High-tech weaponry in Whitehack

One of the big successes in the Whitehack campaign I ran for my kids and their friends last year was the judicious introduction of high-tech firearms. These were discovered in the wreckage of a spaceship underneath Dragonfell - so named for a fiery "dragon" that plummeted into the side of the mountain centuries before.

The revelation that the dragon was actually a spaceship prompted equal measures of delight and outrage ("This was meant to be a fantasy game!"), but what really got the players going was the discover of three long, metallic staves that could be manipulated to fire destructive bolts of energy.

The mechanics for this were very simple: the weapons did 1d20 damage. I like to keep weapon damage in a one-to-whatever range (i.e. a single die) whenever possible; I'm not a huge fan of "1d8 + 3" or whatever, so I'm highly sympathetic to Dungeon World/The Black Hack-style damage by class - even though I'm not that keen on character classes otherwise. The swingy d20 meant that a monster might just be grazed (though alarmed) by the energy beam. It also meant that there was a reasonable chance of obliterating a five-hit-dice monster in a single blast. The players loved that.

What they didn't love so much was the revelation that each weapon had only six shots. Boom! Boom! Click, click, click ...

By the time they discovered this, all three energy weapons had been used fairly heavily. But they hadn't been keeping track of the shots. I had, of course. That led to some great tension, especially as the bad news came when they were far away from Dragonfell.

In our current Whitehack campaign, energy weapons have yet to feature, though Dragonfell is on the map. In time, we may find out whether the players have learned the lesson of using powerful weaponry sparingly.