Hi, guys. We played some sessions of Conan, and my group simply loves it! We are trying some ship based adventures (we don’t have Conan, the Pirate… YET), and came to the conclusion that we could use some old guns, like pistols and muskets. Are these weapons in any Conan book? If not, does anyone took a shot (oh, the puns!) at it?
Thanks in advance!
I’ve never seen a firearm nentioned in any Conan book .
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At sea you may see catapults or ballista, but there were no firearms in any Conan stories I remember reading.
There are no firearms in the Conan setting, the technology is similar to the one in our Ancient period. So the ship warfare is done with ballistas, catapults and savage abordages mainly.
In “The Pirate” book there is something called “Argossean fire”, which is the equivalent to the Greek fire used by the Eastern Roman empire. This is the closest to fire you can get 
I’ve never heard tell of any fire arms but I’m pretty sure you could have explosive orbs, dragon breath/Fire pots (napalm) etc. made by alchemy or repeating cross bow (see mercenary book). I think if it were me I’d be very careful not to over do it…you should kill you foe like a true warrior, face to face.
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There is nothing wrong with introducing firearms in your adventures (true Conan fans might disagree 
).
Just be creative and come up with some appropriate tags. Firearms should have a long loading time, be inaccurate but strong and may explode (possibly on a Complication).
For some reason… I could be misremembering, I thought that there were some rather sci fi things that appear in one of the Conan stories, where he stumbles into some kind of weirdo so-advanced-it’s-become-degenerate civilization that had a mysterious ray weapon.
But in general, Conan is more of a mixture of Ancient to Medieval world technology without firearms. However, there’s alchemy, repeating crossbows, and some other things.
In the Book of Skelos, there is a chapter about Weird Science, and it includes stuff like steam power, dart guns, electric guns. But not gunpowder weapons as such as far as I recall.
Shran wrote:
In the Book of Skelos, there is a chapter about Weird Science, and it includes stuff like steam power, dart guns, electric guns. But not gunpowder weapons as such as far as I recall.
Very good point! There’s not a lot of details but still, they’re present. I think you’d not want to put too many weird science options in without drastically changing the setting, but if you’re using Conan not for Hyborea but for some more general S&S type setting, it would work. I am looking forward to John Carter!
Shran wrote:
Just be creative and come up with some appropriate tags. Firearms should have a long loading time, be inaccurate but strong and may explode (possibly on a Complication).
One way to represent the high danger factor of firearms is to give them the Piercing and Vicious qualities.
The development of firearms basically wiped out the use of most armor over the course of the 17th Century due to the fact that mobility became more important than the protection armor afforded. Armor was also quite expensive. Even so, cuirassiers still showed up on the battlefield in the Napoleonic Wars.