A case for crossbows for the Urban Fantasy Vigilante

[PTTG]

You're just leaving the bolts behind like an amateur? Go and grab 'em, man! Get nice hard-wearing steel ones and they last for a long time.

Bows are harder to learn, but are more common than crossbows and are more easily passed off as a hobby thing.

Or, go with a sword or spear made with modern materials. There's been thousands of years of magical research on enchanting swords, and with the right attitude you can palm off Sitrexor, The Sword of the Coming Dawn, as mall ninja crap if you need to.

Even better, go with using magic yourself. Throw a firebolt or freeze the enemy with your hands and use the psychological block effect in your favor.

If that terrorist tries to set off a fireball but you cancel it with an ice wall, the civilians will see something like "Well, he set off some kind of incidenary thing, but this hero guy just charged in there with a fire extinguisher and put it out super fast!"

[Sciencezam]

This thread is quite relevant to a game I'm running, actually.

Jae Hwa is a magician and modern-day ninja working for some government spooks on a deniable basis. She'd love to use a sniper rifle, an SMG, or a suppressed pistol for her work, but she lives in japan (with notoriously strict firearms laws) and definitely can't be carrying one of those around (not that carrying a bow around is 'great', either...)

I had been looking at the Folding Han-Kyu from Dungeon Fantasy: Ninjas, but what bow/crossbow options would be good for her? I figure the higher rate of fire of bows would win out over crossbows.

Originally Posted by Black Leviathan

High tech changes a lot of the limitations of the crossbow and it remains a very good weapon. Compound bows or High Tech crossbows do a nice amount of damage. In a high TL game I had a crossbow archer that had an electric motor that cocked his bow with enough strength to cut the reloading time down to a second. It wasn't quiet but it was terrifying.

Are these motors written up anywhere?

[Hide]

I know this is about crossbows, but you could also try the Blowgun; your vigilantes could be musicians and perform every-night. They could have two sets of blowguns, one is the air instrument (i.e. flute) the other the weapon. Then they could employ compressed air instead of their own to avoid DNA traces from saliva, etc. And I think it reloads faster than a crossbow, although harder to use. Finally the blowguns could be magic wands, and they could fire magic missiles compared to bullets. LC might be easier to deal with after this, because, it is not blowguns but flutes. Also, they regular ammo could be poisoned (and that worked for ninjas and chinese spies).

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Sciencezam

I had been looking at the Folding Han-Kyu from Dungeon Fantasy: Ninjas, but what bow/crossbow options would be good for her? I figure the higher rate of fire of bows would win out over crossbows.

I presume you've looked at Douglas Cole's article "The Deadly Spring" in Pyramid #3/33?

The choice between bow and crossbow essentially depends on how much armour you need to be able to get through, and how capable you are of shooting people in the eye at range. Unless your crossbow is huge, taking down people with one shot requires at least a Vitals hit.