A Sword+1 Can Be A Gun (and also handgonnes in general)

 Look at these things. They are called handgonnes or handcannons or hook-guns, some of the earliest firearms. I love them. I am going to spend hundreds of words ranting about them incoherently.

 

Something about them deeply appeals to me. The barbarity. The individuality. The deranged melee attachments. Even in later centuries the concept of a non-gun gun kept appearing like some primordial limbic monstrosity. No neat rank and file marching type device are these, they are each the work of someone who really had the barest idea of what would converge into the standard firearm shapes of today.

 

 

It seemed like there was a time where firearms were just arbitrary combinations of a hollow metal tube and perhaps a hunk of wood, with a melee killing implement crudely affixed somewhere if you wished. Even more gun-shaped guns got this treatment as you can see. It was like a cambrian explosion of handheld ranged weapons. Obviously from that primordial soup came the arquebus and the matchlock and the flintlock and all the modern guns of the present but what if it did not do that? What if firearms remained bespoke and arbitrary?

Yes yes i understand the spike was for latching on to the front of a castle wall to minimize recoil but do not tell me you could not use this as a war pick or hammer in a pinch.

What if gun usage remained something you slapped onto a melee weapon? What if high-quality loot isn't a sword that can call a bolt of thunder or be slashed to emit a blade of green coruscating energy but just has a blackpowder shot loaded and ready to go (the former are still very cool but just bear with me here).

Reloading? Do you reload a scroll of magic missile? You shoot your shot as a single-use item when it is appropriate and then go back to bashing each other. Want more? It's called installing more barrels.

Imagine guns perceived not as dedicated ranged weapons but as a kind of fixture to other weaponry or even things like breastplates, shields, gauntlets, and helmets. True guns can exist, but as a kind of dedicated specialist deal. Oh look at him, the scrollmancer, the potion flinger, the wand expert, basically in that category of guy who really loves his consumables, that is the musketeer in this scenario.

Is this historically or strategically likely to develop? I guess not considering it didn't in real life and they really did try. But you can do it anyway and I bet it would look cool as fuck. Can you envision a legendary musket? I mean probably, but like, it's mostly probably just a gussied up gun-shaped familiar-looking thingy, right?

Now look at this.

 

I can only find a source for this on deleted tumblr blogs and think it may not be real, but I have seen enough multibarreled nonsense to put it at 50/50. Real or not, it is obviously a ridiculous contraption. In the world of fantasy however it is the Detonating Greatmace of King Lutwig, with at least 13(!) maybe more(!) charges of Normal Gun, and 1 charge of Big Gun, in addition to 1d12 crushing damage.

I honestly think it's pretty simple to apply. Take any normal weapon. It now has a gun barrel on it you can opt to use instead of its melee attack. Maybe even more than one, perhaps with some penalties to weight, accuracy, and/or costs.

What are the firearms rules for your setting? If you're using blackpowder, just use that here, with the addendum that melee gun attachments can't be reloaded mid-battle (unless I dunno a particular class allows for it). Let your squad of elite halberdiers open up the fight with a volley before charging in.

And I have been going on about melee attachments and hybrid weapons but really, look at some of the things in the first image. Figure 12 alone is an incredible thing to throw at someone or find as loot, and the shield/big gun setup of the guy behind him also has potential. Both of these could function as high-tier ranged specialist equipment. Wild multi-shot combinations existed for centuries before the pepperbox or duckfoot species.

 

Another purely ranged option which is not quite a musket is the dopplehaken, or double-hook gun. As far as I can tell these are heavy handgonnes meant to be fired from a wall or mount. A kind of primordial infantry support gun, as far as I can tell. The definition persisted into the 1700s (I think?) but there are records of the of the doppelhaken or something like it dating back to the mid-to-late 1400s putting it squarely in handgonne territory even if it evolved beyond that.

 

 

 

 Cannon too unwieldy? Your 18 STR brolic fighter can't use it like a normal firearm? You can probably do it with one of these except for that third image if it is actually too-scale, but that is a fun option in its own way. You can see the niche, especially in a fantasy setting with horrid beasts scurrying about. This is what you point at the drakes and ogres and supernaturally potent fightmen normal bullets bounce off of (if they didn't already).

There's also the Petronel, which refers to two entirely different guns, one of which is just a long cavalry pistol-thing, but I am talking about this one.

I think this would do well as a decent mount-only weapon but we can combine this principle with fantasyification techniques. Make Figure 12 a petronel, for example. You now have a miniboss, guy on a horse who can shoot you 10 times consecutively or all at once without reloading. And when he expends his ammunition, he runs back over to his squire and grabs his second pre-loaded setup.

This isn't really coherent or prosaic as my other posts but I have strong feelings on the handgonne taxonomy and would like to see it get more recognition over more modern firearm types. There is a huge amount of untapped potential if you ask me. It evokes a kind of gunly aesthetic and set of principles entirely absent in more modern iterations. Consider handgonnes.