Developing Guns for a Sword and Sorcery Game
One of the more difficult problems in developing a sword and sorcery game is deciding what to do with firearms. The easy answer is to leave them out. Once guns enter a fantasy setting, there is an understandable fear that they will displace swords, bows, armor, mounted warriors, and many of the other things that give the genre its character. I never found that answer particularly satisfying. If a world contains societies with different histories, different technologies, old ruins, trade networks, skilled craftsmen, and remnants of earlier civilizations, firearms are exactly the sort of technology that ought to appear in many different forms. The problem is therefore not whether guns can exist beside swords. The problem is designing a world in which both make sense.
That question eventually led to the approach represented in the Department 6 article Firearms Beyond Project Issue. The page describes weapons ranging from muzzle-loading flintlocks to cartridge rifles, revolvers, pneumatic weapons, salvage guns assembled around ancient receivers, and sophisticated repeating firearms. The important idea behind the collection is that these are not simply weapons selected from a catalog because they look interesting. Each firearm represents the technological economy capable of making, maintaining, and supplying it. A gun tells the players something about the civilization behind the person carrying it.
The Problem with the Usual Fantasy Gun
When firearms appear in fantasy games, they are often treated as a special category of weapon: here is the musket, here is the pistol, here are their damage numbers, and perhaps here is a rule explaining that they take longer to reload than a bow. That handles the immediate combat question, but it leaves out nearly everything that makes firearms interesting. A sword can remain useful for generations with a competent smith and a supply of steel. A firearm requires a larger system. Someone must make powder. Someone must cast bullets. More advanced weapons require percussion caps, cartridges, brass cases, springs, precision boring, interchangeable components, or carefully made locks. Repeating firearms make the problem larger because magazines and ammunition must be produced in quantity. Smokeless weapons introduce another level of industrial chemistry.
Once I began thinking about guns in those terms, they stopped being a threat to the sword and sorcery setting and became another way of describing it. A warrior with a sword needs a swordsmith. A soldier with a cartridge rifle needs an industrial society. A man carrying a flintlock may come from a society with excellent blacksmiths but limited chemical or precision manufacturing. Someone carrying a sophisticated repeating rifle may be connected to a distant manufacturing center even if the country through which he is presently traveling cannot make such a weapon. The firearm becomes evidence.
That is the principle behind the Department 6 briefing. It instructs a Troubleshooter to look beyond the gun itself and ask about its action, ammunition, manufacturing quality, repair condition, spare parts, and the apparent ability of its owner to obtain more ammunition. A simple weapon maintained indefinitely by local craftsmen may reveal a healthier technological system than an impressive automatic weapon whose owner possesses the last three magazines that will ever be available to him.
Black Powder Solved Much of the Problem
Black powder became the key to making the system work. It permits firearms to remain widespread without assuming that every society has preserved twentieth-century industry. A sufficiently organized community can produce charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter, lead projectiles, wood stocks, and iron or steel gun parts. Better societies can manufacture percussion caps and paper cartridges. Still more sophisticated societies can produce metallic cartridges, repeating actions, standardized parts, and eventually smokeless ammunition.
This immediately creates a technological landscape instead of a technological level. There is no requirement that the whole world be in the equivalent of 1650, 1850, or 1950. Different places can sustain different systems at the same time. A remote community might use a rifled flintlock because everything necessary to keep it firing can be produced locally. A commercial city might manufacture percussion revolvers because caps, powder, lead, and precision machine work are readily available. An organized empire might standardize a breech-loading military rifle because it possesses arsenals, ammunition works, training establishments, and supply depots.
That gave me a way to preserve the sword. Early firearms are powerful, but they are not continuous-fire weapons. A warrior carrying a muzzle-loader may fire and then immediately find himself in a fight where reloading is impossible. A Dwarrow double-barrel flintlock illustrates the idea particularly well. Two barrels give the warrior two immediate shots in a tunnel or passage, after which the compact hammer or pick he carries becomes very relevant. The gun does not replace close combat. It changes the opening seconds of close combat.
The same design principle works for cavalry, urban fighting, shipboard combat, hunting, monster encounters, and ambushes. Firearms can dominate particular moments without dominating every situation. A man with a loaded pistol is extremely dangerous. A man who has just fired a single-shot pistol and has an angry swordsman ten feet away has a different problem.
Guns Began Describing Cultures
Once firearms were treated as technological systems, they could also become expressions of culture. The Coastal Empire's Armory Model 2180 family is important because the Empire can standardize a common mechanism and ammunition family across rifles and carbines. That tells us much more about the Empire than simply saying that its soldiers possess guns. It implies arsenals, inspectors, trained armorers, production records, ammunition depots, military doctrine, and an administrative system capable of distributing standardized equipment over considerable distances.
The GoKabi suggested an almost opposite solution. Their Defender Rifle can change considerably over its working life. Stocks, barrels, sights, furniture, and fittings are rebuilt or modified while the underlying receiver and operating principles remain familiar to GoKabi Tinkers. What appears to an outsider to be an eccentric collection of individually altered rifles is actually evidence of an extremely mature repair culture. Their standardization exists beneath the surface rather than in identical outward appearance.
The Chuhopi carbine developed in another direction. It is a five-shot repeating weapon using an en bloc clip, but its importance cannot be reduced to rate of fire. A Chuhopi does not ordinarily walk into a shop and buy one. Obtaining the carbine involves a journey, and possession therefore becomes part of the bearer's personal history. The weapon can have social and cultural significance while remaining completely practical as a firearm. Finding a Chuhopi carbine abandoned beside a road is consequently not the same thing as finding an ordinary trade musket. It raises questions about the person who carried it and about what happened there.
That was an important realization for game development. A weapon should sometimes tell a story before anyone fires it.
Salvage Made the Setting Stranger
A sword and sorcery world built over the remains of a technologically advanced civilization presents another possibility: old weapons do not have to survive intact. Parts can survive.
The SAR-15 Salvage Rifle is a good example. Its recognizable pre-Fall AR-pattern receiver survives, but later gunsmiths have rebuilt the weapon around locally sustainable ammunition and a manually operated action. New barrels, wooden furniture, fittings, and other components are combined with the ancient receiver. The result is neither an old assault rifle miraculously kept functioning for centuries nor a medieval rifle wearing science-fiction decoration. It is a genuinely new firearm created by people who understand which portions of an old object remain valuable.
This turned ruins into technological resources without requiring the future population to live entirely on scavenging. Salvage is valuable precisely because people know how to incorporate it into contemporary production. A receiver, spring steel, brass cartridge cases, precision bearings, optical glass, or a surviving machine tool can enter a new economy. The people using these things are not merely picking through the remains of a better age. They are engineers and craftsmen making decisions about what can still be used.
That distinction is important in a sword and sorcery game because ruins should contain more than treasure. They contain opportunities. An ancient sword may be valuable because of its material or workmanship. An ancient firearm receiver may be valuable because a gunsmith can build an entirely new weapon around it.
Technological Simplicity Is Not Technological Inferiority
The Spark Lock eventually became one of my favorite examples of the underlying idea. It is an 18.5 mm rifled muzzle-loader using black powder, lead, and flint. Measured only by rate of fire, it looks primitive beside a cartridge repeater. Strategically, however, it can be an excellent weapon because a small community can sustain it. Lead can be recast. Flint can be stored for years. Powder can be manufactured from locally obtainable materials. The lock can be repaired by a competent gunsmith. A settlement equipped with Spark Locks can remain armed even after a trade route has been closed for ten years.
A sophisticated cartridge rifle may be superior in a battle, but only while cartridges continue to arrive. That creates exactly the sort of choices I want in a game. Better technology should usually be better, but it should also create dependencies. The question is not simply whether a weapon is advanced. The question is whether the society behind it can keep it operating.
The same reasoning produced weapons such as Samely Sorbonne's Monster Hunter air rifle. It eliminates powder and cartridge cases from the immediate ammunition problem, but it introduces compressed-air cylinders, seals, precision parts, and charging equipment. The gun is powerful because it belongs to a sophisticated mechanical system. Take it far enough from that system and its advantages begin acquiring a cost.
Keeping the Sword in Sword and Sorcery
None of this requires weakening guns artificially so that swords remain competitive. Firearms should be frightening. Being shot should be dangerous. The continued existence of hand weapons comes instead from circumstances. Ammunition runs out. Weapons foul. A single-shot firearm has already been discharged. Fighting enters a doorway, tunnel, stairway, ship, wagon, ruin, or crowded room. A mounted warrior closes the distance. A monster keeps coming after the first hit. A gun is too long to manipulate easily. Someone wants a weapon that can remain functional after years without access to an ammunition factory.
Swords, spears, axes, bows, firearms, armor, and eventually magic can therefore inhabit the same world without requiring them to be numerically equal. They solve different problems under different conditions. More importantly, they come from different traditions of manufacture and use.
That became the larger lesson of developing firearms for the game. I stopped asking what guns belonged on the equipment list and started asking what kind of civilization could build each one. From there came the more interesting questions: Who makes its ammunition? Who repairs it? How expensive is it? How far does the trade network reach? What does ownership imply? What happens when the supply route fails? Can somebody reproduce the weapon, or are they merely preserving it? Does its design fit the body and fighting style of the people who use it?
Once those questions are answered, the gun stops being an intrusion into sword and sorcery. It becomes part of the world. A rifle leaning beside a tavern wall, a revolver in an officer's holster, a strange salvage gun carried by a traveler, or a pair of enormous flintlock barrels in the hands of a Dwarrow can tell the players where technology came from, where commerce goes, what a society can manufacture, and sometimes who the person carrying it is.
That is much more interesting to me than deciding that everyone in a fantasy world has to remain at the same technological level.