Baroque Gun Inspiration
I recently got to visit the Musée de l'Armée in Paris and its huge collection of 15th - 17th century arms & armor. The arquebuses, muskets, pistolets, carbines, fusils, and blunderbusses at the museum are pretty incredible in terms of variety & craftsmanship, and this got my wheels turning on fleshing out how guns are represented in renaissance/baroque games like LoTFP, 17th C. Minimalist, or Warhammer Fantasy. The following are some initial musings about using unique/fancy guns as loot & worldbuilding.
(All photos are by me, apologies for the poor quality).
Workshops
Most of the guns I looked at were from workshops in Milan, but there were also several from specific sites in Germany -- in general, it seems like the metallurgical skill needed to craft a quality musket was concentrated in urban manufactories -- not something the local blacksmith could put together. In prep for an early-modern campaign, I'd place several specialized workshops in the larger cities on the map and give each a specialty, making weapon upgrades into a driver of travel/exploration. Something as simple as reskinning all +1 guns as 'Milanese muskets' or something would add a lot of flavor.
Actions
I was struck by how intricate and precise the mechanisms on the collection's guns were. This may be partly due to preservation bias, but it was a welcome reminder that precision engineering did exist prior to the industrial revolution.
As I recall, LoTFP and 17th C. Minimalist both make distinctions between types of action (matchlock vs. flintlock), so no need to re-invent that wheel. But the museum also has several examples of weapons with extra actions -- I'm not 100% sure how these were supposed to work, but I assume it makes reloading faster, or provides a backup in case the powder in one action fails to ignite. In game terms, my impulse would be to make extra actions inflate the cost significantly (my understanding is that 90% of the cost of a gun at the time was in the handcrafted mechanisms) and allow more shots without reloading or swapping out weapons.
Combination Weapons
The Musee de l'Armee has gun-swords, a gun-axe, a gun-mace, and a gun-spear (!):
Apparently these were mostly used for hunting, but for an RPG I think this is license to go wild with the hybrid guns. The most obvious advantage would be not having to swap weapons to dive into melee after taking a shot, depending on how your system handles such things.
Status Symbols
Something like Luke Gearing's rules for improving HD via worn wealth (or follower count) for Wolves Upon The Coast could be adapted for a renaissance/baroque era game about swaggering cavaliers and soldiers of fortune. Upgrading your musket from a mass-produced model like one of these:
to something like this:
or this:
or this:
is a great money-sink and a way to signal high status, which by all accounts was of paramount importance during the eras in question. The idea of a gun as an art object feels foreign and although we usually associate the gunpowder age with disenchantment, I can imagine some of these being 'magical' in at least some fashion.
For an added layer of nuance, prestige effects could also be modified by confessional allegiance, where Catholics are drawn to swagged-out leaders but austere Calvinists actually repel followers if they ostentatiously display wealth (possibly substituted for some kind of system based around the idea of demonstrating membership in the 'elect').
Other Cool Guns
This micro-blunderbuss -- maybe it uses up 6x as much ammunition but can blast a whole room of enemies:
Chicken's foot pistol -- big accuracy penalty but the chance to hit three targets at once?
These all-steel pistols -- no mechanics in mind here, they just look sick as hell & weirdly futuristic. I imagine the laser pistols in Book of The New Sun looking something like this:
