Firearms / steampunk

[Mangus]

Hello all,

First, I would just like to share my excitement about the new edition of RuneQuest that is about to hit the market. I have been playing roleplaying games for 25+ years now, and I have “tried them all”, as they say. Though it was not as popular as AD&D, I always enjoyed playing 1st and 2nd edition RuneQuest back in the day. These past few years I have gone along with the D20 movement more out of necessity than choice. I am glad to see that RuneQuest has been updated, but still retains a classic flavor.

Having said all of that, I am looking forward to trying the system out, and running a game as soon as possible. I have read quite a few posts here on this forum, but I see little information about how RuneQuest will handle various technology levels, and especially how much information the core rules will present on advanced weaponry. I am most interested in adding flintlock style guns, and steam / clockwork machines to my game. I guess my question is, will the core rules cover this tech level, and if not will there be a supplement on it’s way that will?

Thanks!

 

[Dr. Halflight]

Having said all of that, I am looking forward to trying the system out, and running a game as soon as possible. I have read quite a few posts here on this forum, but I see little information about how RuneQuest will handle various technology levels, and especially how much information the core rules will present on advanced weaponry. I am most interested in adding flintlock style guns, and steam / clockwork machines to my game. I guess my question is, will the core rules cover this tech level, and if not will there be a supplement on it’s way that will?

I'm excited as well and the setting I'm conscidering would be Science Fantasy, with elements from Grimjack, Thundarr the Barbarian, & Masters of the Universe. So I'm interested in adding flintlocks, sun swords, smg's, & ray guns. I don't think anything is planned from Mongoose, but with OGL, 3rd party publishers CAN add to the rules & maybe make a penny or 2. Between what I've seen of MRQ & True20, I'm pretty much set for any campaign I want to run in the forseable future.

Thanks Mongoose!

Doc

 

[atgxtg]

Well, since MRW weapon damages aren't far off from the ones in old RQ, you could probably just port over the weapon ratings from RQ3, CoC, or Strombringer and you'd probably be just about covered.

 

[kustenjaeger]

Greetings

Note that the Companion preview under Civilised does give a hint that gunpowder may be an option albeit it would be a bit earlier than flintlock.

Regards

 

[Mangus]

Thanks for the information and suggestions. Porting the damage ratings from Call of Cthulhu is an excelent idea. That is, if the companion doesn't cover what I need.

Thanks again!

Mangus

 

[atgxtg]

Thanks for the information and suggestions. Porting the damage ratings from Call of Cthulhu is an excelent idea. That is, if the companion doesn't cover what I need.

Thanks again!

Mangus

Well, I suspect that, with an open GL, someone will probably write up settings that use firearms sometime.

I know that the mostali (dwarfs) in Glorantha had some sort of musket, and therre were some blackpowder weapons listed in one of the Stormbringer supplments.

I think I used to have a RQ conversion for using 3G weapons, if you have that product.

 

[andakitty]

You could look in CoC and modify the gun stats there. They list a flintlock pistol as 1D6+1, which is way too low. Use the stock damage for each general type of weapon and nerf the range...and increase the malfunction number, and you would have a servicable set of primitive firearms stats. A Brown Bess musket, Revolutionary War era could be something like 2D6+1, base range 40 yards, malfunction 95%+, 2 rounds to reload, for instance. It doesn't have to be perfect, just feel about right and be deadly. And you are good to go. PC's can really get messed up fast with firearms in a game, as any CoC player can tell you. But it's fun, right?

 

[atgxtg]

You could look in CoC and modify the gun stats there. They list a flintlock pistol as 1D6+1, which is way too low. Use the stock damage for each general type of weapon and nerf the range...and increase the malfunction number, and you would have a servicable set of primitive firearms stats. A Brown Bess musket, Revolutionary War era could be something like 2D6+1, base range 40 yards, malfunction 95%+, 2 rounds to reload, for instance. It doesn't have to be perfect, just feel about right and be deadly. And you are good to go. PC's can really get messed up fast with firearms in a game, as any CoC player can tell you. But it's fun, right?

Careful, you don't want to make the old blackpodwer weapons more powerful than thier modern day replacements. It is always good to check real world data and see how things match up.

 

[andakitty]

Indeed, and I have. You would be surprised. Did you know the Colt .44 Dragoon of Civil War fame can be loaded nearly as hot as a downloaded .44 Magnum? That is, more power than the .44 Special but less than a full load in .44 Magnum. The ball ammunition used in those old guns was much more effective than you would think. And have you ever picked up a Civil War miniball? Scary. Anyway, this is my second main hobby, better not get me started. The example was just to give an idea of what such stats might look like.

 

[Lord Twig]

I would tend to agree with andakitty.

The modern weapons improved accuracy, reliability and speed of loading. The power really hasn't changed much. Having seen a flintlock fired once, it would do a hell of a lot of damage, if it actually hit. Plus, the flintlock was only fired once because we spent all day trying to get the thing to ignite.

At the end of the day we finally got a spark from the flint that bounced around for a fraction of a second before it dropped in the pan, then... Oh boy what a sound! Everyone on the range turned to see what had just exploded! There was a huge puff of black smoke and the guy with the pistol had a stunned look on his face. Then we all started cheering, it was a great way to end a day of shooting.

 

[Adept]

I would tend to agree with andakitty.

The modern weapons improved accuracy, reliability and speed of loading. The power really hasn't changed much. Having seen a flintlock fired once, it would do a hell of a lot of damage, if it actually hit. Plus, the flintlock was only fired once because we spent all day trying to get the thing to ignite.

At the end of the day we finally got a spark from the flint that bounced around for a fraction of a second before it dropped in the pan, then... Oh boy what a sound! Everyone on the range turned to see what had just exploded! There was a huge puff of black smoke and the guy with the pistol had a stunned look on his face. Then we all started cheering, it was a great way to end a day of shooting.

The problem was also with complexity. There is an example from the black powder era, of two squads of musketeers firing away at each other for a long exchange, with no hits on either side (imagine the huge clouds of smoke and the peculiar sound of musket fire). At one point the captain in charge of one of the squads takes a hit, and his head is seen to snap back. The next thing his hand flies to his mouth, and after a frantinc moment of feeling around he is heard to say "Damn, that thing could have split my tooth!".



The problem was that with all the phases and motions of loading the musket "Pour powder, pack powder, insert wadding, pack wadding, insert ball, pack ball, pour in priming powder, cock, aim and fire (taking at least half a minute), the soldiers usually forgot at least one part of the proceedings.

Many muskets didn't fire, or fired weakly with loose powder, fired off the ramrod... etc, etc. Add that to the well known difficulty of aiming straight while under fire, and it's no wonder the musket wasn't a wonder weapon.

In the hands of a sharpshooter sniping away at his own pace, the weapon was much more deadly.

At least this is my understanding of the subject.

 

[andakitty]

Ah, a kindred soul.

I have never owned a blackpowder weapon, but I have fired them. Many years ago (too many) whilst out at a local shooting range, some guy showed up with a .45 flintlock pistol. I traded him 5 rounds of .223 fired from my Mini-14 for one shot with the .45. I still remember it. I took careful aim, squeezed the somewhat squishy trigger, the hammer fell...and nothing happened. The guy says 'just give her a second or two'. So I hold on the target and sure enough the thing fires, maybe 3-4 seconds after I pulled the trigger, and it sort of slid down in my hand like a single action revolver. The recoil wasn't terribly punishing but there was a surprisingly large jagged hole in the upper right part of the paper target. I was surprised I hit it. They are FUN to shoot. Then there was the guy with the collection of Civil War style cap n' ball revolvers. Yes, atg, I have actually fired them too. I have a fair grasp on the subject. Oops, I meant to not get started on this.

 

[andakitty]

You are correct, Adept. There is a story of the revolution...a British officer (whose name I CANNOT recall right now) who was the inventor of the first breech loading rifle was killed by the ramrod from a rifle fired by a panicky American militiaman who forgot to remove it from the barrel after ramming the load home...thus the breech loader was delayed a while before it became common. That's the story in general, anyway.

A good rifleman can load and fire one round from a muzzleloader about every 15-20 seconds, given optimum conditions. One movie that is pretty accurate is the Mel Gibson one, The Patriot. When the lines were firing at each other I found it hard to even watch. Also the Horatio Hornblower TV movies.

 

[atgxtg]

Indeed, and I have. You would be surprised. Did you know the Colt .44 Dragoon of Civil War fame can be loaded nearly as hot as a downloaded .44 Magnum? That is, more power than the .44 Special but less than a full load in .44 Magnum. The ball ammunition used in those old guns was much more effective than you would think. And have you ever picked up a Civil War miniball? Scary. Anyway, this is my second main hobby, better not get me started. The example was just to give an idea of what such stats might look like.

Seems we have another common interest then. Part of the difficulty in assign weapon damages is in what parameters and objectives you set. For instance while the old muskets fired a larger, heavier shot, they paid for in in other performace areas, such as penetration (a pointed, stabilized, bullet penetrates better than a ball. It's a healluva lot more accurate too).

THere are also a lot of risks with double loading weapons, expecially with the metaluugy skills of the time. For quite a long peroid of time a musket was more dangeous to the guy who carried it than the people he was shooting at.

Then again, I'm the guy who used to carry a Holland & Holland Double Rpoyale 600 Nitro Express in our CoC campaign. Almost as much fun as the Achisson assault shotgun in mordern day rpgs.

 

[andakitty]

Oh, yeah. My example wasn't meant to be a serious representation, although I did provide my would-be Brown Bess with a fairly short range and a high malfunction number. It is fairly easy to mock up some pretty real-feeling (ouch) firearms stats with BRP, though. None of this having to be shot half a dozen times with a big bore handgun before you go to the hospital. The worst example game-wise I can remember for that kind of thing wasn't evena D20 game :shock: , it was Dark Conspiracy, a sci-fi horror mix from the early 90's. Excellent game with an interesting but very, very flawed combat and hit point system.

 

[atgxtg]

Oh, yeah. My example wasn't meant to be a serious representation, although I did provide my would-be Brown Bess with a fairly short range and a high malfunction number. It is fairly easy to mock up some pretty real-feeling (ouch) firearms stats with BRP, though. None of this having to be shot half a dozen times with a big bore handgun before you go to the hospital. The worst example game-wise I can remember for that kind of thing wasn't evena D20 game :shock: , it was Dark Conspiracy, a sci-fi horror mix from the early 90's. Excellent game with an interesting but very, very flawed combat and hit point system.

THat was one think that I hated about Twilight 2000 (2nd edtion). You could empty a clip into someone and it probably woundn't faze them.

A brown bess is nearly the pinacle of the muzzle loading firearms. 2d6 might even be a bit low for that beast. Damage for that probably isn't much less than a M16 or AK-47 in BRP terms.

As far as the best system for handling weapon damages, I'd probably have to go with TImelords. Everything was deadly in Timelords, even a knife. It was just a question of how deadly. The game had very extensive damage tables, making where you hit and how well you hit at least as important as what you actually hit with. In Timelords, it was very difficult to get an instant kill result with afirearm, but very easy to get a result that knocked a foe unconcious for 1d10 seconds and also killed him in 1d10 seconds.

The James Bond RPG also handed firearm damage very well. THe results metched up better with real word data than probably any other RPG, and the BOnd game was pretty simple.


[/i]

 

[andakitty]

I am not familiar with either Time Lords or Bond.

The pinnacle of muzzle loading firearms? The Kentucky Long Rifle for flintlock. It was rifled, unlike the Brown Bess, and had an accurate range of 100+ yards (I forget the maximum range for it). The real pinnacle was probably the early percussion Sharps and ilk, circa early 19th Century. Pretty much like the earlier flintlocks except you used a percussion cap instead of the flint and powder pan. No more hesitant ignition.

 

[atgxtg]

I am not familiar with either Time Lords or Bond.

Good systems, both of them. Time Lords is a very innovative game. No hit points per say, but everyone had a "body point" score calculated by the character's mass in kg. Weapons were given a damage value that determined the damage dice rolls (for example DV 10 =1d10). When hit, a location was rolled and then the damage rolled was compared to the target's body point total as a sort of ratio. THis gave a general indication of the lethality of the attack. For instance an attack that did 1/2 your BP was more lethan than one that did 1/4 your BP. This was cool becuase you could easily upscale the system to handle large animals and even dinsouars and it would still work.

Time Lords had supplmenets that would let you write up proactically anything, especially weapons, if you had enough real world data to start with.


THe James Bond RPG is another one of my favorites. The system is fairly simple to grasp, but played very well. What is so nice about the bBOnd game is that is is perhaps the only one where shot placement is the most important factor in determine damage taken, just like in real life. In the game, each weapon has a Damage Class (DC). When a target it hit, you index the DC with a Quality Rating (QR) detemined by how well the character rolled compared to his success chance (think of RQ critical and special success chances, but expand it to 4 differnet degess of scuccess). The better the QR and the higher the Damage Class the greater the damage inflcited.

THis meant that a .25ACP Beretta in James Bond's hands was a lot more lethal than a .44 Magnum in the hands of Joe Average. OF course if Bond picked up that .44, well you don't want to be on the recieving end.

Bond also didn't have hit point but used would levels (Stun, Light Wound, Medium, Heavy, Incapcitated, Killed). When someone got hurt, they had to make a Pain Resistance roll or they dropped to the ground clutching thier wound. THe Ease Factor for the Pain Resistnace roll got more difficulty as the severity of the wound increased.

What is cool about the game is that it gives results that match up well with all the data I've seen for real world shootouts and such. At the same time, the game allows characters like Bond (the player characters) to bend the rules in a unique and limited way so that they can pull off the sort of stuff that Bond gets away with. The game was the orginator of the Hero Point concept, where players get points that thety can spend to alter thie die results. Bond did it first, and IMO it did it the best. THe way the Hero Points worked was ingenious. Hero Points modifed the quality rating of the results, not the die rolls, so it was techincally possible to roll like crap and still do great. At least until your points ran out. Very cinematic.

The pinnacle of muzzle loading firearms? The Kentucky Long Rifle for flintlock. It was rifled, unlike the Brown Bess, and had an accurate range of 100+ yards (I forget the maximum range for it). The real pinnacle was probably the early percussion Sharps and ilk, circa early 19th Century. Pretty much like the earlier flintlocks except you used a percussion cap instead of the flint and powder pan. No more hesitant ignition.

Duh! How did I forget the Kentucky Long Rifle? I better go looking for my brain.

Sorry about that.

I wasn't really consider percusiion cap muzzle loaders either. THat wasmore by design through. I tened to view percussion cap as a sort of hybrid tehcnology. I don't really consider the civil war era "cap & ball" revolves as quitwe the same technology as a muzzle loader.


BTW, I recall reading somehwere that some Brown Besses actually were rifled, although not for accuracy , but as an anti-fouling measure. THe unexpected improvement in accuracy was asuprise and sort of help lead to the oblong shaped proto-bulletes that repaced ball ammuntion.

 

[andakitty]

Time Lords and Bond sound interesting. For some reason (probably my love for other genres) I never picked either up, but I remember seeing them. Not really enough money to get more than the top choices in those days, either.

I agree about the hybrid technology for percussion weapons. Indeed, many were converted to brass cartridge, rimfire mostly I believe, towards the end of the Civil War. Later a great many were converted to good centerfire cartridges such as the .44-40 and .38-40. It is a fascinating subject with a lot more depth and detail than a lot of folks realize. Have you ever picked up a copy of 'Cartridges of the World'?. After browsing that book, 300+ pages of different cartridges, I can't watch most westerns without wincing. You know, everybody running around with a Colt .45 (in 1863, when it wasn't even being produced until 1873 and then mostly for the Army to begin with!) and Winchester 1892 lever actions. Then sometimes you get a movie like Quigley Down Under, which does a little better with that.

Oops again. Well, at least it is somewhat related to the thread subject.

 

[atgxtg]

Time Lords and Bond sound interesting. For some reason (probably my love for other genres) I never picked either up, but I remember seeing them. Not really enough money to get more than the top choices in those days, either.

THey are. Time Lords was very detailed and had the level of complexity that RPGs were pushing towards at the time it was relased. THe guy that wrote it also wrote a streamlined version called CORPS a few years later. You can find a lot of his stuff by checking out the btrc website. I generally use his Gun! Guns! Guns! supplment when doing weapon designs are concversion. In that you can actually work out a cartidge design and how much powder it has, and then you can design the weapon that can fire it. What is so cool is that you get to start with real world data, and the results you end up with are pretty accurate. To give you an idea, I once used the vechile design suppment, and was using the simplifeid formula they had for computing a vehicle's tops speed. I also was using a sports car magazine, one that had a list of a bunch of cars and thier permance stats listed in the back. Well, I took the data from the real world cars, used thie real world coeffiences for drag instead of the approxmate ones I got from game calculations. Lo and behold, all my top speed calculatiions were within about 2kph of the top speeds listed.

If you are big into firearms and RPGs, you really should get a copy of GUns!Guns!Guns! You can design evberything from a rapier to rail gun with it. It even factors in for differenet techology levels. THe designer once wrote up a SMG based upon Roman-era technology. Apparently the Romans had the skills to make an SMG, they just lackded some of the knowledge. Makes for some neat what-if stuff. THe Roman SMG worked, it didn't work well, but a submachinegun in 100 AD is pretty devestating.

The Bond RPG was a lot of fun, and avery good system. It shared some qualities with RQ too. It used the same rule mechanics to handle just about everything in the game. THe way it worked was that you added a STAT (or the average of two stats) to a SKILL rating to get what was called a PRIMARY CHANCE. For example, YOu would average you DEX and PER stats and add your FIRE COMBAT skill to get you Primary Chance to operate a firearm. So a character with a 12 DEX, 10 PER and Fire Combat 8 would have a Primary Chance of 19.

You then multipled the pramary chance by an number form 1/2 to 10 called an EASE FACTOR, representing how easy or difficult a task was. THe base Ease Factor was 5. So, continuing with the example, if a character has a PC19 and the Ease Factor was 5, he would have a 19x5=95% Success Chance.

What was cool was that success chances could range up as high a 300%, and in many cases a skilled character doing a easy task would end up with a Success Chance well over 100. This affected the game becuase the rolled result would be given a Quality Rating, similar to criticals and special success in RQ.

The final Quality Rating would determine how well a character performed a task. For example, in Fire Combat, a bitter qualty rating would mean that the shot inflicted a more serious wound. Opposed tasks would often be resolved by comparing the Quality Rating results of the opposing sides.


This basic mechanic was used from everything from driving cars, to gambling, to combat, to detmining how strangers reacted to you, to seduction.

The whole game sort of worked differently that most other RPGs too. For one thing, the players were among the most skillled beings in the game, and so there wasn't any high level NPCs to step in and take over. In addition, the whole Hero Point concept occasionally led to times when the PCs had more control over what was going on than the GM! Of course, they couldn't do it for ever, but it is a very neat an empowering feeling for a player to be able to do it at all.

I agree about the hybrid technology for percussion weapons. Indeed, many were converted to brass cartridge, rimfire mostly I believe, towards the end of the Civil War. Later a great many were converted to good centerfire cartridges such as the .44-40 and .38-40. It is a fascinating subject with a lot more depth and detail than a lot of folks realize. Have you ever picked up a copy of 'Cartridges of the World'?. After browsing that book, 300+ pages of different cartridges, I can't watch most westerns without wincing. You know, everybody running around with a Colt .45 (in 1863, when it wasn't even being produced until 1873 and then mostly for the Army to begin with!) and Winchester 1892 lever actions. Then sometimes you get a movie like Quigley Down Under, which does a little better with that.

Oops again. Well, at least it is somewhat related to the thread subject.

Yeah, I've seen Cartirges of the World. My local library has a couple of copies that I've pawed through. I've got a few sourbooks that I use for reference too.