"magical weapons" Topic

Are there any thoughts as to magical properties that could be applied to weapons and ammunition? Enchanted weapons, simple mechanics for "magical" weapons, or specific powers granted by alchemical or ritual workings in the crafting of the weapon or use of alchemical ammo?
Working, of course, on the theory that a magic sword makes as much sense as a magic shotgun…

This is an interesting question--I look forward to what others think.

Easy magical properties can be things that make weapons more accurate, more reliable and more deadly.

So, for example, a magic rifle might simply be more accurate or have larger range bands (or have smart bullets that seek out their target).

In an age of black powder, a magic weapon might never foul or need to be cleaned, or might not need powder at all. In a campaign where weather matters, a weapon that is impervious to the effects of water would be an enormous benefit.

More damage is an easy change as well. Bullets might explode or cause flammable items to ignite. Bullets could be lethal (or cause more damage) to certain animals or species.

What else are you thinking, chironex?

What about ammunition that gives the shooter control over those who are hit? So instead of damaging the target they become your puppet.

How about ammo to:
Penetrate magical shields.
Go through multiple targets.
Seek a specific individual.
Explode for multiple hits.
Snare someone in s magical bubble.
Start a fire or grow into a fireball.
Turn a target into ice.
Water to evaporate (like ponds).
Cause target to fall asleep.
Cause a sink hole.
Cause mechanical things to fail/rust.
Green ammo that cause foliage, grass, trees ,vines to:
- Grow rapidly into natural walls
- Shrink and/or wither
- Come alive and attack

8)

Magic…guns that never run out of ammo. Oh wait, that's Hollywood.

In the supernatural tv show, they got a gun made by samuel colt, that could slay demons (but it had only six rounds).
i would like something with lot of flavour, or something that made the weapon different, rather than just a more powerfull weapon.
Yes, a magical weapon should be better to aim, maybe it never foul , but i would put the magical power in a most interesting way, and always with a price. So in a warhammer fantasy setting, you can get lets say a hand gun with a small bonus to hit and to damage, that can destroy or temporary ban a supernatural entity with special rounds, but you need to perform a ritual to make those special rounds, a ritual that needs very rare ingredients, or some sacrifice that puts the owner into a moral problem

In Exalted, magic weapons start out being massive things that mere mortals can probably not even lift. Certainly not something that mere mortals can wield.

Then they can add other abilities.

If you want to include armor, there are armors which 'merely' enhance your strength and speed, some that allow you to fly and throw lightning bolts from your hands, some that allow you to run as fast as a prairie fire and wield fire, or control water, or earth (got battlefield engineering to do? Find the guy with the Earth Dragon Armor, he can do it in seconds). The Wood Dragon Armor is especially potent against spirits, doing extra damage to them and ignoring part of what they deal to you.

But to make the really exotic weapons and armors, you need really exotic materials. Unshaped bits of the Wyld, for example, or a salt-diamond mined from the depths of the sea that is so pure it must be kept inside magical fields. Then you put said salt-diamond in its fields inside a larger field with the items you wish to purify and drop the fields around the salt-diamond. You end up with a blackened, blasted, and wasted salt-diamond, but absolutely NO impurities in your other materials.

Magic weapons vs. non-magic = Magic has the advantage
Magic vs. magic = Treat both as "non-magical" (i.e. the magic "cancels out")

@Randall: no real ideas yet, apart from having guns count as magical weapons for killing targets which are supernaturally immune to normal weapons, I look up magical guns and see only a few pieces of art, but a vast amount for magic melee weapons; the latter are often fully fleshed out but the gun's backstory and capabilities are barely mentioned. Also does anyone know what the themed armouries in Guild Wars artworks mean? There are matching pistols and longarms in each one, but what powers does the theme give them?

I know what this one does (I used to have the comic, which gave game stats for the thing in the back):

starts at 1d6 damage, increasing in 1d6 increments with successive hits until you either miss one, change targets or reload; the sixth hit does 6d6 to the target and then the same to anyone caught under a large burst template.
Lion: first, take something precious and cherished. Watch in horror as it burns before your very eyes. Then harvest what's left. Only then can you build a gun that will kill the Devil. – Copernicus Black

Perhaps a simpler enchantment would be something that gives silver bullets the hardness required to work in modern weapons? Silver isn't lead and will soon foul, and isn't very accurate. Shotguns maybe, but the amount of werebeasts and even vampires slain with solid silver rounds fired from self-loading, rifled centrefires…

Actually, silver isn't that much harder to work with, but figuring out how to cast silver is a pain.

Patricia Briggs (Author of 'Moon Called' and a number of other modern fantasy novels) actually went through the trouble of making her own silver bullets (for a Marlin lever-action rifle). link

PURE silver is about as hard as linotype lead alloy, so it will work in rifles. Pistols, not so much, as it takes a lot of force to deform the silver to make the rifling engrave, far more than most pistol calibers generate. Jewelry silver or relatively recent silver coins are much much harder alloys, no way in hell you can cast a bullet for a rifled barrel that will work (it would take pressures over twice that generated in a .50cal Browning machine gun to get modern coin or jewelry silver bullets to engrave the rifling). However, shotguns or olde-skool smoothbore dueling pistols won't complain too much if you loaded them with less-than-full-bore-diameter silver, regardless of source.

The major problem is that silver shrinks a lot more as it cools than lead does, so you need to use an oversized bullet mold and then 'swage' the bullet down to the proper size. And sadly, no, it's not an off-the-shelf next caliber up, unless maybe you're using a .41cal bullet mold to make bullets for a .40cal weapon. And because silver is much harder than lead, there is a chance that a sufficiently-oversized silver bullet will break the entire reloader frame when you run the bullet through the sizing die!

But the math says it can be done, and Patty Brigg (and/or her husband) made some nicely functional silver bullets for a .444 Marlin lever-action.

A significant issue is that silver is harder than lead, and therefore doesn't expand very well. However, this does mean excellent penetration. Since most dangerous-game bullets lean towards lots of penetration and not so much expansion, this may not be a fatal problem for the shooter.

link
Remember: don't click on anything blue!
The real problem is when you see people in movies firing full-auto bursts from a Glock 18 (or, more commonly in Hollywood, a "kustomized" 17 ) at werewolves, though accuracy isn't really an issue with machine-pistols which really do what you should have done with a grenade. Full-auto bursts and even semi-auto rapid-fire seems to be the norm. Maybe they're cored with silver nitrate? The rounds used by Alucards monstrosities in Hellsing are a lot more complex than simply a bullet cast of silver. At any rate you'd need more resources than an everyday handloader could manage, whether you cast the bullet, machined it, or made something more complex, unless the silver nitrate theory works in your setting? The last depends on how plausible Chief Brody's homebrew cyanide-tips were in Jaws.

Thinking of elemental-themed weapons. Fire elemental guns that fire – well, fire magic, are somewhat obvious. Water guns could fire solid chunks of ice, bombs of fog, or high-pressure jets as used in robotic industrial plastic cutters. Air? Sonic booms, shock waves, needle-thin air jets? For Earth, all I can think of is one that, rather uninspiringly, fires rocks. Or rubble clouds, but would have to be big.

So what would the guns in this lot do (I don't play Guild Wars and am uncertain as to whether this is even canon):

Tribal-looking weapons?

Maybe these affect targets on the aetherial plane, or cannot be stopped by conventional armours?

Planty weapons?
link
The guns fire seeds which may sprout inside your body, slowly corrupting you or guaranteeing slow death…
Or maybe just shoot poison..
On that note, there are Keith Thompsons' Polyp faction, whose soldiers' enamel rifles and pinfire shotguns fire enamel projectiles, sometimes with infectious agents coating the bullet.
Corrupting and mutating bullets that eventually make you a … thing? Or ones which just kill you, before bringing you back as walkin' dead?

In Rifts, just about every ranged spell could be made into a techno-wizard firearm (or added to a melee weapon- combination gun/melee weapons that actully are viable?) These ranged from telekinetic bolts and energy blast through shards of ice and exploding nova balls to odd energies that caused machines to lock up or degraded armour. One Rifter even had evil techno-wizards who bound summoned beings into weapon frames, giving huge firepower but at the cost of being an evil person who kidnaps beings from their home universe and traps them inside a machine which uses them as fuel and a focus for power.
Crystalline weapons could obviously shoot energy:

Also in Rifts some Splugorth bio-wizard items are roughly gun-shaped; one fires black lightning which can immobilise someone by appearing to freeze their cardiovascular system. Trouble was that this was a mega-damage weapon, and a decent damage roll could mean even an MD-armoured target would be beyond caring.
Some others entangle or cause paralysis, either as a primary effect or through flooding the target with fear, entangling them with vines or ectoplasmic net, or causing paralysing pain.
Splugorth weapons are often geared towards slavery rather than industrial slaughter, but there is the floodwater pistol, powered by a trapped water sprite and used to slay vampires, who are vulnerable to running water as much as holy.
Taking this a bit more simply, some ranged magic needs wands or staves for the caster to use. If these needed to be pointed at the target to cast, wouldn't they be a bit more efficient if they were roughly gun-shaped…?

Also, in Skullduggery Pleasant, one necromancer had a flintlock pistol for his focus.

For a "genuine" example of magic ammunition, you could go for something based on the folkloristic Freikugeln – basically a set of seven diabolical bullets, six of which will hit whatever the shooter wants them to hit; the seventh will hit whatever the Devil wants it to hit.

link

Taking this a bit more simply, some ranged magic needs wands or staves for the caster to use. If these needed to be pointed at the target to cast, wouldn't they be a bit more efficient if they were roughly gun-shaped…?

Hence my gaming group's jokes about Colt's Wand of Magic Missiles, or Browning's Repeating Rod of Magic Missiles. Or Faust's Staff of Fireballs.

One particularly wicked idea I had for a D&D item was to start with a thunderstone (rock that makes a lot of noise when it hits something hard) and add a conditional Daylight spell to it to go off at the same time as the Thunder spell. D&D flashbang, and it does damage to undead and anything else damaged by Daylight.

In a more limited magic setting, I prefer my magic items to have serious punch. Basic sharp blade? Yeah, whatever, I'd rather invest my magic into something that will do serious damage. It's like the Black Company novels. The Lady can throw down massive damage without breaking a sweat. The Company's magicians can make weapons just as powerful, but it takes them as much more time as the Lady is stronger than they are. So Croaker's Bow is a nice bow that hits pretty hard, and the arrows with someone's name on them are pretty harsh (made by the Lady in a relatively short amount of time). IIRC, it was a spear made by Goblin, and he'd spent dang near every waking moment not spent one actively keeping himself alive for ten years making the spear, and it was sufficiently powerful to take down a (newly reborn) god.

In modern Fantasy, I like Jim Butcher's work. Harry Dresden can throw down sufficient magic to level a city, but he still carries a big honking .44 magnum revolver for those times that either his magic isn't working or he's too tired to cast anything with enough oomph to deal with the problem.

In Shadowrun, magic weapons depower themselves as soon as you let go of them or they otherwise lose contact with your body. So enchanted bullets are a no-go, but I found a spell that would make a bow more accurate (IIRC, steadied it in your hand) and applied it to a firearm. Well, not just any firearm, but a Smartgun that already had a lot of bonuses to hit. The combination was just disgustingly powerful.

Back to Exalted, working with the basic magical materials could get really, really 'interesting'. Jade was the magical material for the Dragon Blooded, and you could mix jade powder into the steel of a weapon, call it good. The other magical materials, though, require particularly exotic refining methods.
-Orichalcum needs to be heated by either concentrated sunlight or molten lava.
-Moonsilver can only be worked by the light of the moon until the crafting is finished. If it sees a single sunbeam, it's worthless.
-Soulsteel requires the smith to literally beat the souls of the dead into submission, quenching the weapon in bile.
-Starmetal is actually the simplest material to work, an ordinary blacksmith's shop will suffice. The problem is that Starmetal is literally the final remains of a small god fallen from the heavens, so every single step of the process needs to be blessed. The blacksmith must be blessed. The tools must be blessed. The workshop as a whole needs to be blessed. The charcoal needs to be made in a blessed fire, harvested from a blessed grove with blessed tools by blessed workers. And even then, everything that can go wrong will, because the least gods of the forge you're using are extremely offended by being used to forge one of their own! It's a frantic race from one emergency to another as your fire tries to go out, your quenching water leaks out, ad nauseam.