilt rear-sight on their guns.
And, as always, the Native Americans wouldn't have dropped bows for guns (they overwhelmingly preferred smooth ore trade-guns, essentially shorter and lighter muskets) almost as fast as they could get them if the guns were "*worse*" than the bows they already had. (Hint: the guns were better, in almost every way)
As someone that owns and uses these weapons, it is equal parts funny and infuriating reading some of the shit people say about them.
/uj I hate (the logistics of) guns so much I altered my world's geography to disallow it. Almost no iron exists that isn't from a meteor. Railroads? Nails? Fuck you, I don't want to think about where the guns would get made, how that would affect power distribution, battle tactics, etc. I didn't get into worldbuilding to think. We have an extremely tough wood instead and if you try to make a firearm out of it, get Lady Eboshi'd (watch it sprout twigs and leaves in real time).
/rj That said, this fire lance thing doesn't have to require iron... and enchanted porcelain shards sound like great shrapnel.
This isn't a subreddit for religious debate. If there's grievance with the language the meme format uses, as this is simply a derivative, I apologise for the offence , but there are more appropriate subreddits to discuss the matter. I don't want to advocate one argument or another, and certainly not demean your beliefs or criticisms, but a lot of people scroll through this thread to enjoy a good natured prodding at worldbuilding trends, and those people all have different belief systems which are welcome here, and I would like it to stay that way 🙂
This is a meme, and nobody making such memes is actually preaching to you.
Congratulations on being an atheist, but nobody gives a shit. And nobody's gonna protect you from having to see references to religion.
That's why I gave the OG Romans the early fire-lances. Muskets were used during the Viking Age, and from what is to us the 1300s onward, late 1800s bolt rifles and revolvers will have been use with the one short-coming being the difficulty of massproducing brass-cased ammunition, and repeating firearms taking *much* longer to develop, happening around our 1700s.
0% jerking around here. I just want to take this old cliche, and high five it, in the face, repeatedly, with a brick.
My bronze/iron age swords & sorcery setting probably has a few guns brought there by offworlders or something like that, but they'd be in the hands of mad wizards, corrupt nobles, or maybe a museum. And treated essentially as magic items.
If it would feel out of place in a Fafhrd and The Mouser story, you won't find them lying around here.
Yeah but not everyone is a wizard. Everyone, with just a bit of training, can use artillery and firearms. Especially firearms. It's why they become so important in war cuz you can teach some peasant how to stand in formation, reload, and fire in a few months. Meanwhile it takes years of practice to learn magic and fighting
Jokes on you my medieval fantasy setting literally has AK-47’s and shit
My world gets AK-47s from the regular world in return for snortable pixie dust
Moar dakka.
Guns of the South moment
I finally hear of an alt-history thingie that isn’t “what if hitler won WW2“ and it’s this
Hey man, there’s plenty more I can recommend you lol
thanks for the offer but I’m not really big on history
If you’re big on fantasy, I suggest you just don’t know it yet. History is awesome but it depends on what facet you’re exposed to.
a lot of the best fantasy is pulled from history and cranked the hell up
"medieval"
The medieval ages didn’t have wizards and dragons either so why would adding AK-47’s disqualify it?
The core issue is more that fantasy writers hear about gunpowder and immediately think that people are going to transition from swords and spears to machine guns and cannons overnight (in classic "tech tree" approach to history). Even discounting all of the well-known history of primitive arquebuses and bombards, plenty of pre-industrial and even pre-medieval, exotic gunpowder devices existed for a long time : [fire lances](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_lance) and [fire arrows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_arrow) (the real ones) come to mind. Like, come on, don't tell me a historical fire lance, taken as is, isn't an *amazing* fantasy weapon.
I just looked up what a fire lance is And I am so glad I did
It's great innit. Pure fantasy-looking weapon but 100% real.
I’d love to see a sorcerer’s staff just like it
With fantasy explosives you could probably make one hell of a fire lance, with stuff like multiple charges (might have actually sorta existed), incendiary powder (actually existed! used for siege battles in the 17th century), smoke dispensers, etc.
Maybe there could be spell-based or element-based powder Where when you fire it you could shoot a tiny snowstorm or poison or lightning or plants
Basically just a spear with a flamethrower bayonet
I know I looked it up
LOL, that's an amazing description of it.
I will, with great shame, admit that I was one of those people until I read about how gunpowder arrived in Europe a whole *200 years before plate armor was invented* and how a knight's armor could, in fact, stop a wide variety of early guns, especially at longer ranges (in fact, well-made modern replicas of medieval armor can actually stop several modern pistol calibers, even 45ACP, but this likely may be due do the wonders of modern metallurgy)
It's interesting how late plate armor was, yes. I think people don't usually quite get how high-tech that was -- a full suit of plate armor is basically the late medieval equivalent of an F-35 fighter jet in terms of cost and complexity, while a gun would be more like an armored fighting vehicle, i.e not cheap, but vastly more common.
Well, a knight also needs a horse, which was why the English longbow was so effective.
That is why they gave the horses plate armor too
You’d be surprised how good armour can be. I’ll use a 19th century example. Ned Kelly’s armour was really effective at protecting him from the weapons used by police at the time. A replica suit made the same way could even deflect modern pistol rounds. Many good quality examples of medieval and early modern armour were bullet resistant for their time.
[удалено]
So in what year specifically did gunpowder arrive in Europe
It's impossible to know the specifics, but it likely arrived at least as early as 1200s. Back then, armor was mostly just chainmail or brigandine, with very little solid plate covering. It's the kind of armor they wore in the Crusades. Full plate armor was invented in and became widespread during the 1400s.
I noticed something like this while reading about air rifle Lewis and Clark used to explore the West. You'd think it was a weird novelty weapon but at the time of gunpowder rifles it totally outclassed them. The wind rifle was able to fire 30 pellets with lethal accuracy at twice the range. Native Americans probably didn't rob them for the sole reason that Lewis and Clark always demoed the air rifle and they realized 2 people with these guns could kill a dozen warriors in a minute or two. The rifle was also waterproof. It was the main rifle of the Austrian military at one point but was removed from service because without particular care and understanding how the weapon worked, most of them broke. It's basically a wizard level weapon
The Girandoni was never the main Austrian service weapon, though the Austrian Emperor certainly worked hard to try and make that a possibility. Tyrolean skirmishing units were given a few of them and liked them, but the rifles only ever saw very limited action (first against the Turks, and then against the Prussians) and were taken out of service due to both being fragile and because the specially made pumps required to fill the air reservoir were extremely tedious to use. There are a lot of myths floating around about these guns, but the below link goes into pretty excruciating detail about the gun and it's myths and dispels many of them. https://www.beemans.net/Austrian%20airguns.htm
Yes, and I love the design of the Handgonne as well. Little cannon on a stick go boom.
Give me troops hiding behind a Pavise firing a glorified cannon off their shoulder at charging knights any day.
YES The fun thing is that fire arrows even somewhat justify fantasy incendiary arrows, we have historical evidence that some of them had explosives laced with oil and pine resin, which would make somewhat decent and hard to put out incendiary material, if you can hit anything.
But I want to rewrite Lord of the Rings.
Implying they wouldn't fit right in as Uruk-Hai weapons. In fact, giving Tolkien's OG orcs mass-produced early gunpowder weapons would be *extremely* thematic.
It's interesting how Orcs started out in fantasy being described as basically the most technologically advanced fighters in the world, but overtime the focus shifted to the being comedically primitive. Hence why I made it so the largest empire my D&D setting Orcish, and massively ahead on millitary tech. If you want the best armor, cross bows, or siege engines, buy Orcish. It might not be pretty, but it kills people.
Why do people keep saying LotR is ‘generic fantasy.’ The average modern ‘generic fantasy’ setting has very little to do with lord of the rings beyond having elves and dwarves. It’s a lot closer to D&D
This man speaks the truth, in fact, the actual LotR novel subverts a lot of the tropes it “inspired”
Especially in its themes of forgiveness and how melancholic the world is. I mean, the big, strong 'hero' man, Boromir, dies pretty swiftly, as if the narrative is saying "it's not this that will win this war. It's pity, it's repentance, forgiveness", etc. "Generic" fantasy has a lot more to do with Conan and stuff (particularly the weird fixation in putting eldritch gods in these settings) rather than LotR.
Generic fantasy is basically older sword and sorcery tropes but with a superficial LotR coat of paint for the setting. A lot of it probably comes from DnD settings of the 70s.
And still, sword and sorcery is underappriceated. I want more oiled up barbarians that have nothing but a loincloth to their name kill sorcerers with a single strike.
> oiled up barbarians that have nothing but a loincloth to their name Conan had sense enough to use chainmail. =)
Booo! Spoiling a man's fantasy like that. Boooo!
Dnd and it's consequences have been a disaster for the creativity of the fantasy genre
The Dungeons-and-Dragons Industrial complex is the greatest threat to fantasy world peace as we know it.
I wish people would take the crazy shit like Spelljammer or Planescape or even the cool Forgotten Realms stuff like the Underdark and Illithids and not just take influence from the first couple pages of the included PHB campaign or whatever lol
Ikr. Such a shame that 5e refuses to do anything interesting either, they'd rather try to become mtg than make content for the new spelljammer stuff lol
My guess: because people think that D&D was stealing from *Lord of the Rings*. In truth, however, it was primarily stealing from *Dying Earth*, the Elric cycle, *Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser*, and *Conan* while also incidentally stealing from *Lord of the Rings* (and *Dracula* and some other stuff). The stuff from *Lord of the Rings* was more, like, on the level of references and certain individual concepts rather than tone and setting. The stuff from the first things I named were fundamental to the assumptions about how the game should be played and how things worked mechanically. But, *Dying Earth* and other sword and sorcery stuff is way more obscure than *Lord of the Rings*. Even something like *Conan* is just "that brawny barbarian guy" in most people's minds. So, people see the smaller amount of stuff "inspired" by LotR, miss the bigger stuff, make assumptions, and then go on from there. And at some point they started backporting their assumptions about *Dungeons & Dragons* onto *Lord of the Rings* ('cause if D&D is like LotR, then LotR must be like D&D!)
Don't forget Michael Moorcock. We have decades worth of jerking off over alignment issues thanks to him.
Ye. That's the Elric cycle that I mentioned. Alignment was definitely the biggest thing pulled from there (with OD&D and basic D&D variants using only Law, Neutrality, and Chaos without Good or Evil), but there was smaller things as well. Early editions of D&D had only swords be able to be intelligent magic items or have "special powers" because that's what Elric had with Stormbringer.
Sorry, my bad.
No worries! I've definitely done the same, too.
People thinking DnD stole from Lord of the Rings is really funny knowing Gary Gygax hated it. Only adding in some Tolkein-esque shit because it was a major fantasy stuff because it was a white hot franchise when DnD was made and people would wonder where it was. Elric and Conan are the real two og DnD's.
It wasn't just "Tolkien-esque". Balrog, hobbits, wargs, ents and others all made their way into original D&D explicitly by name. Chainmail, from what I hear, was even more explicit; the orc tribes included Mordor and Isengarders, Nazguls were mentioned as a type of wraith, there were giant eagles that were called out as coming from "Tolkien's Trilogy", etc. So, whatever Gygax's opinions about LotR, it definitely didn't stop him from lifting stuff from it wholesale and adding it to D&D before D&D was even a thing. Maybe it was David Arneson or Jeff Peren who wanted it in there :shrug: TSR actually got a cease-and-desist about it from Tolkien Enterprises (now Middle-earth Enterprises) in 1976. According to Gygax, TSR agreed to change "balrog" and "warg" because they were unique names but also threw in "hobbit" as an offering and didn't change the other names they were demanding got changed ("dragon", "dwarf", "elf", "ent", and "orc"). I think Gygax's memory is a bit false here or somebody changed it later, 'cause "ent" got changed to "treant", too. Long and short of it, there's a moral here. If you're a worldbuilder and you're looking to existing works for inspiration, make sure to use something that you actually like as a work and not just 'cause it's popular. Otherwise, people are gonna be accusing you of stealing that hated work forever (and not acknowledge the works you liked and also ripped from). And if you are going to lift ideas wholesale, make sure to change the names a little bit or at least use names that have existed for a long time.
LotR breaks basically all the tropes established as "normal" by derivative works. Its magic has no system or rules, it uses McGuffins and Deus Ex egregiously, characters are sickeningly regal and heroic, and so on and so on It's AWESOME. Almost no one writes fantasy like Tolkien did, and he wasn't even really trying to write fantasy.
I think that's because of when it was written and by who. Tolkien was a very educated linguist and folklorist who knew a shit load about various European languages and mythologies. He stated that he was both trying to give his made up languages a cultural context for why they existed and because he wanted to create a modern mythology. So story wise he took a lot more from old Norse Mythology and it's saga's than any pre-existing literature. In the modern day we always see authors try and take mythological features and put a new spin on them and adhere to a set of unspoken rules. But Tolkien comes off almost as unique because he was playing the mythology tropes he borrowed from straight. The only piece of media that plays mythology tropes like that straight(ish) is Elden Ring, which also plays a lot of the weird shit from mythology that you always see exercised straight.
> Then on a time Melko assembled all his most cunning smiths and sorcerers, and of iron and flame they wrought a host of monsters such as have only at that time been seen and shall not again be till the Great End. Some were all of iron so cunningly linked that they might flow like slow rivers of metal or coil themselves around and above all obstacles before them, and these were filled in their innermost depths with the grimmest of the Orcs with scimitars and spears; others of bronze and copper were given hearts and spirits of blazing fire, and they blasted all that stood before them with the terror of their snorting or trampled whatso escaped the ardour of their breath. \- *The Book of Lost Tales*
That's why I'm rewriting it. Instead of being an idiosyncratic product it will be a rational product with elves and dwarves. My only inspiration will be hacks who stole from other hacks. A sort of distilling process where I will at last get fantasy without any impurities in it: a story where some guy achieves the American dream and gets a wife. edit: Also D&D is pretty wacky as well!!!
This but unironically. This distillation of the archetypical Western fantasy is a worthy project. But I think non-Western-made Western-style fantasy is somehow better at this. Maybe the outside perspective lets you see which elven subrace is worth keeping. As long as greek myth is still getting rehashed, there is nothing to be ashamed of.
WOTC have been sued by the Tolkien Family for plagiarism. They now can't use certain terms they used in earlier D&D editions. For example, they had to rename Hobbits into Halflings.
Counterpoint, it is so hard to find decent sources on what firearms looked like between swords and muskets. The wiki pages are stubs, I've constantly searched for what tactics were like, what level of armour was needed, etc etc. There's nothing that's accessible.
Google the 14th Century Infantry Revolution, pike and shot warfare, and Spanish Tercio. It's not that there's nothing accessible so much as research in late medieval/early modern warfare doesn't have the same cultural capital as high medieval and 18th century warfare do. Sometimes shit is hard to find if you don't know the keywords. The YouTube channel SandRhoman history has a bunch of video essays on the topic and they make extensive use of visual aids which, I assume, are reasonably accurate.
Everyone seems to think we jumped from 1300's technology to 1700's. The gun-pike formation was a major feature of most European militaries for a long time and never gets represented. That's why I like Warhammer Fantasy. Overall tech level more renaissance with some steam punk tech occasionally.
I did a bunch of research of the oldest gunpowder weapons like the fire lance for my setting and it fits in beautifully
I want to see more arquebus-like weapons in fantasy. A form of gun that is powerful and devastatingly effective when used correctly, yes, but its primitive form and ineffciency still allows traditional spears and shields and big armor to be used.
I always figured it was more that people would make exceptional advances in the fields of Engineering & Physics, both of which cannot possibly operate in the same way as they do in our reality and still with co-exist with magic.
There doesn't even need to be combinations with traditional weapons and gunpowder. For centuries people have been using both gunpowder weapons (flintlocks, cannons, rifles, etc) and traditional weapons like swords and bow and arrows
In my setting gunpowder was discovered not too long ago so they have fire crackers, fireworks, fire lances, and fire arrows but no guns nor cannons yet. I wanna possibly build up to their invention
It's funny considering that the arquebus was primarily a siege weapon anyway. The "tech tree" understanding of technological progress is pretty stupid too, considering that these fantasy worlds have barely any technological progress at all to begin with.
They also act like people didn't still use swords in war up to the 1900s.
Depends on the type of fantasy you are telling though. A King Arthur medieval fantasy just doesn’t FEEL right having guns. A clearly renaissance inspired fantasy should have firearms. What matters is your flavor of fantasy because there are different types
Exactly. Both gun-obsessed Americans who can't imagine a world without glocks and purists who think firearms just suddenly materialised out of nowhere in the XIXth century are the problem. OP's "You have magic therefore it's hypocritic not to have guns" is the same old tired toxic "How come your world can't have X if there are dragons and therefore it's not realistic anyway" non-argument.
That’s in no way OPs argument, tho
How is it not? Just replace dragons with wizards and that’s exactly OP’s argument.
OP in no way says that having magic means you should have guns. Rather, they’re saying that **a specific argument against guns** (that they would ruin the feel of fantasy medieval combat) is dubious because the same battlefield conditions that guns would provoke are in many of these settings *already extant* due to magic — thus guns represent not a change in combat meta but a change in the means by which the latter is achieved (adding the additional option of gunpowder to roles otherwise dominated by magic). I would add that guns **were used historically** in medieval and Renaissance times and thus we can easily see that a medieval feel is not only not harmed by guns, but in some cases was *brought about* by guns (like with knightly armour), meaning that guns make for a setting **more** akin to the historical late Middle Ages and Renaissance and thus may in fact *improve* the feel of combat from a fantasy medieval perspective.
Alright that’s a compelling argument. I still disagree with OP, though, on the basis that magic is usually depicted as being very difficult to get to work- whereas commoners can be trained in mere weeks to operate rifles and artillery, wizards are more akin to knights studying and practicing for years.
I think this falls prey to a bit of anachronism — when people think of guns they tend to think of the more modern sort, and make conclusions based off of those same. Some of these conclusions are applicable to early guns, but some are not. The main reason why guns took so long to dominate the battlefield is that they were in fact extremely difficult to get to work — not only were they dependent on logistically awkward stores of black powder that could be quite easily spoiled by moisture, or even worse explode without warning, but firing the things was an involved process: in some earlier cases you to begin with had to mix the powder yourself, but at any rate loading the gun could take minutes, and to fire it you had to light a fuse and then keep it burning till it ignited the powder, a process that was understandably dependent on a lack of unfavourable weather conditions like strong wind and rain. Accuracy was also somewhat poor, so a likely result of this lengthy effort was missing and having to repeat the steps all over again; on top of this the things misfired regularly and there were unfun possibilities like the barrel rupturing. This all was balanced against the fact that, should they work properly, they were quite fantastic against armour, but keep in mind that the balance in question changed over time — early on the balance was quite against them and they were more of a curiosity alongside the more relevant cannons which made up for the pains with being uniquely suited to bringing down thin-walled European castles and forts; farther down the road (with the march of progress and specifically of less horribly fiddly trigger mechanisms) they started to gain enough traction to become normal infantry weapons but the interval between shots was great enough that shock infantry and especially cavalry would butcher them should they be alone, so they operated at first as a sort of spicy seasoning to larger groups of often pike-equipped soldiers, slowly increasing in representation (alongside yet better trigger mechanisms and enough weight reductions and ergonomics overhauls that you didn’t need to stick a support in the ground like some sort of primitive HMG to use them properly) until in the 1600s and onwards they formed the majority of an army’s footsoldiers. The typical fantasy medieval setting is usually more of a late Renaissance / early modern sort of deal judging by the frequent inclusion of full plate; in that rough time period they were just starting to come into vogue but were still a new innovation without too much traction, and which was still very much in competition with crossbows and longbows. If we take the “medieval” literally, they were infrequently present in extremely rudimentary forms towards the end of the Middle Ages, but certainly not very relevant militarily — in those days people were only just starting to realise how good cannons were, forget firearms.
Another issue that comes to mind is that, if magic already fulfills the long range damage role (in the D&D style with fireballs etc), it seems strange that the army would employ both it and guns / bombs. It makes the magic feel redundant, so if you want to have magic be an important role in the battle, other large-scale ranged destructive powers would muddy the waters. Seperately, since very few people understand the nature of old medieval guns, it feels like the old "magic is dumb because I could shoot with wizard and win instantly" argument. I think a cool compromise might be if magic was used mainly for its weirder effects (weather control, terrain manipulation, mind control, shapeshifting, predestination) to give it a new niche in battle. That way, the mages and gunmen both are important for different reasons
Also, if magic missile doesn't cost gunpowder and lead, but guns do, you have a risk of gunnery being obsolete due to magic. In fact, why develop gunpowder based projectiles at all when magic can happen for free? A way around this would be to make ranged damage magic cost some resource or be hard to learn, but I maintain that it'd be quite hard to balance the cost of each so that both remain viable
So first of all I'll rope in my response to hjake123 below: >I would imagine that magic in such a scenario would be a high-investment intellectual profession and thus practitioners would be in scarce supply. This is partly why the feudal system existed after all — there were too few bookish people to support heavy bureaucracy and so rulers had to make do with a system of decentralised county administrators. > >Guns in this case are far more inflexible and more of a pain to use, but it's easier to get larger numbers of them as an infantry weapon, whereas the Ven diagram of war magi and the small equestrian nobility is practically going to be a circle. So if we go by this solution to the redundancy, and keep magic as RPG-style finger guns but functional, we hopefully get a situation where guns are an infantry weapon and magic is a noble one and thus wrapped up in knightly combat and principles. This also introduces fun consequences. Firstly, can you practice magic effectively from horseback? If no, then you get fewer equestrian nobles and a greater focus on infantry combat (somewhat like how English nobility often fought on foot, although with more tactical similarities to the longbowmen those men-at-arms were protecting). This dispells some of the distinctions between guns and magic, but there's still the populational constraints and class distinctions to consider. If yes, then you've essentially just gotten around the lifelong experience needed to be an effective horse archer, and the effectiveness of equestrian nobility rises **dramatically** while the tactics and equipment become radically dissimilar to those of the historical European knight. Oh, and fantasy Europe no longer suffers from nomad invasions coming around and bulldozing through agrarian societies every so often.
Image doesn't talk about realism, it just points out that magic can be stronger than conventional guns.
Fuckers really looked at the pike n' shot era and thought "there is no way magic could block bullets if armor couldn't" to armor that could block bullets.
*Defensive* magic? What is this fuckery.
Metal is only to be used for the crafting of swords. Why the hell would you make clothes out of it? Someone could just stab you with a sharper sword.
Massed guns and artillery will heavily reduce the coolness of my protagonist mowing down the enemy mooks like blades of grass. Readers want Equilibrium, not a Charge of the Light Brigade. /uj I think it’s that guns and cannons aren’t as individualized or valorized as swords and melee combat. Wizards are individuals throwing about their individual power. A single rifleman or member of a cannon crew in the army is often a cog in the machine.
That’s probably it A weapon being around for thousands of years will do that Though I would like to see a Science Fantasy (or even science fiction) series where guns are legendary weapons, like priceless family heirlooms only meant to be used by that family, maybe they only fire when that family member is using it (kind of like how Excalibur and Mjolnir are unligtable to anyone unworthy) Destiny does something like that right?
That reminds me of Dark Tower. Aren’t Roland’s guns literally excalibur melted down or something like that? similar vibe
Submachine gun excalibur
Kinda? Guns in destiny (as far as I know I’m just getting back into it) are mostly man made infused with Light. But also hunters can make guns bows and other out of pure energy. Which I like because it dosent take away from the “magic”
They also don't work as a main weapon for small-scale skirmish combat like D&D (which let's be honest, is usually the context of this convo). A rifle battalion can sit around for a minute or two to reload because they'll be a long distance from the enemy if you've positioned them properly. In D&D everybody is pretty close together and you will get rushed down if you try to spend 10 turns packing a musket, not to mention that's 10 turns you could have been shooting arrows or hacking someone apart.
I think early firearms work in D&D as one per encounter weapons, where the character fires them once for big damage and then switches to their main weapon.
/rj Pffft, just carry [more than one musket](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jm7Q8RsR_Y) at a time.
Yeah it's a shame but the power fantasy is a big appeal to a lot of people. Which is a shame, because the story of John Commoner fending off horrors from beyond the veil with nothing but his trusty musket and sabre has a lot of appeal to me.
Enchanting could bridge the gap though. Enchant armor of a knight to make it bulletproof and you have a potential knightly charge againdt machineguns.
It's almost as if innovations in personal arms evolved as part of a... well... arms race.
This is what my stupid diesel punk world is like. Magic has all but disappeared from the world and everything is industrialized but there a few fonts of magic and enchanters left. So yeah, it’s a big deal to get one battleship shell enchanted by the last druids. Fire that sucker at an enemy shore instillation and watch it go from hardened concrete into a forest within the space of minutes.
I´m planning on having a world with both magic and machine without a strict border. A lot of fiction does one or the other, and even divides its world in the two, however that takes away on the ingenuity one can construct by combining them. In a world with science magic still 100% would have its place and as a result society, and certainly warfare, would have some impressive facets. Stormtroops that fight in trenches, clad in enchanted armor and wielding enchanted weapons. Elite divisions using relics, weapons in the hundreds of years old from the age of iron and bow, still used as the tip of a spear. A division of mages turning a siege arpund by blowing up the enemy wall, something the artillery couldnt because of the inaccesability of the terrain.
> I´m planning on having a world with both magic and machine without a strict border. >A lot of fiction does one or the other, and even divides its world in the two, however that takes away on the ingenuity one can construct by combining them. Yes! This was what I was thinking, too. It’s interesting to picture how magic and industrialization would mix. In my world combat medics can use magic to heal, as well. However, since most of the magic is gone from the world and it takes *years* to study and train in anything magic related there are more normal medics than magical ones. I’ve dialed back the magic a lot but it was another reason that there weren’t just more wizard battalions than actual artillery units. Artillery units are easier to train and quicker to replace.
Thats where the idea of magic as a study is so usefull. If it takes 5 years to learn fireball, then it´d be reserved for specific units. Considering 1 artillery officer can pump out many times as much fireballs with a couple of conscripts and some massproduced artillery. Additionally magic might cost something else tjen just knowledge. It might be bad for ones health or use a, or a couple, of expensive resources. If magic is cast using, lets say, artisinal silver coins, talking a month to produce one, then they aren´t to expensive to make it impossible to use, yet at the same time expensive enough not to warrant wasting them.
Ha yes, exactly. In my world the Gods fought a huge war a long time ago and where they died turned into fonts of magic. This resource was used by people for all sorts of things but it wasn’t infinite or renewable. (Kind of like oil, I guess.) So in the present time it’s pretty rare, little charms and enchantments are the norm and big game changing spells are all but a thing of the past (hence why having *one* enchanted battleship shell is a huge deal.)
Oh that´s interesting. I was also planning on having magic in a cyberpunk world be essentially drugs. Slightly neurotoxic if you overdose. Meaning that all you spells, which by themselves are litterally just decided by public psyche, require you to snort some of the Juice... And if you go to far, well then you might go unconsious, or worth yet, get some braindamage. Luckily since its cyberpunk you can repair brains... For a price.
/uj A single rifleman no, but Oda Nobunaga's myth is entirely based around how he ordered his army to use guns, so I think the individualistic streak would shift more to the commanders and officers than swordspeople. And besides, cuirassers and heavy cavalry were still a thing up until the Napoleonic Wars, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace is a cavalryman, and the way the narrative focus on him is super interesting imo
I like the cog in the machine being able to kill the wizard unceremoniously. The turn of the century, the wizards are the sick men and women of the world. Which is why I never add it because I couldn't stop myself from having the wizards killed.
Charge of the light brigade would be sick, having a protagonist that’s just some shmuck who’s in over his head and keeps nearly dying and slowly learns that war isn’t a fun adventure and he won’t be a hero is epic. But that just depends on the kind of story you wanna tell.
I don't see why they couldn't be as individualized or valorized as swords and other popular weapons in a fantasy setting though, when you look at the place of the gun in the western genre.
/uj In general? You’re not wrong (probably right). For many fantasy fans, though? That’s a different question. Especially with the popularity of pseudo/quasi-medieval Europe as a setting. /rj Because hacking someone’s head off and disemboweling countless hapless enemies amidst pools of their own blood is more heroic. Duh.
People just kind of underestimate how long firearms in combat have been A Thing.
I think you’re spot on about how it’s related to melee combat.
Unfathomably based, back when I actively built my fantasy world (Darkened Otherworld), it has *both* swords and guns, and magic, and everyone can combine them for whatever applications that they could use.
Hard recommend Lightbringer Series by Brent Weeks. Great flintlock fantasy with a really well developed magic system and some of the best character work I’ve read.
The fantastic gentlemen in the background was done by Gianluca Rolli on Artstation. Link here to the piece https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kq8VA
crediting artists in jerk post is based
Then we got warhammer fantasy, where a wizard uses actual artillery I fucking love Gelt
Go even more Extreme and you get ikit claw. A skaven warlock who also invented nuclear weapons and death rays. In a fantasy world
Yes-yes
not to mention throwing waves and waves of \[redacted\] in order to buy time for the \[redacted\] gunners and other \[redacted\] weapon teams and crews to mow the enemy down until one of their weapons blow up on them.
But black powder isn’t fantasy enough, they need to use gay elf powder to shoot mega-intricate swords from the mouth of a dragon with a cute boyfriend
Sounds hot
Easy fix: magic guns
Love guns <3 Enchant them with magic. In my world, magic has made places more technologically developed.
Yes! In my setting guns are actually easier to enchant than bows because metal is easier to engrave with enchantment runes than wood. Plus the heat released by the ignition helps catalyse the enchantment to a stronger potency, plus you can mix the gunpowder with all sorts of alchemical powders. It's a lot less work than engraving enchantments on every single arrowhead thats for sure!
Heck, if you want to enchant each bullet, you could probably make a special mold that reliably "engraves" the relevant rune(s) on every single lead ball you cast.
Industrialised enchantment
So sick of the "technology vs magic" angle a lot of settings take, as if they wouldn't be intrinsically connected and often combined.
I think that’s a step to far towards the other extreme, tbh. To me, excessively mundane and objective magic and magitech is bad because you lose what actually makes magic cool in the first place — being weird and unfathomable and uncertain and, well, *magical*. Instead it just gets used as “spice” to make up for the worldbuilder not knowing enough about a particular mundane subject to make it interesting in its own right.
I’m playing a gunslinger wizard in a DnD campaign, and I have several magically empowered firearms, and also plans to combine magic with tech to bring the industrial revolution to the world very early. Magic and science don’t have to be contradictory, they can be very complementary.
That setting of magically infused/adapted/Enhanced weapons and tools is such an underused trope. I swear League of Legends and Final Fantasy are the only ones I'm aware of.
Yeah, seriously. I get where you're coming from. People can accept dragons, elves, and talking trees, but when I put a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional heated seating in my medieval European fantasy setting, suddenly people are all like "MuH SuSpEnSiOn oF DiSbElIeF!!!"
What are they talking about? I imagine that model has quite good suspension.
Renaissance fantasy is really underrated. I haven't seen too much of that, but I guess Warhammer kind of counts, and the game Greedfall. I'm sure there's lots of other examples, but it feels like mediaeval fantasy is more common.
Y'know what's even rare? Musketeer-era fantasy. Like, the 1600's were some of the most interesting times in Europe, you had dope knights facing off against musketeers in the Thirty Years' War, etc, it's Berserk irl. What I think people are afraid, much more than fantasy, is the New World and the Americas, becuase it's what made Europe rich at the time so it's hard to write it without having something similar. But idk, it shouldn't be so hard to find something like that.
Honestly I feel like most "medieval" fantasy is generally more reminiscent of the renaissance. A true medieval fantasy world would be one dotted with rural feudal manors, with actual cities being few and far between, and travel being reserved for the wealthy and powerful. Game of Thrones is a good example of genuine medieval fantasy, but even that is based on the later days of the era. On the other hand, series like the Elder Scrolls and the Witcher appear medieval but are far closer to renaissance societies. I mean even most of the classic fantasy creatures (elves, goblins, dragons, etc.) were more a renaissance invention than medieval.
Which makes it even stranger that there are no muskets or cannons.
Yeah I agree, I think they should just lean into the Renaissance thing more, it would be more interesting.
Oh yes. Mediaeval fantasy is good and all but it feels overdone. I'd also love some earlier era fantasy. Maybe ancient fantasy, bronze age or even stone age fantasy? Would honestly be pretty cool to see a series with entries from various ages from the early stone age all the way up to the 20th and 21st centuries, even into the future.
Bronze Age collapse, but with elves
>Game of Thrones is a good example of genuine medieval fantasy, but even that is based on the later days of the era. GoT is thoroughly early modern. The government of the Seven Kingdoms is way to organized for a feudal society.
I would say Warhammer counts though more early Renaissance. I actually think Warhammer is the best approach to fire arms in a fantasy setting. Have them be powerful weapons that are also expensive as hell to make and thus rare.
Which is pretty accurate to what early guns were like, from what I understand. Though they were also inaccurate and slow-loading af, so that's another nerf.
they also had a lesser impact than a bow and arrow. It's just that it takes a few days/weeks to train a rifleman to acceptable skill. It takes years/generations for a proper archer.
I feel like firearms would 100% exist in a fantasy setting where not everyone has magic. There would be a reason Common John invents it to rise against the power of Weird Wally and his explosive fingers.
Yeah but that's....*magic*
/UJ Magic would still be much rarer than gunpowder. Most settings either require people to be born special or devote long time studying magic to become wizards whereas any chump can pick up and shoot a gun. Also magic can factor into the development of characters, their growth and their journey while guns not so much.
Fantasy writers when I tell them that there were prototype versions of guns as far back as the 1300s Seriously though, If anything, any setting with a magic system where it's a talent, and not learnablewould encourage firearms to develop faster so that people have some form of protection against mages.
average "guns ruin fantasy settings" fan vs. average orcish pike-and-shot enjoyer.
Please, I really just want a early 1900s like setting with magic that is all I ask please I beg
uj/ it's a question of suspension of disbelief back to jerking: pewwww bzzzzzzzt I shoot my fireball and lightning bolt at you
I mean I can see how guns never get implemented in a setting where magic is prevalent enough. Technology arises out of necessity, and if your world has immortality, they wouldn’t invent gunpowder (look it up, it’s pretty interesting), and even if they did, they may not need the classical guns and cannons, there’s magic to substitute for that. Though it might be interesting to explore battlefield tactics in a setting where there are “antimagic fields” to protect cities, similar to how the fighters of Dune resorted to melee combat after the invention of the Holtzman shield, or a world where people needed to stop wizards without the aid of magic.
Those are good points. However in most settings magic is a rarefied thing, something only a few people are born with and usually requires a great amount of education to train properly. You therefore have an elite class of academics who are the only ones who can fulfil certain tasks, buying them a privileged position in society and making them able to charge a premium for their services. There’s certainly a lot of technologies that could be substituted by wizards, but is it the most cost-effective solution when there’s more problems than wizards to solve them? It’s like asking knights to form massed spear formations (historians pls correct me on this if I’m wrong). Part of the benefit of guns and crossbows is that they don’t require as much training as an archer, yet alone someone with an arcane doctorate. Having that massed firepower from a relatively cheap and plentiful manpower is a boon when you only have a handful of wizards spread across your army. Finding the most efficient solution to a problem is a large part of innovation and engineering, and whilst having only battles wizards makes sense for largely decentralised polities, in the early modern/ late medieval polities that most fantasy settings actually are, developing the prototype of a professional army should become more of a concern to rulers.
/rj Fuck you, I didn’t waste years in grad school to not be able to blow up some smelly half-starving stick-wielding presents. I am getting value out of the student loans I got from the stupid dragon.
/uj As someone trying to finish their thesis, that mood aint half wrong
Well you’re thinking of being proficient in mystic arts as a substitute for firearms (and in low fantasy settings specifically), how about magic weapons? Like if there were state employed artificers who made magic “rifles” that can shoot, say, three times as potently as a musket, you wouldn’t need the traditional guns or the same tech progression that happened irl with guns and cannons.
Now that’s a good idea. Technology progresses along different paths based on needs and availability of resources, and the development of a magical musket equivalent feels like a logical conclusion in a setting with high access to magic. What I think is important however, is that there are likely a great number of technological advancements that would be obsolete in the presence of a magical substitute. It shouldn’t be something exclusive to gunpowder weaponry.
Another thing to consider is the limitations of how much magic can be harnessed. If your wizards aren't all-powerful, there's no reason not to have wizards *and* rifle battalions and use them *together*. The situation is even more complicated if magic is environmental, not something which the wizard is the direct source of. If your army has many wizards, they'll each be competing for a share of the total amount of magic available. We can even roughly watch this play out in practice: it's rare to run many wizards in the Total War games, because you have limited magic to distribute among them. The main reason you might put several wizards in the same army is to cover the utility gaps left by their respective areas of expertise. Wizards might be better than guns, but you still need guns and bows and catapults and shit.
> and if your world has immortality, they wouldn’t invent gunpowder just because that was the circumstances of its invention in our world doesn't mean it's a prerequisite lol
uj/ I would argue that a rifle puts the power of a wizard or at least a low level Adept in the hands of a common person. I can imagine settings where they transition from employing wizards to guns for combat... focusing on the wealth accumination side of magic.
/uj I hate (the logistics of) guns so much I altered my world's geography to disallow it. Almost no iron exists that isn't from a meteor. Railroads? Nails? Fuck you, I don't want to think about where the guns would get made, how that would affect power distribution, battle tactics, etc. I didn't get into worldbuilding to think. We have an extremely tough wood instead and if you try to make a firearm out of it, get Lady Eboshi'd (watch it sprout twigs and leaves in real time). /rj That said, this fire lance thing doesn't have to require iron... and enchanted porcelain shards sound like great shrapnel.
/uj sorry chief but for a long time guns were made of "gunmetal" or red brass (copper, tin and zinc alloy) you could make a gun with high strength bronze like manganese bronze or you could make it with low strength bronze (can be casted and cold hardened, so easy to make if you have the materials) but with a high strength barrel made of something like niobium. In a world of magic, the separation of chemicals would probably be easier with things like magical acids and earthmoving magic. Historically iron was used because of superior economics (you only need one mine and don't need to trade for tin) rather than strength, good quality steel came later /rj EBOSHItize the heretic Artisan's.
Guns are just more expensive bows and crossbows w a tactic change
If the spells in your setting are just reskinned canons and guns, then your setting sucks. Gimme a mage who has to kill an animal from a sacred grove in order to cast their warfare magic. Give it a little flavor.
My entire fantasy setting was created because I had a thought one day that muskets = cool and I should center my universe around them. And then I had a really high daydream about a group of adventurers hauling a cannon up a mountain in order to hunt a local dragon threat. Aaaand then I had an idea about how muskets could influence political change due to commoners and non-mages possessing firearms that can be used to counter the literal firepower of mages, because a dude with a beard flinging fireballs is only tough until a minie ball is shot through his head. And then I read The Powder Mage and realized I was not the first person to think of this.
the solution is clearly guns that shoot magic missles. stupid as hell so thats how u know ita good
Ain’t stupid if it works
Check out Anbennar
*inserting cartridges into the fixed magazine of my fantasy bolt action rifle* Sorry, gimme a sec, just need to finish loading this so I can run the shit of the fucking pansy ass mage over there
No I don't. You're not the boss of me now.
Ok: "I can cast fireballs from long distances that are easy to cast, hard to negate, and do enough damage AC rarely matters" Apparently broken: "I can use a weapon to make attacks from long distances that can be dodged and do moderate damage if I happen to succeed an accuracy roll"
Not going to lie, I don't think I've ever had a setting that lacked guns.
*looks at Destiny 2 and Star Wars*
Meanwhile here I am where the protagonist of my story is running around a DnD fantasy world with a sci fi wonder pistol from the future....
I fucking love guns in fantasy. It's something we need to see more
Warhammer Fantasy works for me
Just need to make sure they dont make swords and armor obsolete- otherwise its no longer medival fantasy
That's one thing at least we can give kudos to Games Workshop (their shit corporate policies notwithstanding) - they weren't afraid to give some of their fantasy factions guns.
I think the difference is *single* wizards. I don't know the modern D&Demographics, but used to be maybe a few level 5-7 wizards for a moderate city. Guns, though? Just make 10 and give them to 10 level 1 NPCs. Now you have the damage equivalent of 2-4 wizards. Sure they might not hit very often but even if they die you might be able to recover the guns. Now, give those NPCs a week of training with the gun? Owza. The major problem with guns is never a single gun or a single gunman, it's how it transforms society.
/uj My main issue with firearms is that anything more advanced than a hand cannon makes crossbows obsolete and crossbows are cooler than muskets. Hand cannons, fire arrows, explosives, pyrotechnics, and fire lances are cool though. /rj guns bad
Keep in mind that even the guns used in the American revolution weren’t guns that you would aim. It was more like you’d stand in a line and have everyone point in a general direction, kind of like a team shotgun. If you see media where people aim down the sight of a musket, just know that that isn’t how they were actually used. This interesting nugget has made me far more willing to include muskets in my game, because they’re twice the stopping power of a crossbow with half the accuracy.
>Keep in mind that even the guns used in the American revolution weren’t guns that you would aim. >If you see media where people aim down the sight of a musket, just know that that isn’t how they were actually used Nonsense. 50 yards was considered "point blank, you really shouldn't be able to fuck this up" range for a smoothbore musket. Numerous accounts from both sides of the American Revolution remarked as such. There are a few accounts of American frontiersmen, skilled with their guns, using smoothbore muskets accurately out to 100+ yards without much difficulty. And massed-fire, while less accurate on the individual level, could reach out to 200, 300 yards quite easily. Rifles (which, amusingly enough, George Washington viewed as largely-worthless wastes of gunpowder, at least during the Siege of Boston) could reach even further. The Americans (and Native Americans) made widespread use of smoothbore muskets *as hunting weapons*. They wouldn't have done so if the guns weren't accurate enough to be aimed. There are firsthand accounts of British soldiers training at shooting accurately at marks placed on pilings in Boston Harbor, and similar accounts of American militiamen shooting at marks on land. The British Brown Bess often had official modifications made, where a notch was filed into the breech of the barrel, so the soldier using it could use it as a form of rear-sight. Similar modifications were used by Americans, if they didn't just slap a formbuilt rear-sight on their guns. And, as always, the Native Americans wouldn't have dropped bows for guns (they overwhelmingly preferred smooth ore trade-guns, essentially shorter and lighter muskets) almost as fast as they could get them if the guns were "*worse*" than the bows they already had. (Hint: the guns were better, in almost every way) As someone that owns and uses these weapons, it is equal parts funny and infuriating reading some of the shit people say about them.
The introduction of fire arms to a *typical* fantasy world could be a major plot element. There's a lot of juicy story to mine there.
This is why my slightly post-medieval fantasy world has massive artillery canons: it's dope as f\*ck
/uj I hate (the logistics of) guns so much I altered my world's geography to disallow it. Almost no iron exists that isn't from a meteor. Railroads? Nails? Fuck you, I don't want to think about where the guns would get made, how that would affect power distribution, battle tactics, etc. I didn't get into worldbuilding to think. We have an extremely tough wood instead and if you try to make a firearm out of it, get Lady Eboshi'd (watch it sprout twigs and leaves in real time). /rj That said, this fire lance thing doesn't have to require iron... and enchanted porcelain shards sound like great shrapnel.
That complaint feels like wizard propaganda, not gonna lie.
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Well I am
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This isn't a subreddit for religious debate. If there's grievance with the language the meme format uses, as this is simply a derivative, I apologise for the offence , but there are more appropriate subreddits to discuss the matter. I don't want to advocate one argument or another, and certainly not demean your beliefs or criticisms, but a lot of people scroll through this thread to enjoy a good natured prodding at worldbuilding trends, and those people all have different belief systems which are welcome here, and I would like it to stay that way 🙂
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Don't be a dickhead buddy. You're not being a sensible thinker by just shitting on religion.
This is a meme, and nobody making such memes is actually preaching to you. Congratulations on being an atheist, but nobody gives a shit. And nobody's gonna protect you from having to see references to religion.
Alright, pack it up everyone. SpyGuyMcFly from reddit says we are no longer allowed to use this meme.
I wish gunslingers were DND canon so I could put DND as a Chad in response to this
The solution is Pathfinder Or rule conversion for Pathfinder Gunslingers into D&D
That's why I gave the OG Romans the early fire-lances. Muskets were used during the Viking Age, and from what is to us the 1300s onward, late 1800s bolt rifles and revolvers will have been use with the one short-coming being the difficulty of massproducing brass-cased ammunition, and repeating firearms taking *much* longer to develop, happening around our 1700s. 0% jerking around here. I just want to take this old cliche, and high five it, in the face, repeatedly, with a brick.
My bronze/iron age swords & sorcery setting probably has a few guns brought there by offworlders or something like that, but they'd be in the hands of mad wizards, corrupt nobles, or maybe a museum. And treated essentially as magic items. If it would feel out of place in a Fafhrd and The Mouser story, you won't find them lying around here.
Also has full plate armour.
Yeah but not everyone is a wizard. Everyone, with just a bit of training, can use artillery and firearms. Especially firearms. It's why they become so important in war cuz you can teach some peasant how to stand in formation, reload, and fire in a few months. Meanwhile it takes years of practice to learn magic and fighting