Firearm

Some Tanegashima Matchlocks

About twelve hundred years ago in China, some people figured out that certain chemicals mixed together (such as potassium nitrate, carbon and sulphur) exploded when brought to spark, which became known as "Black Powder". After some toying with this little tidbit of information, they discovered that a tube sealed off at one end could be used to focus said explosion to propel an object at high speeds. After a few centuries of refinement they managed to take that mechanical principle and apply it as a weapon of warfare which changed the game, the Arquebus. Comparatively cheap, easy to make, easy to learn to use and capable of penetrating all but the heaviest armor, this marked a transition away from close quarters to ranged warfare.

In modern times, firearms are the staple weapons of any nation, normally using futuristic weapons that doesn't even fire solid projectiles like lasers.

A Brief History of Firearms

The Firelance, the Chinese Invention which started this all

1000s to 1200s: The Chinese realize they can make barbarians shit their pants by shooting hollowed arrows packed with powder and bamboo tubes filled with powder and pebbles at them. Gradually bamboo gave way to cast iron and bronze.

1300s: Various gunpowder weapons begin to proliferate westward along the silk road aided by the Mongols. Crude versions of hand cannons, grenades, rockets, and flamethrowers all see use. Despite considerable psychological effect and good armor penetration, most of these weapons are only marginally more likely to kill the target than the user, and their use is not widespread. For the most part these weapons were used by skirmishers. Even so the designs and methods of manufacture were gradually refined and improved by various early gunsmiths by trial and error.

1400s: Hand cannons see continued and expanded use. Bit by bit from the crude handgonnes of previous centuries the first "true" firearms evolve with the gradual development of the matchlock, taking on the basic shape of lock, stock, trigger and barrel. By clamping a lighted wick into a flashpan via a trigger the shooter is able to aim and fire at the same time, making him markedly less likely to blow his own jimmies off. Despite advances the matchlock was unwieldy, unreliable, and generally inferior to a good bowman. This didn't stop some inventive commanders from seeing their potential, particularly with poorly trained conscript soldiers. Some forces made a go of it by carrying two or three guns at a time and just throwing the spent ones away like a really shitty Matrix movie.

1500s: Guns continue to evolve with the invention of spring loaded firing mechanisms. The wheel-lock spins a steel plate against sulfide rocks to produce sparking (think cigarette lighters) which ignites a flash pan. This was revolutionary in that soldiers could prime their weapon in a matter of seconds instead of fucking around with a lit wick. It also means that for the first time guns weren't completely fucked in the rain, just mostly fucked. They also cost a lot to make so only wealthy people could afford them, so most people stuck with matchlocks. Powder formulas had improved considerably, including the development of the more stable and moisture resistant corned powder. Japan was particularly notable in the history of firearms for their heavy transition from blades to guns after discovering the novelty of matchlock guns, more so that any country during that time. Infact by the end of the 1500s, they had more trained riflemen in their armies and produced more matchlocks than any other country to date during that period.

The Flintlock mechanism, now you did not need to light some string and put it into a serpentine before firing

1600s The wheellock is refined into the simpler and more reliable flintlock. Muzzle loading is simplified with the creation of paper cartridges, essentially the pre-measured cake mix of murder. Some German dudes came up with the idea of cutting spirals which they called "rifling" so that they wouldn't have to walk up right next to their targets to hit them, but this required a barrel tighter than a nun's cunt and a hammer to ram the ball in.

1700s: The French invent the bayonet, allowing their troops to be choppy while they were shooty. This is the point where gun infantry tactics become the dominant (though still not only) form of fighting, when guns go from one a few common infantry weapons to the primary weapon used by most infantry. Formations of musketeers go from big square blocks to lines two or three ranks thick.

The Mechanism of a French Chassepot, an early Bolt action rifle, as well as it's paper cartridge

1800s: Pretty much everything that makes up a modern firearm is invented here. Some fool came up with an explosive that would go off if you slam a hammer into it, which led to the first explosive primers. This basically involves putting explosives in ur explosives to explode your explosives. Cartridges that contain a primer, propellant and slug, similar to modern-day bullets, are developed. By this time, wars were largely fought using firearms rather than melee weapons.

By the late 1800 inventers had finally gotten the technology to contain the force of the gun powder explosion with a tight seal and do so cheaply. Experiments done earlier like the Puckle gun (1718) or Ferguson rifle (1776) to create breech loading rifles cheaply. See, despite that it was well known that that slotting in bullets from the rear and using a mechanism to load it into the chamber is much simpler than spending about half a minute to ram it down a long barrel, the technology was just not there as without cheap steel (cheap is important for hand guns you are going to make millions of) getting Iron to contain the explosion with out deforming and leaking gas thus weakening the shot was a nightmare. The industrial revolution among other things gave birth to the concept of "breach-loading" and later, "magazines", and simpler mechanized feeding systems like tubes, slides, cylinders, and bolt-actions. The likes of pump-action shotguns, bolt-action rifles and level-action rifles, and revolver and semi-automatic pistols, are developed and/or developed upon, giving a glimpse on how weapons in the future would function. Near the end of the decade, some french guys worked out that they could both improve firepower and keep their guns considerably cleaner by replacing black powder with nitrocellulose, the first of many "smokeless powders".

Just as important as the new designs that came about during this period were the new methods of production. People like Eli Whitney worked out devices such as milling machines which allowed for the quick production of finely tuned parts which were so close in size that you could take one bit off one gun, stick it on another from the same line and it would work just as fine. Breech loading and repeating firearms had existed for centuries beforehand, but were not cost effective to mass produce until the Industrial Revolution.

A British Lee-Enfield Bolt Action Repeating rifle

1900-early 1930s: The hey-day of guns because of the advent of WW1. The idea of bolt-action rifles are popularized, along with semi-automatic and fully-automatic weapons. Bolt-action rifles meant that riflemen no longer had to be confined to shooting one round at a time before needing to reload as they could now load individual clips that contained 5-10 rounds a piece. Machine guns are now becoming more and more popular in the battlefields, drastically changing the way infantry would maneuver the battlefield as a single MG emplacement can effectively cripple platoons with the right positioning. Submachine guns, the first automatic infantry weapon, are developed by the German Empire and issued to their stormtroopers, giving the rest of the world an idea on the wonders of a lightweight fully-automatic weapon that could easily be used by infantrymen, which was previously restricted to heavy machine guns.

late 1930s-1940s: Automatic and semi-automatic rifles start phasing out bolt-action rifles for standard infantry use with the start of WW2. Submachine guns are now becoming more popular with various armies around the world, making it the staple lightweight automatic weapon for infantry troops, totally re-defining urban combat due to the weapon's great effectiveness in close combat. Nazi Germany invents the Sturmgewehr 44, the first widely produced assault rifle (the Fedorov Avtomat being the first Assault Rifle to be put into service, introduced in 1915, but production was limited due to costs.). This weapon would later become the template for modern assault rifles used by the world over.

A QBZ-95 Assault Rifle, the current service rifle of the People's Republic of China, note bullpup configuration (the magazine feeds behind the trigger), thus saving space

1950s-1990s: People now realize the power of a fully-automatic rifle. Assault rifles become more and more common with armed forces of the world and are extensively developed upon, largely, if not completely, phasing out the old bolt-action and semi-automatic rifles used back in WW2. Iconic Assault rifles such as the AK-47, M14, and M16A1 are created and show the world the power of an automatic rifle through the the numerous wars going on during the 1960s-70s, such as the Communist wars in Korea and Vietnam, along with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, to name a few.

2000s: With the invention of more advanced materials such as plastics and carbon-fibre, along with numerous technological advancements of the modern world, firearms become more deadly than they were ever before. Fine-tuning on how every aspect of how a firearm would work, has allowed numerous countries to develop better and efficient ways on how to kill on a scale unseen since the Europeans developed the musket.

Many countries around the world are now looking for new ways to phase-out combustion-based firearms as a whole, and are looking for ways to make what were once sci-fi-only weapons, such as laser, plasma, and gauss guns, a reality. While met with some degree of success, nobody (as far as we know, anyway) has found a way yet for these weapons to be man-portable that a single soldier could carry these into combat or be affordable to an extent that it would be more feasible to make these instead of the traditional slugthrowers.

Relations here

Most fantasy writers tend to exclude firearms. There are a variety of reasons for this, such as:

• Most fantasy comes from Tolkien, who, being a naturalist that largely despised industrialization, did not have guns (although he did have gunpowder in middle earth, used by the wizards (Gandalf's Fireworks and Saruman's Fires of Orthanc) and by the orcs).
• Most fantasy (whether copy-catting Tolkien or not) is based on medieval Europe. Depending on your definition of "medieval," Europe did technically have firearms towards the very end (crude and unreliable ones, but firearms nonetheless), but most authors base their fantasy on earlier medieval Europe.
• As in real life, firearms mean that vulgar, dirty, peasant conscripts can take down the author's Mary Sure, noblemen knights that trained so hard in the arts of swordsmanship and melee combat.

All that being said, most fantasy authors are much more open to cannons, which became viable on the battlefield long before smaller firearms.

Generally speaking, if a world has both the "stock" fantasy races and guns, there will a strict hierarchy of who uses them, from most to least likely:

• Dwarves: They almost always have the best, most plentiful guns. If only one race gets firearms, it's them.
• Gnomes: As tinkerers, they're frequently on a different tech level from everyone else too. Not unlikely to have firearms either.
• Humans: Unlike the other races, which are usually an all-or-nothing deal, different human nations have different likelihoods of having guns. Italian and east Asian analogues, as well as the "industrious" or "scientific" nations, are much more likely to have them. Your barbarians, guys keen on knights and chivalry and the more conservative less so.
• Orcs: Orcs would probably love guns if they could actually build some. However, they're usually either incapable of building things or have a hard time organizing themselves to the point that large-scale firearm and powder production is possible. Even so, they could still obtain them them by other means such as fighting as mercenaries for guns and stealing them off the corpses of the fallen and similar. They are higher on the list if they are more like Tolkienian Orcs, which can be fairly well organized and "delight in explosions" enough to manufacture their own gunpowder, if only for simple bombs.
• Elves: Being arrogant pricks, they see guns as crude, inaccurate, foul-smelling contraptions that are no substitute for a bow. However, they'll still use them when necessary, even if they don't like it. That said they also had a good reason to not use them, namely most firearms in a fantasy settling would be Arquebus-type which were out range and had slower firing rates than a bow, the main advantage being ease of use and armor penetration. As the main problem of a bow, it takes years to learn, itsn't a problem for long life elves, a bow is simply a better choice.
• Wood Elves and other Fey/Nature types: They'd rather die than use a firearm, even if the rest of the world has moved onto biplanes, bolt-action rifles, shell-firing cannons, and tanks. If this happens, this means they either have powerful magic (so the actual weapons used are unimportant), they are really really good shots with a bow, or they're about to die out.

Of course, sci-fi writers almost exclusively use firearms, seeing as how it's THE FUUUUUUTTTTTUUUUURRRREEEE. The one exception is Warhammer 40,000: although guns are the main combat implement, close combat is still alive and well, and most armies have at least one elite, close-combat unit wielding weapons that are distinctly not firearms.

Rules

Most fantasy RPGs deal with firearms the way they deal with lots of things that threaten their Medieval Stasis: terror, suspicion, and shitty rules. If you have the option of using a firearm in most games, it probably has one shot that's weaker than a bow, then takes an entire encounter to reload, and is illegal everywhere in-setting in case you didn't get the hint.

BECMI Dungeons & Dragons doesn't have rules for firearms, but there were one or two adventure modules that incorporated a crash-landed spaceship, with weapons the players could loot. They were treated as magic wands and staves. A few issues of Dragon magazine offered rules for early cannons and hand cannons.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons mentions guns in a tucked-away subsection on importing TSR's cowboys & indians game Boot Hill to AD&D (DMG, pg113). Revolver pistols and gatling guns would do as much damage as a longsword; shotguns as much damage as a two-handed claymore, a (thrown) stick of dynamite does 4x the damage of a short sword. The rules insist "...when gunpowder is brought into the fantasy world it becomes inert junk, ergo, no clever alchemist can duplicate it." To reinforce this concept, the Manual of the Planes included rules for factors of prime material planes, one of which determined if complex (read: setting destroying) chemical compositions like black powder would even work in said plane. If you have any knowledge of chemistry, you may cry now.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition included the arquebus in the Players Handbook, where they were depicted as slow, powerful and expensive (500 Gp!). They were also potentially dangerous to the user as the result of a bad roll. It was painfully stressed that the inclusion of firearms in the campaign was the call of the DM. Firearms were a bit more common in the Spelljammer setting. Moving away from the classic fantasy background, there was the historical campaign sourcebook A Mighty Fortress that introduced rules for firearms of the 16th and 17th centuries and the Masque of the Red Death setting for Ravenloft pushed everything into a gothic horror version of the 1890's.

D&D third edition has a section on advanced technology (DMG, pp162-164) for Renaissance-era, 20th century, and futuristic weapons. The weapons are more powerful than what can be found among ranged weapons in the Player's Handbook, but also heavier and more expensive. You're better off with magic crossbows.

Pathfinder seems to do early firearms right: they have shorter range than bows without magical items, take longer to reload, have a chance to break on a misfire, and use up more expensive ammunition, but they hit harder, have a terrifying 4x crit modifier, and use touch AC, effectively ignoring armor. Probably the only things restricting their use so heavily are the stiff feat tax needed to make use of them and the fact that there's really only one major gun factory in the land, the Gunworks of the small nation of Alkenstar, and they keep most of their guns to themselves. A specialized class, the gunslinger, is centered around the use of firearms.