Found here. Short version? …Comments traffic gold, baby. Comments traffic gold. Which was not the reason why I wrote the article, but people do love to discuss how and when to introduce firearms into your fantasy RPG campaign.
2 thoughts on “My PJ Lifestyle piece on introducing guns in your RPG is up.”
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Having read through this, and noticed that you specifically mentioned the Thirty Years War along with the alternate gunpowder name, a thought immediately came to mind.
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The setting of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H. Beam Piper is, coincidentally at a technological and societal level roughly equivalent to Europe at the time of the Thirty Years War. There are five Great Kingdoms each divided into divided into dozens of constantly warring principalities (much like the Holy Roman Empire). In this timeline, gunpowder (called “fireseed”) was discovered by a priest of a minor healer god called Styphon when what they were mixing blew up in his face.
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When the priesthood of Styphon realized what they had, built a gunpowder monopoly and used it to make themselves wealthy and influential. If a prince wouldn’t pay the prices they charged for fireseed, or annoy Styphon’s House in any other way they’d publicly put them under an interdict, which let their rivals know that the time to settle accounts was at hand.
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This setup lasted for a while, until Corporal Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police got shifted from our timeline into that one.
I’m completely unrepentant about blowing up characters that try it. (Well, after their first attempt fizzles, anyway. If they research what they did wrong to make it actually work, that’s on them.)