SNAPDRAGON
The Snapdragon, manufactured by Arms of Innestia, is the most common assault rifle in production. Sure, Primarch Ballistics makes guns that are far more accurate. That is, until you sneeze on them and they fall to pieces. Alchetronics is doing some interesting things in the field of energy weapons, but they're primarily an electric car company and they're 10 years from having anything ready for the field and have been for the last 20 years. Feng Shui Firearms incorporates elderbrand wood into their weapons, which is great for enchantments and gun mages but not so much for anyone who doesn’t have an extra thousand dollars or more to spend on their gun. Gugnir and Sons armed the allies in the Great War 100 years ago, and they haven't seen fit to update their designs since. But Innestia is not just the archon of fertility and passion; she's the archon of fire, the forge, and warfare, and this gun manufacturer dedicated themselves to her for a reason.
The Snapdragon isn't exceptional in any particular way, but that's part of why it's so popular. 30-round magazine, mounting points for various accessories, rugged construction, reasonable price point. It's never the best weapon for any particular fight, but it's usually almost as good as the top contender for half the price. And more importantly, it's never the wrong weapon for any particular fight, a liability of your more specialized firearms. The 31 cm barrel length gives it good range while still being suited to "close quarters fighting", as the marketing brochures refer to it. This partially means what it seems to mean, fighting in urban environments. But the peace with the trow is fragile, and if it shatters, people need a gun that works well in a tunnel fight. The Snapdragon was designed with that potential in mind.
The Snapdragon has now become so popular that its popularity has become a major selling point. Military contracts and a thriving civilian market mean they manufacture tens of millions, with the corresponding economies of scale, allowing them to slash prices without cutting corners. When adventurers start out, the Guild of Champions usually gives them a used Snapdragon to start their careers. When they start to make money, they usually purchase a newer Snapdragon, upgrading it with some of the many, many accessories available for this firearm. And when they get to be elite adventurers, they often prefer the gun they've grown accustomed to, even when better options are available.
Arms of Innestia manufactures a broad variety of firearms, from basic pistols to high-end military equipment. But the Snapdragon is their flagship product for a reason.
FIRETHORN
In a time of rising global tensions, as militaries were looking to update their arsenals, Arms of Innestia unveiled their newest assault rifle, the Firethorn. It had a greater range, firepower, and accuracy compared to the Snapdragon, and its sleek polymer design had a futuristic flair that made everything else on the market look dated. AoI hoped it would become the new standard for global firearms. Instead it was a flop. Military contracts netted less than 20,000 ordered and civilian and adventurer interest were limited.
However, the gun gained a renaissance 10 years later when the show Archangels Soaring featured the gun as the new signature weapon of the team leader Rick Steele. Within weeks, stores were struggling to keep up with demand and frantically placing orders. AoI restarted production and hasn’t stopped since.
The Firethorn’s flat surfaces are ideal for artistic paint jobs, and those who are willing to shell out for a Firethorn are often also willing to splurge for a custom design to augment their flashy weapon. Between this and the show giving it a sudden surge in popularity, the Firethorn has acquired a reputation as overhyped eye candy that can’t live up to the price. But as multiple independent range tests confirmed, the Firethorn is a superior firearm whose fine-tuned performance matches its ultramodern exterior. While there are numerous competing theories as to why the Firethorn never achieved the expected market penetration, lack of excellence is not among them. For the discerning gun buyer with a little extra money to spare, or for the showoff who wants a gun with at least as much style as it has substance, the Firethorn is an excellent purchase that will not leave buyers wanting.
CHRYSANTHEMUM
Adventurers sometimes need to take down things so big that your average bullet doesn't have the right stopping power, but a rocket launcher would be overkill. This is where the Chrysanthemum thrives, a gun which fires micro grenades at high velocity to devastating effect. Part anti-materiel rifle, part grenade launcher, this gun can take out a moving vehicle or a golden bear with a single shot.
The Chrysanthemum features a rotating drum magazine that holds 6 micro-potion rounds allowing the user to load a variety of munitions and select which one they want in an instant. So if you know you're going up against a dragon, but you don't know what type, you can load up an incendiary potion, a lightning potion, a frost potion, and of course an armor-piercing spike potion and fire what you need when you need it. The Chrysanthemum lacks the blast radius of a regular-sized potion grenade launcher, but it has a smaller, more powerful shot that's designed to pierce armor and deal a more precise effect with less collateral damage. It’s not the first gun you would turn to for urban combat, but if something comes out of the Strange that can shrug off normal bullets, it’s the last thing that beast will ever see.
TIGER LILY
The Tiger Lily is another Arms of Innestia bestseller, an SMG designed specifically for tunnel warfare. It is the default weapon of the Flatlands Peoples, used to great effectiveness in their ongoing war against the trow of Clan Simistil. It's got a 40-round magazine of small-caliber bullets that allow you to quickly fill a hallway with lead and it can equip a suppressor and subsonic rounds without suffering much of a drop in performance.
For any military force fighting a war against the trow (or expecting one), the Tiger Lily is a cheap, effective, and proven weapon that is a crucial part of their arsenal. For many, it's the cornerstone.
PETUNIA
40 years ago, Arms of Innestia had solidified its position as the dominant manufacturer in the arms market, supplanting Gugnir and Sons. However, even the most dedicated AoI fans were still buying the occasional G&S gun, and a bit of research showed why. When adventurers went up against things like golden bears, calamitous wolves, or maybe even summoned dragons, they were finding that AoI didn't have anything capable of landing reliable killshots, and so they made sure to have a larger caliber Gugnir and Sons firearm for these kinds of situations.
The Petunia was AoI's answer to this problem, an oversized carbine that fired .60 caliber shells packed with every recoil-mitigating innovation AoI had at the time. Early field testers complained about the weight, and so AoI spent a few years developing a prototype that replaced most of the steel with lighter aluminum. One broken shoulder later and they went back to hardened steel. Turns out, weight is still the best way to manage recoil, and without it, the Petunia had too much kick for most users.
The Petunia was hardly a top seller. There were never any military contracts, civilian interest was mostly a handful of big game hunters, and adventurers had only so much demand for a gun that could one shot a water buffalo if it was on the other side of a brick wall and also wearing a flak jacket. In modern times, it's been mostly replaced by the Chrysanthemum micro grenade launcher and the Black Rose anti-materiel rifle. But the Petunia hasn't found itself in the dustbin of history just yet. Some adventurers swear by the Petunia and keep one by their side just in case they run into something particularly large and armored.
TYPE 9 REVOLVER
The Gugnir and Sons Type 9 Revolver has also reached a good amount of fame. It's an older gun, even for Gugnir and Sons, but it's still making brisk sales to this day. The Type 9 is a 5-round, .55 caliber magnum revolver whose kick is designed with gnomish wrists in mind. Carbon-based lifeforms sometimes struggle with the recoil, but no one complains about the results. The Type 9 has a decent range for a pistol, continuing Gugnir and Sons tradition of making up for sophistication with a larger cartridge size. And that lack of sophistication makes the Type 9 virtually indestructible. It does not break. It does not jam. It shrugs off chaos curses. It can be swallowed by basilisks and still come out functional. It's heavier than some PDW's and was invented back when horses were the primary mode of transportation, but if reliability is your prime concern, there's no gun with a more proven track record. Friendships fade and women can be capricious, but the Type 9 never disappoints.
TYPE 24 “SWEEPER” SHOTGUN
The Type 24 shotgun was manufactured as a military firearm for the Great War where it mainly saw use as a trench-clearing weapon that was so effective it earned the nickname “the Sweeper”. But it gained a second life in the hands of adventurers as a cheap military surplus weapon that was incredibly versatile.
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Even to this day, when fully-automatic magazine-fed shotguns are available, the Sweeper is a common pick for adventurers, especially skirmishers and other door kickers. Most adventurers add a side saddle to their Type 24’s to hold additional shells, and they fill this with whatever assortment of alchemical and specialty munitions they think they might need, then load the main tube with cheaper buckshot. Whenever the adventurer needs a specialized shell they can simply breech-load the appropriate ammunition and fire it. This takes practice to do seamlessly, but when half seconds can make the difference between life and death, most adventurers are willing to put in the practice.
PERSEVERANCE
The Feng Shui Firearms Perseverance is one of their most popular products. It's a boxy PDW that is favored by gunmages because of its light weight, portability, and combat effectiveness. Like all Feng Shui Firearms products, it uses elderbrand wood and mystic ink in the stock, grips, and as many other components as it can to produce a weapon that is half wand, half gun. The boxy frame leaves plenty of room to add glyph designs and pneumite crystals to power any of the thousands of enchantment templates available for this weapon.
You want something cheap, get a Snapdragon. It has twice the stopping power at half the cost. The Perseverance is designed for battle mages who need to be able to lay down suppressing fire between spells, gunmages who want a weapon that's easy to imbue with magic, and adventurers who want a weapon that was designed to take enchantments rather than enchanting being an afterthought.
VIGILANCE
The Feng Shui Firearms Vigilance was designed as a sniper rifle for the Polar Alliance’s Special Forces Division. While it wasn’t the first sniper rifle with elderbrand components, or even the first one by Feng Shui, all of the Vigilance’s predecessors had issues with the wooden gunstock warping and throwing off the accuracy of the barrel, as well as the barrel heat undermining the magic focusing potential of the elderbrand elements.
FSF’s innovation was to use a free-floating gunstock with optional mystic ink linkages that transferred magical energy onto fired bullets without any of the issues that came from full contact between barrel and gunstock. This, combined with the typical Feng Shui touch, created a gun that was easily enchanted for magical accuracy, damage enhancement, or other purposes.
But the Vigilance is also popular among battlemages and strangelings. The weapon is capable of focusing spells up to 2 kilometers with minimal loss of cohesion, a distance that exceeds the range of all but the finest of staves, while still also shooting bullets.
For the price of a Vigilance, you could buy an Arms of Innestia Hyacinth sniper rifle and have enough left over to afford a backup sniper rifle, body armor, sidearm, and several thousand rounds of high performance ammunition. But if you are the sort of magic user who needs something for long range combat, this gun will treat you better than all of that other gear combined.
MAGNIFICENT GRACE
When Feng Shui Firearms developed the Respectful Grace pistol, it was seen as a minor project, a self-defense tool for strangelings and the occasional mage, as well as perhaps a fashion piece for the well-to-do. But then, monks of Hun Lao got ahold of it.
These monks trained with a variety of pistols-akimbo-style martial arts that are sometimes derogatorily known as “gun fu”. And sure, such tactics might not work well on a battlefield or against a trained opponent fighting with conventional tactics. But the things that come out of the Strange don’t usually abide by standard battlefield doctrine, and the close-in firepower used by these monks is often the exact right tactic to deal with threats that conventional tactics struggle to manage.
With the Respectful Grace pistol, the monks realized that if they channeled the magic of their glyph tattoos through their gun, they could project the energies a meter or so beyond the weapon’s barrel. This would be meaningless to most people, but given the monks’ penchant for close quarters fighting, it was plenty of distance. And this extra destructive magic often made the difference between an enemy that was dead and one that was wounded, pissed at you, and close enough to claw your face off.
Feng Shui Firearms sent a team of designers to talk with the monks about their novel use of the Respectful Grace pistol, and what challenges they faced with the weapon, and the feedback led to the development of the Magnificent Grace pistol. This firearm comes in semiautomatic and fully automatic variants and is designed a bit more rugged than its predecessor. Ridges on the bottom of the handle make it slightly more effective when pistol whipping opponents. Redesigned mystic ink lines more effectively channel glyph tattoo energy down the line of fire, adding another half meter or so to the projection of glyph effects. And bayonet mounts were added for those that wanted the extra melee potential. The result was a resounding success and many flatlands militias placed bulk orders for.
SR-9.1
Conventional wisdom says that sniping is a profession reserved for the elite few, that you can't just turn any random infantryman into a sniper. Primarch Ballistics is not a company bound by conventional wisdom, and their SR-9.1 sniper rifle is about to show what happens when trowlet ingenuity is pitted against a previously unsolvable problem.
The SR-9.1 is as much computer as it is rifle, combining the input from its sensor arrays to calculate distance to target, drop, windage, and even the temperature of the powder in the bullets to get the most accurate firing solution possible. All the shooter has to do is place the crosshairs on the target and pull the trigger. In the time it takes a trained sniper to calculate the relevant factors and line up the shot with a standard rifle, an average grunt holding an SR-9.1 has already picked off their target and is looking for the next one. Even without the scope and sensor array, the SR-9.1 is a pinnacle of accuracy. With those gadgets turned on, it's a technological marvel.
Of course, Primarch Ballistics has its naysayers for a reason. The SR-9.1 may be 10 years ahead of its time, but it'll need at least 15 years of testing to get all the bugs out. The gun requires extensive maintenance, and if any dirt falls in it or if it even gets used too much, it can become overloaded with contaminants and jam unexpectedly. The precision alignment is easily disrupted by strong shock, so this is not a weapon that handles being dropped well. The software still has a few bugs that pop up under weird conditions and there's a joke that the manual has 1 page of firing instructions with the other 59 pages being prayers to Aquillus, archon of computer code, to beg him to clear out the mess the programmers made. It's not a horrible gun, maybe only 30% more likely to malfunction than a standard sniper rifle. But when a misfired cartridge can spell the difference between life and death, sometimes 30% is enough.
P-12.2
A promising new product from Primarch Ballistics, the P-12.2 is a semiautomatic pistol designed for spec. ops work to be as quiet as a whisper. The high barrel twist rate is designed to convert enough of the bullet’s momentum into rotational energy that it can fly at subsonic speed and still have extra energy to release on impact. Combining the subsonic speeds with a suppressor and other integrated noise-reducing solutions gives users a gun whose loudest sound is the cycling of the mechanism, and even that can be mitigated with care.
The P-12.2 is a specialty-purpose weapon and most governments try to keep it out of the hands of civilians. It’s used primarily by special forces and some adventurers, though a few have wound up on the black market.
While the P-12.1 was a disaster that was quickly pulled from the market, the P-12.2 has managed to eliminate most of the design flaws that plagued the original. The suppressor can still blow too much gas back into the gun’s mechanisms if it is fired too rapidly, and a solid enough kinetic shock might break some of the finer sound-dampening mechanisms. But for those to whom stealth is paramount, the P-12.2 has no rivals.
MG-8.4
Primarch Ballistics had long been struggling to break into the machine gun market, and they saw the MG-8 as their chance to finally do so. Though it has the “MG” designation, the weapon is built more like an assault rifle than a machine gun. It has the traditional high-tech innovations you’d expect on a Primarch Ballistics firearm but the focus was sustaining a high rate of fire without overheating or breakdown. However, the gun’s main selling point was its helical magazines, hollow tubes that fed rounds into the gun in a spiral pattern. If you needed a magazine that held more rounds, you simply slotted in a longer tube. 50, 100, and 150 round magazines were available, allowing the weapon to be used more like an assault rifle or a machine gun as the situation demanded while also bypassing the long reload times of conventional belt feeds. The result was a weapon that could engage targets over a kilometer away with burst fire or lay down suppressive fire in close quarters with equal ease.
But the PB team were adamant that this gun had to be reliable. PB was eyeballing surface military contracts, and for the MG-8.4 to be chosen, it couldn’t suffer the kinds of malfunctions that PB weapons had become known for.
It was in that regard that the MG-8.1 failed. While the prototypes had been quite reliable, manufacturers weren’t able to maintain the strict tolerances the gun required and the resulting product failed under even moderate use.
The weapon was redesigned into the MG-8.2 which eliminated all of the prior production glitches only to replace them with new ones. The MG-8.3 was a much better version, and the variant for trowlets functioned immaculately. But those manufactured with human-sized grips drew slews of customer complaints. Engineers stressed for months trying to figure out what the differences between variants were that caused such a gap in performance, until a tour of the factory revealed the problem. It turns out Primarch Ballistics had been hiring trowlet refugees for their manufacturing, workers were leery of manufacturing guns for the surface world so they began subtly sabotaging any guns they thought might end up in the hands of humans. PB closed the factory and reopened it in a new location with more trustworthy workers and rebranded the weapon as the MG-8.4 without changing a single design element. The resulting firearm was a masterpiece, delivering on the promise of innovation that PB was known for without sacrificing durability or reliability.
Unfortunately, the magazines for the gun were never able to live up to that promise. Despite dozens of iterations, in the end, the helical design always resulted in feed issues that meant the MG-8.4 was prone to stopping midway through a salvo of suppressive fire. A popular aftermarket conversion was to modify the gun to accept standard box magazines, turning it into more of an assault rifle. But Primarch Ballistics themselves were unwilling to make that adaptation, perhaps because doing so would mean admitting they were unable to deliver on their goal of creating a machine gun that could stand toe-to-toe with competitors. The MG-8.4 never quite lived up to its ambitions, but it’s still an innovative weapon that allows machine gun levels of firepower in an assault rifle package that can operate at sniper rifle ranges. It is not a gun to be dismissed.