Chapter 0 - A Brief Primer on Guns in Fiction

The Fantasy Firearms conversation has been around for a lot longer then you might expect. Believe it or not, the origins of the argument actually originate in the real world. From the moment they became available to the common man, guns have signified a very start before and after. When the rules of engagement became less about having a trained and tested army of elite soldiers, and became more about supply lines and numbers.

Firearms in general are known as "The Great Equalizer", and for good reason. This is something that a lot of worldbuilders fail to understand, or lean to hard into to try and accommodate them.

Guns are NOT complicated.

You could reasonably teach someone how to operate most guns in a matter of minutes, and within hours they will understand how to reload, aim into the distance, and shoot without flinching. Compare this with all weapons before it, they are had a short range (most melee weapons) or take years to become proficient with (most ranged weapons). Guns solved that issue by turning collection of half useless farmers into a fighting force that could down 99% of the old world's fighters in a volley, and when it was 10 to 1 on the survivors, even your flee-bitten farmer army can make due.

All this to say, the solution to making firearms work in a fantasy setting is to take them seriously, but not treat them as an aberration either. They are a tool, and just as not every problem is a nail, not every situation needs a hammer.

Chapter 1 - What Makes Firearms Work?

Now that we have an understanding of what a gun actually is in a worldbuilding sense, lets actually tackle how they'd work in a fantasy setting.

The major concern most people have with guns is them becoming a cancer to the worldbuilding. The worry comes from the very justified understanding that a gun, especially modern ones, are extremely good in many situations. They aren't hard to use, they don't require that much training, and even under the worst circumstances they're extremely deadly.

This gives the impression that any situation that could involve one, so the worry goes, should involve one. Why train for years to use a sword when a gun takes hours? Why waste your money on expensive reagents when bullets are much cheaper and easier? Why engage in your fantasy world and all its cool power systems if Johannes Wick over there will do the job just as well and much quicker?

(Edit: To clarify what I meant here, I'm saying that given the same amount of training between something like a sword, a bow, and a gun, the gun takes the least effort to become deadly with. Bows aren't complicated either, but the skill floor on a bow is much higher then a gun. In the right hands both are deadly, but in the wrong hands a bow isn't as deadly as a gun)

This line of thinking is coming from three places, both of which aren't wrong, but incomplete: 1. Guns are The Apex of Human Warfare 2. "Guns are Overpowered" 3. Guns feel out of place

The first one is deceptive, because this line of thinking comes from our modern world with out modern sensibilities. While there are some exceptions (like the "Punk" genres, and Urban-Fantasy), the vast majority of fantasy is written in the style of "Medieval Stasis". Worlds where there are castles and kings, wizards and warlocks, ancient secrets and lost civilizations, the works. There is nothing wrong with this, but guns as a cultural object present some very post-industrial questions that many writers and worldbuilders are uncomfortable, or unwilling to address. However, this is what brings me to my first major tip.

You can make up the rules of guns in your world!

For example, gunpowder is a big component of your standard gun. Whether its in the bullet or a seperate package. This is a very easy concept to work around, lets say that gunpowder in your world exists, but its not the easiest to access, or your world's chemists are behind our own. What if instead your world had some kind of analogy to gunpowder, maybe some kind of crushed fire crystal, or some sap that grows in magical trees and explodes when it catches fire.

Just these two things rapidly changes the economy of guns without needing to do anything special with them. They don't need to be rare, or difficult to make, they just need to work within the confines of your world.

Another example would be to present them against magic and its users. Assuming you're not working with a strict set of laws for magic like a sanderson book, you can probably bet that as soon as guns become something worth noticing, that enterprising magic users will begin examining them, finding ways to use them or counter their use. It would only take one high profile mage being executed by round shot before even the most curmudgeonly of wizard in their tower to ignore it.

Most fantasy setting's that introduce guns treat them like such an unsolvable issue that they forget that we made them to begin with. If you can make something, you can counteract it too. This goes especially for worlds with magic that lets people do a wide variety of things. The first Anti-Gun spell that becomes accessible is going to be common practice for mages to learn, thus making guns what they always were, a tool to be used, not a bomb to be defused.

Last example, them not fitting the setting. This one is the most setting dependent, and out of everything its the best reason to not include firearms of any kind. Sometimes you don't want to consider the ramifications of firearms on your whimsical fantasy noble bright world. Vibes are as good a reason to include something as to not.

However the important point about that is that there is a distinct difference between saying "I don't think they would fit in my world" versus "I don't think they fit in fantasy". The first is an opinion, the second is a statement that can be argued with. This goes for basically anything, but always ask yourself "What does this add to my world?" when you want to develop it. If your struggles come from it clashing with everything else, then maybe reconsider. But if your struggles come from not being able to imagine it, that's unfortunately an issue with you, not the genre.

Chapter 2 - How do I make guns work? Specifically?

This is an extension what I was talking about in Chapter 1, but I want to help break some preconceived notions about what makes a firearm a "firearm", because in the modern day we have a very specific outlook on them.

The first question you need to ask yourself is what kind of world you've got. If you're doing a low magic, darker setting in the same vein as Game of Thrones or The Witcher, guns are going to be your natural evolution of combat eventually. These worlds are close enough to our own that given time and some luck they'll come to the same conclusions that we did.

However, other settings needn't necessarily follow the same rules. Many science fantasy settings move on from traditional metal slug based firearms and move on to laser weapons. There's no reason to believe that a world where people can open portals to other dimensions and summon demons would even consider working with black powder. Maybe instead your analogue for firearms is powered by demons and shoots fire, or powered by rock creatures that shoot lasers, or any other combination of things.

Firearms don't need to strictly be blunderbusses and flintlocks, you have complete control of the aesthetics of your world, flavor guns to work however you need. As long as your needs are met, they can be whatever.

The second question is how new guns are in your world. Here's the thing that a lot of Medieval Fantasy worldbuilders fail to consider. Years are LONG, and centuries and millennia are REALLY LONG. If you've had magic kicking around in some form for a thousand years, and you suddenly introduce firearms in the tail end of a thousand years of magical study, if those mages suddenly crumble and fall to a wooden stick that explodes, they were slacking on the job.

If guns are a relatively recent, but have still been around for a while, say 20-50 years, then its basically assured that at least several research groups will have put the time and energy into coming up with countermeasures and protocols for their involvement. Don't be naive and make them be "banned" or somehow looked down on. There is rarely a reason for such an outlook, instead its usually the creator wanting nothing to do with it.

Lastly, if your guns have existed for a long time, this is the one that is going to require the most work. If your setting has had some analogue for guns for anywhere in the range of 100-300 years or more, then all the guardrails that exist for other circumstances will apply, and you're going to run into the same issues that magic has when guns are new. In 200 years, our real world when from flintlocks to drone strikes. This is where I present a solution that not many people consider, just avoid having an industrial revolution, and keep your tech progression slow.

The real world went through a lot of shit from 1700 on, and that came more from a thousand years of boiling water suddenly overflowing into the industrial revolution. Your world likely didn't have the same set of circumstances, and if you introduced guns in a slower advancement scale, then they might become an entirely different kind of item altogether. Instead of being mass produced weapons of war, they could be artisan creations, powered by one of a kind ammunitions specialty made for a user. This way, they can be just as available as you need them to be, and special to boot.

Chapter 3 - Conclusion

Alright, I've spent a lot of time elaborating, contextualizing, and explaining how and why guns work. With this last section I just briefly want to touch on the actual act of worldbuilding and why guns area microcosm of something I wanted to discuss.

Many times, you'll have people asking if they can do something in their world. We've all seen it: * Can I put guns in my fantasy setting? * How do I justify people using swords when magic/guns/super-powers exist? * Would this astrological feature make sense? Is it realistic?

Far be it from me to tell people how to worldbuild, I've just got done spending 1500 words doing precisely that. But the concerning thing about questions of "Can I?" is that it implies that the person building their world thinks that there are hidden rules they don't know about. Like someone who "knows what they're doing" will come by and say "You did it all wrong, its terrible. Nobody likes this."

To be clear, those people exist, with the start difference being that they don't know what they're doing either. There are no rules but the ones you make and can justify to yourself. If you're telling a story there are some considerations to be made, but building a world does not have rules, it has guidelines.

To bring this around to firearms again, and to tie a little bow on all of this. Horace Mann is an early american politician who is known for many things, but his best known title is that of "The Father of American Education". I won't give you a big biography of the man, but he's the one that many people can thank for taking education from something granted to a few, to a right given to many. Among the body of his work, there is a quote that's very applicable to both topics I've pointed out today.

Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men,—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

I think its not a coincidence that with time, firearms became associated with this term as well. Don't ask if you're allowed to do something just because you've never seen it done. The only limitation in your worldbuilding is what you can justify to yourself. If you want your wizard to shoot a gun, nothing is stopping you but yourself.