Legends of Shadow World. Using “Slug Throwers” in Rolemaster.

I’m fine tuning my “Legends of Shadow World” adventures and debating the mechanics of firearms used by some particular nasty Demon Warriors: basically a large caliber gatling gun! Here is what I used:

Gϋthϋraxx Auto Gun

Weighing 22lbs and 42” long, this ornate hand held rotary gun is the preferred weapon of Gϋthϋraxx Shock Troops. The guns are ornate constructions with a bulbous receiver, curved metal stock and a cylindrical clip of grey/black metal.

Each gun holds a 12 round clip of .80 caliber slugs that are fired from 6 rotating spring powered barrels. The gun can fire up to 6 slugs/round. Each clip takes 1 round to change and the spring rewound every 12 shots.

Stats:

  1. Use Heavy Crossbow Table. 4x Damage. 4x range.
  2. Each shot after the first will receive a cumulative -10 penalty due to recoil.
  3. Requires 95 strength to fire w/o penalty. For every point under 95 there is a cumulative -1 penalty. For every 5 points under 95 winding the barrel takes an additional round.

 

Since I’m using RM2 stats (like other SW products), I wanted to keep things simple. Using the Heavy Crossbow chart with a damage and range multipliers made sense.

Anyone have a better idea or thoughts on this?

9 Replies to “Legends of Shadow World. Using “Slug Throwers” in Rolemaster.”

  1. That seems perfectly viable to me. I once had to do a similar conversion where a player wanted to use a chainsaw in melee. I used the battleaxe table and everyone was happy.

      1. We were playing Rolemaster Doom as a one off adventure complete with respawning points so realism was not a high priority.

    1. I’m thinking it needs a rule for strafing multiple targets. Since it can fire up to 6/rnd and there is a cumulative recoil penalty maybe -10/15 degree arc?
      So if you lined up 6 targets in a 90d frontal arc, the user could fire at all 6 targets, but would have cumulative penalty of: 0/-20/-40/-60/-80/-100. Seem reasonable?

      This allows for innumerable targeting solutions: firing 2 slugs each at 2 targets separated by 50d, or 2 slugs at 1, 1 at the next target that’s 30d away and then back to the first target for 2 more etc.

      1. You could lose one slug between each target when strafing. You still suffer the recoil but the slug just blows chunks out of the environment. That would make it less dangerous when used that way. It would also surprise PCs who get their hands on one of these!

        I want to see one of these used in a cathedral filled with stained glass windows!

      2. In my view recoil penalties are decent, but you need to consider penalties for changing targets as well which would be in addition to the recoil mods. Alternately you can have a burst attack. I’ve worked most of this stuff out, but if you do burst attacks you need a new crit table if you want it to work correctly.

          1. I take them as per target, not per degree shifted. So it’s -10 for the first, -20 for the second, and so on. And that’s in addition to normal consecutive shot penalties. But that also doesn’t simulate suppressive fire very well, so I have the burst attack option. It uses a fixed rate of fire and covers a defined area. But that requires new attack and crit tables.

            Penalties are also driven by possible rates of fire and the length of the CR. Six shots per round isn’t especially high if you’re using a five or ten second round. My firearms stuff is based on a two second CR, and assumes all fire is generally aimed, so you have RoF ranging from 1 up to 11 (or 30 with a minigun, but that’s a pretty unique case). My shot penalties are also calculated based on that. If you’re using a longer round and lower RoF, I’d say the penalties should be lower as well.

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