Of course, the best reason of all for firearms to be a part of Ravenloft is that they're very much a part of the Gothic-horror tradition. Hunting a werewolf with silver *arrows* just doesn't do the classic monster-hunting stories justice.
The fact that a heck of a lot of Ravenloft's monsters happen to be immune to normal bullets, OTOH, makes such weapons a *lot* less destabilizing for a game campaign than they'd be in a conventional D&D setting. I wouldn't let guns into Greyhawk or Dragonlance -- heck, I'd be reluctant to let them into the Forgotten Realms, where they're officially *supposed* to be found -- but in Ravenloft, they're just not that great an advantage over the threats PCs are opposing.
Firearms feature prominently in my game, at least in the more advanced domains. One of my players carries around two pistols and a parthian rapier (the sword pistol combination). I don't find firearms unbalancing or distracting. To the contrary, I feel that they really fit the milieu. Whereas Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk are pseudo-medieval settings inspired by Tolkien and Leiber, Ravenloft is inspired by gothic horror and often takes place in a rennaisance-like setting.
Historically one of the things that made firearms so prevalent was the ease that they could be used. Unlike other weapons, they didn't take years of training or exceptional strength. With the introduction of firearms, a peasant with a musket could take down an armored knight. To reflect this, I made a houserule that any character from a rennaisance domain automatically gains the exotic weapon proficiency: firearms feat (if firearms could really be considered exotic in such domains). However, I haven't found firearms to be unbalancing because I also houseruled that firearms take a full round action to reload. (Given the fact that a round is only 6 seconds, I could have ruled that they take 4 or 5 rounds to reload.) It's not going to do a lot of good trying to desperately reload your musket while a werewolf is charging at you! So while firearms are relatively common in more advanced domains, they are not the only weapon. Generally a volley of shots is released the first round, and then the players drop their guns and go melee.
Shadow wrote:I made a houserule that any character from a rennaisance domain automatically gains the exotic weapon proficiency: firearms feat (if firearms could really be considered exotic in such domains).
That is a house rule? I thought that characters form Dementlieu, Mordent, etc automatically had the feat. . .
Anyway, I also don't find Firearms unbalancing. I never had problems with them.
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Firearms have some advantages, even with their matchlock and wheel lock versions which suit CL 9 domains. According to d20 Past, they do need at least one full round action to reload, are very inaccurate and misfire at 1 (1-3 in wet weather) but:
1) they can bypass damage reductions of fey and lycanthrope cretures (in d20 past muskets of this period do 2d6 to 2d8 damage)
2) they are pretty good for the first shot
3) they can be give to a non-combatant lethal force (a non-combatant with a bow will do less damage than with a musket).
4) Unfortunately, there is no Str requirement for crossbows in d20. IMO there should be one. A woman scholar with Str 8 should have it more easy to point a musket or pistol and fire than try to load a crossbow.
BEAUTIFUL IS!
CHAOS
too DIM MJLTIVERSE
IS TO NOTICE
MOST THE OF.
IMC firearms are very common in Lamordia, Dementlieu and Mordent, somewhat less in Borca and Richemulot.
Reason: I usually assume that Lamordian CL is 18th-19th century, Dementlieu 18th, Mordent 17th and Rivhemulot/Borca 16th-17th century in Earth reckoning. And although historically firearms were not so effective in these times they were a lot cheaper (especially ammunition: instead of making every single bolt/arrow as handwork - which was quite complicated work, believe me - one could just cast lots of bullets from tin). Also it was easier to use them.
The reason why other neighbouring realms do not use firearms is the RL`s common distrust toward foreign things and also a bit superstition.
i tend to have the western domains with a higher CL to have access to firearms and buy them at the standard price, and increased prices the lower the CL the domain is. It make sense that a rich noble in some low CL domain, would use some sort of trade union (Bortis trading company) to buy that one very expensive hunting rifle they always wanted. So lower CL domains with firearms would only be found among the rich.
"milord prince Othmar, what is that?" inquires Ser Tristen, Othmar replies "why its my Dementlieu boom stick.."
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
- Matthew 6:34
Dont go looking for trouble; its already looking for you...
- Mordentish Proverb
Firearms and non explosive projectile weapons can co-exist quite easily in Ravenloft they're only up to the snaplock pistol. Presently on planet earth we've been exposed to semi-automatic/automatic firearms for the last 70 or so years. But theres still wide use of non-explosive projectile weapons in developing and undeveloped nations, hunting, fishing, killing each other e.t.c. The wealthy west is definitely a minority, just like the Renaissance domains. We're in the 21st century and they co-exist here, so it can work fine in Ravenloft.
I made firearms a simple weapon proficiency for characters born in a CL9 domain. It has been already mentioned that the main reason firearms came to the fore was the ease of use. A longbow takes a lifetime to master, but even a sickly old man can be taught to and wield an arquebus or a musket.
They remain exotic in CL8 and lower domains simply because they are a rarity. I've also introduced more primitive firearms to CL8 domains - the Handgonne and bombards.
Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I was under the impression that reloading any firearm in Ravenloft is a standard action. But looking in the 3.5E Campaign Setting it lists pistols as a standard action to reload. What is the time, please, to reload a musket by the rules? Thank you!
Seek not in the shadows, for there ye shall find secrets too terrible for mortal man to bear.
-Mordentish proverb
Troile wrote:Really the crossbow is the peasant's weapon. You don't need training...when it was invented there was a huge scare about peasants being able to wield such deadly weapons.
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...Well, it might have caused the fear of peasants scare when it was introduced in Europe in the Middle Ages, at any rate.
In the Far East, records suggest it might have arisen independently in several locations, but one point of origin is in pre-Imperial China, which would put it at earlier than 231 BCE (the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang, was buried with the famous Terra Cotta Army, which does include several statues carrying crossbows). There, it was seen as an artillery style weapon, which you would fire in large numbers against massed formations of enemy troops to maximize the chances of a hit. The idea of using a crossbow as a marksman's weapon was still not very common - they were the expensive weapon you gave to a lowly soldier to take out armored enemies without having to train him through generations.
Longbows, as made famous by the English, are cheap to make in terms of industry, but the real cost comes in training. They say "to train a longbowman, start with his grandfather" and there's a strong element of truth in that. Because the propulsion power is entirely supplied by the bowman, you need a man who's naturally very muscular around the arms - both as a function of training, and of simple genetics.
The crossbow, on the other hand, swaps the two investments. Anybody of middling strength can aim and fire it, because the propulsion power is purely mechanical. If you can operate a winch or a stirrup draw, you can force the bow back into ready position and reload it. Thus, you don't have to spend nearly as long training a soldier before he's battlefield-ready. The payoff is that crossbows are expensive. The mechanisms are more complex than a traditional bow, requiring a mix of wood, elastic material, and metal, and essentially you'd need a military industrial complex already in place to dedicate the craftsman hours to produce meaningful quantities of crossbows. The state of Qin was such a society when it established the first Chinese ("Qin-ese") empire.
In Europe, where the lords and nobles reserved their right of use of force through exclusive access to archers and cavalry, having a lowly serf or peasant lugging around a crossbow which he could use without generations of training would have been a destabilizing factor. Crossbows didn't catch on, but it was more for social and political reasons rather than practical reasons. In the Far East, the crossbow and its low-accuracy, rapid-fire cousin, the Zhuge crossbow ("Zhuge nu") have been used in actual military conflicts as late as the Sino-Japanese war in the early 1900s.
A much longer (and non-spoiler'ed) comment on guns
Guns and bows have different advantages and disadvantages. If you want to emphasize one over the other, you can tweak the economic, material, and social conditions of your given area until one weapon type wins out over the other.
Bow physical advantages: Cheap to make - materials readily available. Silent - good for hunting as they won't necessarily alert prey animals... or, less effectively, humans. Arrowheads can deliver poisons to offset the lesser wounding potential compared to bullets.
Bow physical disadvantages: Large - harder to maneuver through woods or difficult terrain stealthily, harder to conceal from searches. Range is dependent on the strength and training of the wielder - investment in training can be very large. Arrows are slower than bullets and are more greatly affected by gravity, breezes, rain, etc. Arrows typically do not cause as great a wound as bullets and have lower penetration power against armored targets.
Gun physical advantages: Small - easier to maneuver and conceal (pistols only - rifles might be roughly equal to bows). Accurate - much less training needed to get a shot on target than with bows. Range is much higher, allowing for more faraway kills. Energy in each shot is much higher than an arrow, allowing for greater penetration of armor and greater wounding potential. Potentially faster rate of fire (depending on tech level) if magazine technology has advanced to revolver or lever-action/pump-action levels, and if bullet technology has advanced to unified powder and payload charges.
Gun physical disadvantages: Costly to make - metallurgy requirements for barrel and bullets to withstand heat extremes in firing; alchemical requirements for gunpowder (actually derived from very common ingredients, well-known to Chinese schoolchildren everywhere, but actually finding out the arbitrary correct ratios is a dangerous process that does require a degree of scientific infrastructure). Very loud - stealth after the first shot is impossible. Potentially very slow to reload (if bullet technology and magazine technology have not advanced sufficiently).
Also, consider the different earliest types of firearms that humanity created, each with fairly distinct functions. Limiting the availability of one type while making another type available in your campaign can give greater flexibility than just banning or allowing all guns.
Musket: simplest gun type - a long smooth tube fires a round bullet with a powder charge. Inaccurate but still powerful at long ranges, this was best used in massed fire. Intended mostly for use in battle against human and cavalry targets.
Rifle: an expensive craftsman gun type when it was first introduced - a long screw-threaded tube fires a shaped bullet. Accurate and powerful even at long ranges. Mostly used by big game hunters, because the first shot was the only shot you would get against an unsuspecting animal target, and you had to make it count as a glancing blow would not kill the target and enable it to escape. Slow to fire, slow to reload - later adapted for use in the military when costs became feasible for mass production.
Scattergun (shotgun): a long smooth tube fires multiple small round pellets. At short ranges, it's likely to hit the target with several pellets at once. At long ranges, they spread out, covering a larger area with low-energy pellets. Mostly used against small game like birds, rabbits, and to control vermin. Each pellet is unlikely to bring down big game (or a human) on its own, but could immobilize a pheasant or a rabbit long enough for the hunter's dog to secure it. In later military use, shotguns allowed a soldier a higher chance pers shot of in injuring (and possibly killing) an enemy at close quarters - popular in trench fighting or urban warfare, where ranges were limited by walls.
Pistols: a very short firearm for personal protection, usually to dissuade human violence. The bullet does much less damage than a rifle bullet, and so a number of later innovations focused on quick firing (the Colt revolver) and concealability (the Derringer).
Making them work:
A number of reasons could arise for the slow adoption of gunpowder weapons even when the materials are available. As in Medieval China, an ample supply of cheap manpower could make it economically less advantageous for a ruler to invest in gun research, even if he currently knew how to make guns.
Gun tech could be arbitrarily set at a certain level by the GM to favor only defensive uses (the Chinese repeating crossbow, the Zhuge nu, is now thought to have been only of much effectiveness when fired from a fixed position in defense of a fortified position, rather than as some sort of medieval assault rifle). Muskets and single shot rifles have serviceable accuracy when fired from a fixed position, but perhaps the drudgery of reloading and resupplying means they cannot be effectively used in attack (because as your musket line advances, you're waiting on your powder boys and reloaders to follow your shooters). Or, the entire gunsmithing industry could be the exclusive preserve of a few wealthy skilled eccentrics - the type who would be willing to sit around mixing weird concoctions of dung leechings (potassium nitrate), bat guano or brimstone (sulfur), and twice-burned wood (charcoal) and risk life and limb in the process, while others mix together increasingly arcane ratios of black metals to create a single gun barrel at exorbitant cost and manhours.
In Ravenloft:
Several rationales exist for domains to suppress or simply disdain gunpower tech, while still allowing individual PCs or NPCs the leeway to use them.
Darkon already deals with the historical anachronism of being a highly magical nation, so a GM could easily handwave gunpowder as being less reliable, more dangerous, and simply more expensive than magical means.
Falkovnia is a highly militarized nation, but could also feature a highly paranoid leadership. Drakov could be simultaneously tempted by the promise of gunpowder on the battlefield, while terrified of a Guy Fawkes-style plot against him - now, a conspirator could eliminate him and his entire leadership remotely, just by piling the barrels high and lighting a long enough fuse. Alternatively, gunpowder weapons could still be at a tech level where the advantages of training a musket division don't quite balance out the ready availability of traditional arms... and tradition typically comes with its own social pressures.
The Renaissance-style domains of the western coast do have firearms according to canon, but they could have a situation where the widespread adoption hasn't happened yet. Much as medieval England's knight-on-horseback was restricted to the landed gentry by reasons of simple economics, it's possible that gunsmithing is a dangerous, wasteful, and industrially expensive undertaking that only the landed gentry could finance - if you can only reliably produce a few hundred rifles, with an applied lifetime of a few hundred shots before their performance degrades beyond effectiveness, then you'd issue those to your elite border divisions nearest to your likely enemy, rather than have them distributed throughout the realm or issued to civilians. Or, the logistical issues of reloading and supplying could be problematic enough that you'd only designate specific supply centers, and deploy static positions of defensive gunmen to control key roads, passes, and other likely avenues of attack.
Finally, nations think in terms of cost-effectiveness. The U.S. armed forces have tested out many models of highly advanced gun systems for their soldiers, but the winning design is usually the design that can be produced in large quantities at economic costs. The world's most successful and widely issued rifle, the Soviet AK-47, was better known for its reliability and economy than for its performance, accuracy, portability, or wounding potential.
Thus, a Ravenloft domain ruler may choose to outfit a limited, elite, loyal crack squad with muskets or rifles in the event of hostilities, while the rest of the populace views guns as an expensive curio or white elephant. While PCs and NPCs, who tend to think in terms of personal firepower and usually have a decent amount of treasure to throw around, could quite feasibly shell out for an expensive firearm. After all, the rifle itself was first adopted by private huntsman and Jaegermeisters who could afford the cost - and military planners adopted the practice afterwards when it became cost-effective.
