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GURPS defines the medieval period as TL3.
Players of D&D think they're playing in a medieval setting.
But much of the equipment in D&D is TL4 according to GURPS, which says it's "age of sail."
So much of D&D is already TL4, I wondered if adding the "missing" TL4 item would break it.
That would be guns.
Pathfinder even has a "gunslinger" class.
Critical Role has a main character in their anime, Legend of Vox Machina, who uses a gun.
TL4 is 1450 to 1730. Guns go from cannon lock gonnes to full flintlock in this timeframe.
But does it matter?
The only things that change, besides firearms, is the adoption of what GURPS calls fencing weapons.
D&D is early TL4 where "sword" still equates to the GURPS broadsword and not a rapier or smallsword.
Artwork from D&D clearly shows ships that are obviously NOT TL3, much like the armor available.
Matchlock and wheel lock guns don't break the paradigm.
Multi-barrel and superposed loads (which didn't catch on in the real world) might get more common if there's an, ahistorical, adventuring class.
The existence of armed and armored, but not noble, persons is also ahistorical. Never mind the racial and gender egalitarianism that's been there since day one, despite what Hasbro thinks.
Considering that I don't think it's even difficult to run a fantasy campaign with Old West gear, it's simple to add some early firearms to the mix.
I've also considered the effect of letting the dwarves and elves be the source of TL4 goods and letting people pay double for them.
The Ulfbrecht swords from history are an example. It appears unlikely that the places where such swords are found had developed the furnaces needed for crucible steel. But they did have trade networks to places that had. A pig of crucible steel could readily be hammered out into a far better blade than could be made from bloomery iron by virtually anyone who could make a sword.
Crucible steel is a very late TL3 technology, but it wasn't native to where the swords have been found.
By TL4, it's a normal technology and it leads to making the long, narrow blades of rapiers.
And given 'magic' and the advancement of alchemy that exists in a 'swords and sorcery' environment, one would think that gunpowder or a magical variant thereof would exist. Just Gygax was virulently anti-gun in his D&D settings, at least from the beginning, though leakovers from Boot Hill, Top Secret, Gamma World, and others intruded.
ReplyDeleteEven with some 'special magic' that interferes with black powder or even nitro-cellulose, there had to be other compounds that would go boom.
I mean, you have mages who can make things go booom and zaaaap and pew-pew-pew magically, fire, lighting and various magic missiles. Controllable black holes exist. Anti-gravity exists via magic. There are even 'optics package' type spells that give distance vision, farsight, infrared and ultraviolet vision.
And non-magical people will work hard to create workarounds to circumvent the mages' control of all the fun stuff.
Especially once AD&D added in later editions things like spell components. Spell components for spells that zap, burn, blow and ka-boom. Which would probably be whatever that world's analog for carbon, sulfur and potassium nitrate.
Of course, introducing gunpowder and gunpowder weapons also means countermeasures to counter magical futzing with said gunpowders. Magical wards around powder stores to keep some hedge wizard tossing magical matches and sparks through solid walls, or stopping magical tunneling or flooding or other fun things.
And I'm sure once gunpowder was 'invented' in a world, and mages realized that said gunpowder was very easily defeated by humidity in all its forms, that said inventors would then react with various flashpapers that are waterproofed, kind of like the oil-laced leaves in John Ringo's "March Across" series.
D&D, like most things portraying medieval, is full of anachronisms. But it could be worse; I've seen movies depicting full plate armor about a 500-600 years earlier than invented (which means an AR15 would have been equally anachronistic to the plate armor description in a medieval setting). 3
ReplyDeleteBut the D&D world is alternate universe TL3, so it doesn't quite equate our in-universe TL3. Guns would unbalance the game horribly unless you balanced it out somehow. But GURPS is pretty good about balance. I'd just use whatever the absolute earliest version of guns GURPS Tech at TL4 and see how it goes. -JKing
Guns in GURPS won't unbalance an adventuring party, near as we've been able to tell.
DeleteGuns and cannon dramatically change war, but not lesser conflicts until the flintlock is perfected by late TL4.
I was thinking matchlocks being the weapon of war and wheel locks being known as dwarflocks.
Magic affects so much technology if you start looking too hard. Widespread and effective spell use could mean that the entire field of medicine is never developed, or is severely retarded, because you never get motivated to figure out why someone got sick when a simple spell cures them fully 100% of the time.
Give it a shot! Heh, literally. Good observation about medicine. -JKing
DeleteMedicine and hedge witches with their herbs and potions still will be popular amongst the little people who can't afford spell cures. Or who belong to the wrong religion or god/goddess in an area controlled by one religion or one god/goddess.
DeleteTech will develop where magic controls as an alternative to magic. Or in combination, like a blacksmith chanting phrases of power while working high-quality ore. Or said hedge-witch brewing up a batch of her special mold medicine (aka penicillin) or some sulfur-based anti-infections.
Like in WFRP!
ReplyDeleteThere really isn't much gun content in WFRP, but it does prove that their inclusion doesn't break the fantasy trope.
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