If you've never heard about the Girardoni Air Rifle and hate the idea of gunpowder in your fantasy world, now's your chance to learn about something really cool.



These alternatives to firearms were initially built by the Holy Roman Empire, and achieved a brief if still obscure fame as a powerful implement used during the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Rather than using black powder to propel their ammunition, they operated using gas canisters not dissimilar to modern air guns, albeit for lethal utility rather than play. (There are modern lethal air guns too, mostly for hunting's sake as far as I can find.)

These were some pretty curious weapons with unique attributes - attributes that are actually useful for TTRPGs. How many games have you seen with black powder rifles that are fired once every other turn, or even once every turn? How many have treated a wheellock or flintlock rifle as the one-and-done throwaway they'd actually be in a close-quarters skirmish? Black powder's obscuring smoke clouds, fiddly weaknesses, and poor handling are rarely touched upon in a tabletop setting, and probably for good reason because dealing with all of that would be an enormous headache and just make more knife-eared bow users out of your players. But listen to this. The Girardoni rifle managed to achieve the following feats:

• Being entirely powered by air, the air rifle had no powder to be wetted by rain, and could be used more effectively under poor conditions.
• Because the rifle could hold dozens of leaden balls at a time, and because the reload mechanism required no mucking about with manual powder loading, the Girardoni rifle was the first true repeating rifle and also extremely fast to fire. We're talking fast enough to be useful repeatedly on the time-scale that RPG combat takes place at. You don't even have to bend the fiction that much.
• The weapon had no muzzle flash or smoke clouds, allowing the operator's view to remain clear and unobstructed despite the incredible rate of fire.
• Without a muzzle flash or smoke clouds, and with a remarkably quiet report, the rifle was well-suited for snipers who didn't want to give their position away. In fact, this characteristic gave the rifle a sort of black reputation as an assassin's weapon.
• This was further enhanced by the fact that the weapon could be fired repeatedly while lying prone. Rather than require that the operator stand up to reload, he could simply pull a spring-loaded chamber bar to slip a new musket ball inside (or, on some models, utilize gravity and a simple tilt of the barrel).

Unfortunately, a Girardoni rifle was also comparatively fussy, and had several drawbacks that prevented its immediate and enthusiastic adoption:

• The brass air reservoirs the Girardoni rifle used were difficult and expensive to make at the time, with what metallurgy was available. Making a pressurized metal container that could hold a great deal of air in an 18th century blacksmith is no mean feat.
• As a compounding and related problem, the reservoirs were fragile. Smashing your rifle's butt too hard against a rock might crack it open, rendering it worthless - not a great feature in an outdoors environment.
• Refilling a pressurized container with air might be easy today, but at the time all you had to work with was muscle power. The cart-powered pumps and smaller hand-pumps could take an hour or more to refill a single reservoir, and one reservoir only managed around 30 shots at lethal pressures. And reservoirs, as covered above, weren't cheap enough to be manufactured easily.
• Finally, the things required skills to operate that most soldiers couldn't be easily trained to possess. Someone who knew how to operate a black powder rifle was lacking several skills needed to handle an air rifle.

That said, pay attention to those drawbacks. They may be critical for an army, but for player characters in an RPG? They're mostly easily mitigated. With adventurers assumed already to be reasonably competent people invested in their own abilities and equipment, an air rifle is a fantastic weapon. And indeed this is the niche that the weapon had, serving as a sniper's weapon and on specialized roles like the one it held during the aforementioned expedition through western America.

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So here's some rifles and rules for you.

• Air Pistol: 1-handed, Weight equal to a dagger, Damage 1d6! blunt, Range ~235'
• Air Rifle: 2-handed, Weight equal to a sword, Damage 2d4! blunt, Range ~275'

The exclamation mark means the damage is explosive. I like unpredictable guns. If you roll the maximum number on a die, add a new die and roll again. 1d6! can become 3d6 if you get two 6s in a row. It averages out to something like 4.2 and 6.5 average damage for the pistol and rifle respectively. I don't include prices since everyone's is wildly different (and I vary them even within a campaign), but the air rifle is generally about the same price as a longbow, or four times as much as a sword. Both can be found in large port cities or other places where exotic curiosities are found.

All air weapons follow these rules:

• Air guns require a replaceable air canister, attached to the weapon as the stock of the rifle for air rifles, and attached to/part of the grip for air pistols. These canisters are fragile, and if violently impacted, dropped, or otherwise abused will rupture (I break 1d4 fragile items in a pack every time one gets dropped).
• Air canisters can store up to 30 shots' worth of air before recharging.
• Air guns have a remarkably quiet report and no muzzle flash. They are not silent, but it is extremely hard to locate a shooter outdoors. They may be fired and reloaded while prone.
• Refilling an empty air canister takes 1 hour. (In reality, they take closer to 20 minutes, but I find that an hour is nice for game time tracking ... and some balance concerns.)
• It's an implicit thing in my system, but these guns pierce most plate armor protections. Not all of them, but most. I use a mixture of damage reduction and Defense/AC, and have it ignore Defense/AC, but if that's not an option you might just have the guns negate a flat amount of AC.

Air canisters are considered ammunition and are sold individually for around 33% of a pistol's price (or 25% of a rifle's price). A maintenance pack with air pump, lead bullet mold & melting pan, and cleaning tools is sold separately for a modest fee, weighs as much as the rifle, and is required for recharging the canisters. Lead slugs are about four times pricier than arrows and will put a bigger dent in a new PC's wallet, too.

Tell me if you use it or dig it, I'd be happy to hear either way.

GURPS has had them covered since High Tech first edition.

Quote from: David Johansen on April 10, 2023, 09:21:14 PM
GURPS has had them covered since High Tech first edition.

Go figure that there's a GURPS supplement for everything. I don't have that book, so do you have an excerpt?

The fourth edition High Tech pp 88 has stats for the Steyr-Giradoni M.1780 11.75mm, the Daisy Red Rider no 111 .175BB (you'll shoot your eye out kid), and the NSG SplatMaster .68 paint ball gun.  There's a couple paragraphs on the history and advantages of air guns and a couple paragraphs on each weapon.

I've come across some interesting DIY slingshot ideas that you might like, with varying degrees of effort required.

First video gets across the basics, the second demonstrates how stylish they can be.

Edit: If airguns were possible under HRE, you shouldn't need Eberron/steampunk to justify these in your campaign.

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Quote from: Mr. Ordinary, Esq. on May 06, 2023, 06:23:25 PM
I've come across some interesting DIY slingshot ideas that you might like, with varying degrees of effort required.

First video gets across the basics, the second demonstrates how stylish they can be.

Edit: If airguns were possible under HRE, you shouldn't need Eberron/steampunk to justify these in your campaign.

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Those are really interesting.

I ended up writing an improvement over my original rules that swap the guns' flat damage for a resource die mechanic for air pressure.
https://blog.cyclopeancompact.com/p/improved-air-rifle-rules-and-two
I also wrote two one-level "bonus" classes that are compatible with the GLOG. They could use some playtesting, maybe a non-combat ability (though my Warrior/fighting man class doesn't get one, so, eh!). Maybe they'll see use in my upcoming campaign here.