Boss Out of Town wrote:
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So . . . she's threatening these gentlemen with an empty gun? Cripes, she's got bigger balls than her girlfriend.
We should take up a collection and get her a repeater. The pump carbine Michael Douglas used in Romancing the Stone was a really fun weapon. Of course, Leah would be staring at Kathleen Turner the whole movie.
Sign . . . KT in her prime = Sarine in a good mood
Yeah... that leads into the next page.
Single-shot rifles are still pretty much the norm for the most part.
In fact Veracia only just upgraded their small number of riflemen up from crappy muzzle loaders.
Repeaters exist, but still extremely new and cost a small fortune and in Northern Confederacy would more than likely attract more thugs than it would deter.
There's really only two countries actually producing firearms.
The confederacy, who are intentionally only exporting the cheapest, low-grade stuff they got. (they do have much, much better but those are kept strictly to themselves and often won't even trade between the other city states in the Confederacy)
And Farrel, which retro engineered the cheap confederacy stuff and eventually started producing much better firearms of their own. (still charging out the ass for them, of course, because they can)
The Gewehr Wraiths were particularly fortunate in this regard, as to have a number of VERY clever and quite skilled private blacksmiths who stuck around with them from the Gewehr's days as a 'proper' mercenary guild. And to have gotten a hard start on everyone else, firearm technology wise, by realizing that firearms were going to be the next big thing while the rest of the guilds were still stubbornly sticking with their swords and traditions. There are even a few Gewehr pushing for the group to stop the killing crap and just switch to selling guns, claiming the money would probably be about the same.
Um... yeah, it's pretty obvious that, before being awkwardly wedged into ES, the Gewehr were originally created for a story I was planning about a group of samurai in feudal Japan who encountered firearms for the first time and immediately decide to adopt them as their favored weapons in place of the katana, causing them to be shunned by the rest of Japanese society and eventually degrading into a group of ninja like mercenaries.
The funny thing is Proto-Jon and Proto-Sara both started life as basically the same character. I just could never decide if I wanted the main character to be a smart ass guy in his late twenties, or a sullen, nearly emotionless girl... beside gender/personality, they were nearly identical, same outfit, (okay, almost, the female version didn't have pants) same background, etc.
Do you put this stuff into your novels? Its important info that would be otherwise missed, i rekcon.