With almost supernatural power, the Gonne can possess the mind of the man who uses it. It shows him the power he has in his hands, and erases all scruples by telling him what could be achieved with this power.
The Gonne, like so many other recent technological devices in Discworld, was invented by Leonard of Quirm.
As usual, he had the best of intentions when he devised it, but it turned out to be one of the most dangerous weapons ever conceived in the history of the Disc.
I always thought that scene from the first Indiana Jones movie where Indy is confronted with an expert swordsman and solves the situation by simply shooting him was a comment on exactly what this article describes...
Why one specific narrow slice of fantasy avoids gunpowder. Steampunk fantasy, gunpowder fantasy, non-eurocentric fantasy, science fantasy etc don't have any issues with gunpowder.
Star Wars has guns. They shoot lasers/plasma instead of lead propeller by gun powder, though.
There's fantasies that incorporate various "{propellant}-powered projectile weapons" but your right that they're not common, though (and maybe not considered "classic" fantasy).
There's also alchemical way to work in guns into a fantasy setting not reliant on gun powder. Or why not have gun powder; alchemy+magic could be a superset of science even.
The Powder Mage trilogy by Brian McClellan includes gunpowder as one of the magic system elements, and integrates it in a way which the author of the OP might be interested in :)
Sword users can learn new techniques. Wizards can learn new spells. Characters can become visibly stronger, or to learn to wield stronger arcane forces. But a guy with a gun can... what? Get a bigger gun?
You take somebody like Magneto and you can have lots of creative applications of the powers, interesting matchups and development. Or you can have Rob Liefeld hero #6, who charges in with big guns. And either the bad guy dies, or the bullets bounce off and there's little ground in between.
There's a whole comic book era of big dudes with guns and they're pretty much all pointless because there's nothing much interesting they can do.
> Sword users can learn new techniques. Wizards can learn new spells. Characters can become visibly stronger, or to learn to wield stronger arcane forces. But a guy with a gun can... what? Get a bigger gun?
A guy with a gun can learn skills for shooting better. He starts with Stormtrooper shooting skills, and ends like the Man with No Name.
Watch an old spaghetti Western, and there are clear themes that the protagonists are far more skilled at firearms than most people in that world. I'm reminded of a scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I think) where the character Tuco escapes or something, goes to a frontier store to buy a gun, then disassembles all the guns at the store, quickly and carefully examines all the components, and reassembles all the best parts into the one he then steals, which shows his knowledge and skill. In those movies the characters' skills are taken as given, but I see no reason why you couldn't have a skill-building arc for them any less than for a swordfighter, a martial artist, or, a wizard.
Another case in point, a movie where the skill disparity is very explicit in the shooting scenes (especially the ending): Quigley Down Under.
> He starts with Stormtrooper shooting skills, and ends like the Man with No Name.
On the other hand, I imagine writing such a story without it seeming contrived could be rather hard. The problem with western style duels is that they often don't leave the loser with many opportunities to learn.
But, on second thought, it's not as if it hasn't been done: Django Unchained is a good example for such a plot.
JRPGs either solve this problem by giving the gun guy materia slots, new different colored guns, or giving everyone generic magic.
(They are very bad at integrating this into the story. In Tales of Vesperia one specific ultra-cool sword is plot relevant, you lose it at one point in the game, and then you find one with better stats in a chest. Also FF7, the #1 gun guy game, has a snowboarding minigame right after a main character death.)
So focus the book on something other than pure fighting! Fantasy is so much more than campaign stories. There happened so much in the early industrialist era, supremacy of gunpowder is one part of that but there is so much more in how society is built and structured that changed in those times. There is so much opportunity for an author that is good at world building.
Guns turn things into an issue of preparedness and position instead of direct martial skill.
It's still skill to get into the situation but it's way harder to work into fictional warrior tropes of superior skill at arms winning.. the virtues wind up looking cowardly.
Compare and contrast with westerns, or any movie with an arming montage.
The boring answer is just that fantasy is about swords and westerns/crime dramas/action are about guns. "Why isn't historical fiction set in the future?" Well, some of them use that as a secret plot twist, but mostly it's just because anyone who writes about the future already has their own genre with better and more useful conventions.
If you put guns in your fantasy then you're breaking a convention, which is fun and profitable in moderation, but you can only break so many conventions before you end up in another genre.
> Sword users can learn new techniques. Wizards can learn new spells. Characters can become visibly stronger, or to learn to wield stronger arcane forces. But a guy with a gun can... what? Get a bigger gun?
You can imagine wizards but you can't imagine more creative guns and guns-usage? For being into fantasy, you seemingly drop the ball on the whole "made up" stuff.
What's to say there aren't different techniques to using guns where one user is better than another? Or since we're in fantasy, that some characters can learn how to avoid getting shot better than others.
Do you have examples of cool things a guy with a gun can do? As some kind of growth curve? That are on par with, for example, Ged growing to become archmage?
I've seen "Wanted" and it wasn't that compelling. Sam Sykes does a decent job in "Seven Blades of Black" ... but even that only works because the gun is a VERY magical device.
In fantasy the abilities of wizards and sword fighters are plausible within the constraints & difference with the real world. Eg magic isn't real and people don't fight with swords, so we're in an unknown territory where a large range of techniques are plausibly effective. You don't know a wizard so you can't really tell me this spell wouldn't work in this conflict, you know?
But people do fight with guns, and the abilities and techniques of guns and what advantages they offer are well understood, pressure tested in real conflict, and easy to find out about. The area of unknown is small, and so mostly the plausible techniques are the real ones.
You can tweak the plausibility by fuzzing off from real world uses with things like laser guns or muzzle-loading black powder, though that's still much better understood than wizard magic. You see a similar thing with fantasy melee too. Fencing is well understood even in the modern world, but how many fantasy sword fighters are recognizably fencers?
> But a guy with a gun can... what? Get a bigger gun?
Watch a cowboy shooting competition some day, be it with pistols or rifles. As a recreational shooter myself, I sure don't have the techniques these people have.
bad argument, imho. you can use you imagination and invent lots of new "skills" for guns the same way you can do for swords and bows: shrapnel shot, crippling shot, blinding shot, rapid fire, etc. Item wise I see absolutely no "logical" difference between guns and "sword A with 10 DMG" and "sword B with 250 DMG and ice damage". This is fantasy worlds we are talking about, cmon.
> Or you can have Rob Liefeld hero #6, who charges in with big guns. And either the bad guy dies, or the bullets bounce off and there's little ground in between.
don't forget pouches. presumably, as the character levels up they get more and more pouches.
He didn't. He was in fact quite clear that Lord of the Rings was inspired in large part by his experiences in the First World War: Dead Marshes especially, but also Sauron and Saruman and their forces of industrialization.
It has been some years since I read LotR, but wasn’t there one very widespread edition that contained a foreword by Tolkien where he very clearly denied any allegory behind the story, and was obviously fed up by people claiming such?
Fantasy avoids gunpowder because there is no character develipment. This is the same reason why guns are the great equalizer:
Just about anyone can semi-competently wield a gun after a ten hour course.
What this means is that guns brought down the warrior casts of Europe, Japan, etc. Guns are the great democratizing force since taw raw numbers become the most important metric of battlefield success.
With a stub nose revolver in her purse, any 110 lb woman can walk at night and have a fighting chance against a 250 lb 6ft 5 monster.
Makes for boring fantasy for sure. Makes for a fair society though.
Make the character an inventor/engineer and suddenly you have endless possibilities for progression and variation. Sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic.
Equalization is not a very convincing argument. You can twist the rules in any way, this is fantasy. Make the firearms less advanced than a revolver, less available, less preferred, countered by magic, or simply make your work not revolving around combat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Mag... has an interesting solution to the magic vs. gunpowder problem: the use of magic makes nearby guns fail, and vice versa. Either can work, but your character must choose to specialize in one or the other.
Readit News
https://wiki.lspace.org/Gonne
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You're going to use a sword when someone 100 meters away can plug you in the head with a gun? Umm... good luck with that.
They tried to paper over the issue by making the stormtroopers terrible marksmen, but that wasn't very successful (at least in my case).
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There's fantasies that incorporate various "{propellant}-powered projectile weapons" but your right that they're not common, though (and maybe not considered "classic" fantasy).
There's also alchemical way to work in guns into a fantasy setting not reliant on gun powder. Or why not have gun powder; alchemy+magic could be a superset of science even.
Shields, personal or larger, hamper many projectile weapons in Dune: the projectile has to 'burrow' through the shield.
"Why (High) Fantasy Avoids Gunpowder"
Sword users can learn new techniques. Wizards can learn new spells. Characters can become visibly stronger, or to learn to wield stronger arcane forces. But a guy with a gun can... what? Get a bigger gun?
You take somebody like Magneto and you can have lots of creative applications of the powers, interesting matchups and development. Or you can have Rob Liefeld hero #6, who charges in with big guns. And either the bad guy dies, or the bullets bounce off and there's little ground in between.
There's a whole comic book era of big dudes with guns and they're pretty much all pointless because there's nothing much interesting they can do.
A guy with a gun can learn skills for shooting better. He starts with Stormtrooper shooting skills, and ends like the Man with No Name.
Watch an old spaghetti Western, and there are clear themes that the protagonists are far more skilled at firearms than most people in that world. I'm reminded of a scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (I think) where the character Tuco escapes or something, goes to a frontier store to buy a gun, then disassembles all the guns at the store, quickly and carefully examines all the components, and reassembles all the best parts into the one he then steals, which shows his knowledge and skill. In those movies the characters' skills are taken as given, but I see no reason why you couldn't have a skill-building arc for them any less than for a swordfighter, a martial artist, or, a wizard.
> He starts with Stormtrooper shooting skills, and ends like the Man with No Name.
On the other hand, I imagine writing such a story without it seeming contrived could be rather hard. The problem with western style duels is that they often don't leave the loser with many opportunities to learn.
But, on second thought, it's not as if it hasn't been done: Django Unchained is a good example for such a plot.
(They are very bad at integrating this into the story. In Tales of Vesperia one specific ultra-cool sword is plot relevant, you lose it at one point in the game, and then you find one with better stats in a chest. Also FF7, the #1 gun guy game, has a snowboarding minigame right after a main character death.)
It's still skill to get into the situation but it's way harder to work into fictional warrior tropes of superior skill at arms winning.. the virtues wind up looking cowardly.
The boring answer is just that fantasy is about swords and westerns/crime dramas/action are about guns. "Why isn't historical fiction set in the future?" Well, some of them use that as a secret plot twist, but mostly it's just because anyone who writes about the future already has their own genre with better and more useful conventions.
If you put guns in your fantasy then you're breaking a convention, which is fun and profitable in moderation, but you can only break so many conventions before you end up in another genre.
You can imagine wizards but you can't imagine more creative guns and guns-usage? For being into fantasy, you seemingly drop the ball on the whole "made up" stuff.
What's to say there aren't different techniques to using guns where one user is better than another? Or since we're in fantasy, that some characters can learn how to avoid getting shot better than others.
I've seen "Wanted" and it wasn't that compelling. Sam Sykes does a decent job in "Seven Blades of Black" ... but even that only works because the gun is a VERY magical device.
But people do fight with guns, and the abilities and techniques of guns and what advantages they offer are well understood, pressure tested in real conflict, and easy to find out about. The area of unknown is small, and so mostly the plausible techniques are the real ones.
You can tweak the plausibility by fuzzing off from real world uses with things like laser guns or muzzle-loading black powder, though that's still much better understood than wizard magic. You see a similar thing with fantasy melee too. Fencing is well understood even in the modern world, but how many fantasy sword fighters are recognizably fencers?
Watch a cowboy shooting competition some day, be it with pistols or rifles. As a recreational shooter myself, I sure don't have the techniques these people have.
IMO it's one of those things that only works once, and only because it references other stuff to provide context.
don't forget pouches. presumably, as the character levels up they get more and more pouches.
Shoot ULR: https://youtu.be/7owwTz7Z0OE?t=11
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Tolkien hated allegorical writing. It's doubtful goblins and orcs are supposed to represent industrialization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #186
(Not in an allegorical way; it's literally what happens.)
Just about anyone can semi-competently wield a gun after a ten hour course.
What this means is that guns brought down the warrior casts of Europe, Japan, etc. Guns are the great democratizing force since taw raw numbers become the most important metric of battlefield success.
With a stub nose revolver in her purse, any 110 lb woman can walk at night and have a fighting chance against a 250 lb 6ft 5 monster.
Makes for boring fantasy for sure. Makes for a fair society though.
Equalization is not a very convincing argument. You can twist the rules in any way, this is fantasy. Make the firearms less advanced than a revolver, less available, less preferred, countered by magic, or simply make your work not revolving around combat.