Modern Monster Hunting Guns [XM500, MICOR Leader 50, etc.]

[dcarson]

Can you repurpose the fuze from things like flash-bangs?

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by dcarson

Can you repurpose the fuze from things like flash-bangs?

Not for modern high explosives. For black powder, yes.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Eh, it's not as if real adventuring occultists are so plentiful that you can afford to turn them down just because they are dangerous crazy persons. In any case, if you did that, you'd never have anyone who could work magic on your side, as it seems they are all more or less cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, especially the powerful ones.

Though it's worth keeping in mind that this because magic does not work in reality. This tends to keep sane, practical people from spending years studying it. It carries over as a trope in secret magic settings because the central concept is that magic works but somehow doesn't change anything. But it's worth considering that the mix of people willing to devote years of effort to something most people don't believe in should be somewhat different where it produces results. You get a mix more like avant garde artists or hobby flower gardeners - some of whom are obsessive crazies sure, but it's no longer a *requirement*.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Though it's worth keeping in mind that this because magic does not work in reality. This tends to keep sane, practical people from spending years studying it. It carries over as a trope in secret magic settings because the central concept is that magic works but somehow doesn't change anything. But it's worth considering that the mix of people willing to devote years of effort to something most people don't believe in should be somewhat different where it produces results. You get a mix more like avant garde artists or hobby flower gardeners - some of whom are obsessive crazies sure, but it's no longer a *requirement*.

I suppose that by now, there might be some mentally stable people who are practicing magic. If so, however, no PC has ever met them.

The setting background is that ever since the 1980s, subtle supernatural phenomena have been occurring on our Earth. There is no evidence that anything supernatural existed in the 20th century before this. In other words, the world was our own, exactly, until some point in the 1980s.

Depending on how credible one might find anecdotal evidence from before the 20th century, it might be possible to maintain that supernatural phenomena had existed before, even if they had not been proven by scientists. In any case, modern occultists can find useful magical knowledge that was written before 1900 and the prevailing theory is therefore that the paranormal existed in some form before, but was dormant, inaccessible or otherwise undetectable for most of the 20th century.

The phenomena that occurred in the 1980s were mostly incredibly subtle or confined to extremely remote places. Very few supernatural phenomena from before 1988 are even attested in any other form that anecdotal and it's an individual researcher's choice how many of those stories to credit.

Before 1990 or so, almost no one knew that anything out of the ordinary theoretically existed in the world. Discovering a change point between the campaign world and the real world would have been almost impossible, as most of the differences amounted to a few people in the world having had paranormal experiences, in private, that were true. They may or may not have told trusted friends, but few or any historical changes can be pinpointed.

The exception is that some of the organisations that exist in the modern world of 2018 had their origins in private conversations between trusted friends in the 1980s, about some inexplicable events one of them had witnessed. No organisation that any PC knows about can truly have been said to have been founded any earlier than in 1989, when the Vatican took its first steps to discreetly investigate the secret archives and various reports in order to determine the true situation. From that point, it's possible to date the inception of an inner circle of Vatican insiders who are aware of the potential existence of occult phenomena.

At a similar point in time, an informal network among the inner circle of HM Queen Elizabeth II was coming into existence, based on Her Majesty's prophetic dreams, which had by that time become specific enough to convince several of her close confidants that no other explanation than a previously unknown human capability was remotely plausible.

There were also other, less important groups of friends and confidants, who moved from discussing phenomena to actively researching and trying to collect evidence. Due to the way magic seemed to function, evidence was extremely hard to come by. Proximity to high technology, skeptics and various modern conveniences likely to be located near any scientific laboratory mostly made any supernatural phenomena impossible to replicate. Evidence, at least in the 1980s and the early 1990s, meant testimony of someone whose senses and intellect one trusted, not any kind of physical evidence or data that would convince a skeptic.

In the 1990s, however, the real world and the campaign world start to diverge. Instead of the fairly rapid and sustained drop in crime rates in the US and some other Western countries seen in the 1990s, the campaign world saw the high urban crime rate of the late 1970s and of the 1980s, continue to rise. Violent crime, homicides, missing persons, all of these indicators gradually rose during the 1990s, instead of dropping as in our world. The rise was almost imperceptible in the early part of the decade, but by 1995 or so, the campaign world was noticeably worse than the real world, even if only marginally so.

Even so, the supernatural was quite subtle and did not produce much in the way of replicable results or effects that could be independently verified. It might be possible to theorize that something odd was going on in many incidents on record, but as for smoking gun evidence to convince any skeptics, it simply did not seem to exist. For whatever reason, apparent otherworldly beings or cryptids, when killed and taken to a laboratory, usually turned out to be mentally ill people or sick animals of quite natural origin, even if witnesses had testified to seeing much larger and more frightening beings.

Even ritual magic did not work reliably or predictably during the 1990s, with few occultists being capable of working any magic that could not be dismissed as coincidence. It was possible to study magic, yes, but not as if one would study a scientific discipline, as the results were still frustratingly subjective.

In the 2000s, there were finally some greater changes and some places in the world now had uncanny things happen on a regular basis. But there was a very strong correlation between areas where few or no people lived and where most of the more noticable phenomena was observed and in those areas where occult incidents occurred within human society, they tended to do it at night and among people who already believed in it, but were not necessarily credible witnesses.

Even so, with the ever increasing scope and power of the paranormal phenomena, it was inevitable that governments and authorities would start to take note. In 2005, the 'Shadow Court of HM Queen Elizabeth II', the British conspiracy dedicated to studying the phenomena, had decided that the rising crime rates and disappearances were almost certainly connected to the occult and that the supernatural represented a greater threat to the UK and the world than any terrorist organisation or mundane criminals.

By every reasonable metric, the veil of secrecy around the occult should have collapsed in the 2010s, probably early in the decade. In 2018, it still hasn't, but official denials increasingly ring hollow for the numerous people whose daily lives bring them into contact with unexplained events, deaths and disappearances.

What might explain the inability of believers to convince anyone of the true state of affairs is the Facade, an inexplicable mechanism by which either humanity as a whole or perhaps the world, tries to close the minds of mortals to the inexplicable and edit out memories of the impossible and supernatural (Pyramid #3/97 'Mask of Humanity' by Christoper R. Rice).

In any case, this means that anyone who studies the occult in the campaign world either started only a few years ago (at the absolute most thirty eight years, but more likely 5-10) or is the kind of person who studied it before anyone was aware that it actually existed. And due to the lack of official institutions or authorities that even acknowledge magic, it's not as if the study is a normal career choice, even by 2018.

More than that, due to the Facade, those who believe in the supernatural tend to be strong-willed and somewhat odd. And because of the subjective and confusing nature of magic, practitioners have to have a somewhat flexible mind.

It is theorized that mana and magic, by their very nature, may be some sort of invasive energy caused by other worlds bleeding into the reality of our own. Certainly, it is true that otherworldly creatures are spotted most often in areas where it is easier to work magic and that their presence seems to stimulate magical energies.

And it seems axiomatic that most of the otherworldly beings who are prepared to teach humans the use of magic are much less likely to be benevolent than they are to be predatory. The idea that magic is a corrosive and dangerous force has much to recommend it, even if it can't be proven. It may well be that studying the mysteries of magic in itself tends to have a deleterious effect on human sanity.

[Calvin]

I'm a bit late to the party, but a few things came up that I can comment on.

The first is that barrel length does not actually impact accuracy, at least not in reality. As long as the barrel is long enough that the round is properly stabilized by the rifling, extra length does not increase accuracy or precision. And it's not a very great distance either, I'm working off the top of my head, but a 5.56 only needs to spend 6 inches in the rifling to stabilize properly.

So aside from snubnose pistols, shortening the barrel of most firearms won't reduce accuracy.

What it will do is reduce velocity, which might make certain shots on moving targets more difficult, but that's an issue of time of flight, not a change in MOA.

As for recoil, the Ballistics Spreadsheet actually computes recoil for you. My suggestion would be to start by building the base weapon in the sheet, including a modifier for weight if it needs it. Then use the sheet to track what happens to damage, recoil, etc, as you modify.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by dcarson

Can you repurpose the fuze from things like flash-bangs?

Originally Posted by Rupert

Not for modern high explosives. For black powder, yes.

This brings up another point, though.

Kessler's guys mostly can't legally obtain anything that a police department couldn't plausibly require. But anything that a Captain's command (including a small local SWAT team) in the St. Lucian police might conceivably get legal end-user certificates for, they can probably arrange to acquire, more or less legally (at least while in that jurisdiction).

Does anything they can order that way contain parts that could be repurposed into more dangerous ordnance, assuming you have access to RDX from the mining industry and can make any kind of casing or fragmentation sleeve with Machinist and Armoury?

Would there be useful fuzes or other parts in Less-Than-Lethal munitions, breaching charges, anything a police department might justify for disabling vehicle or watercraft engines, etc.?

[Icelander]

To be clear, I am still accepting suggestions on really cool monster hunting weaponry available at 2018.

Yeah, sometimes the legality of the weapons and suitability for their cover IDs will be the prime consideration. And, yes, most of what they have access to will have been sourced through grey market means that require some lip service to be paid to a plausible end user and which won't cover truly restricted ordnance.

But that doesn't mean there won't be some NPCs who express their unique identity by having managed to convince their Patron to buy them something completely illegal on the actual black market, like second- or third-hand Chinese or Russian military export ordnance obtained through a truly criminal arms dealer, just for special occasions.

So, what are the coolest LC 1-2 weapons being exported by nations where strategic bribes might disappear a couple and a case of ammo?

Or being fielded by a country where an arms dealer bribing a supply sergeant at the armoury is plausible and likely?

What are the sexiest LMGs, SAWs, GPMGs, vehicle-mounted machine guns, grenades, anti-personnel mines, grenade launchers, automatic grenade launcers, commando mortars and similar that a well-funded group could buy on an actual international black market?

It's established that Kessler has a long-standing relationship with a former mercenary turned the kind of arms dealer who almost never has even a pretence of legality. Forged documents, bribed officials and actually stolen ordnance. But obviously, it's easier to get away with that sort of things in countries where corruption actually is endemic. So weapons that are made in a country with effective regulation and imported into another such country are pretty much ruled out.

But any weapons where the seller, transshipment point or the end user are corrupt ought to available, albeit perhaps orders of magnitude more expensive fhan they would be for a valid end user certificat

What does that leave us with?

I'm at least a decade behind on studying trends in black market models and suppliers. I could make guesses for 2006-2008 and 2010-2011, but not only is there constant innovation are the world, but it also gets utterly overshadowed by thd constant commercial pressure in the West to release, to publish, to launch something new, regardless of whether you have something to say. Basically, the cool new stuff didn't even exist when I last had a game where PCs were allowed near military ordnance, even the nifty bits.

So, drown me me in brand, model and type names. Suggest HE and DEDP grenade launcher ammo and where you ought to procure them,.

Are there arms dealing nations so eager for currency or perhaps attention that they'll sell to anyone with dollars?

Is Russia indefferent to you, or do they wish to sell new AK pattern LMG?

What are we buying and from whom?


*New rule. After taking strong sleeep medicine, go immediately to sleep. Do not pass Go, do not get $200 and absolutely do not decide you'll finish what you writing. And as you find it hard to focus and the letters run around like ants dancing the Mouse King, you ought to realize that before putting you to sleep, such pills promote bisociation, metanarrative thinking and the sneaking suspicion that tne button fot 'Next' is breaking the Fourth Wall.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Would there be useful fuzes or other parts in Less-Than-Lethal munitions, breaching charges, anything a police department might justify for disabling vehicle or watercraft engines, etc.?

There could well be, yes. There are grenades out there that fire chunks of rubber all over, for crowd control, and they'll have real grenade fuses. These should be obtainable by a SWAT team in the US if their leadership wants it.

Also, there are police-grade grenade launchers with chemical and smoke warheads. They are slightly smaller bore than the military 40mm grenade launchers, so you can use police ammo in a military GL, but not the other way round. Those round could be filled with other payloads, and any with a burster charge will have a 'proper' fuse that could be used with an explosive or incendiary charge.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm at least a decade behind on studying trends in black market models and suppliers. I could make guesses for 2006-2008 and 2010-2011, but not only is there constant innovation are the world, but it also gets utterly overshadowed by thd constant commercial pressure in the West to release, to publish, to launch something new, regardless of whether you have something to say. Basically, the cool new stuff didn't even exist when I last had a game where PCs were allowed near military ordnance, even the nifty bits.

I really have no idea. Last time I paid any attention is at least that long ago, and it was "the latest hot brand of 'AR'/M4, with all the latest hot doodads hung off it".

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Rupert

There could well be, yes. There are grenades out there that fire chunks of rubber all over, for crowd control, and they'll have real grenade fuses. These should be obtainable by a SWAT team in the US if their leadership wants it.

Also, there are police-grade grenade launchers with chemical and smoke warheads. They are slightly smaller bore than the military 40mm grenade launchers, so you can use police ammo in a military GL, but not the other way round. Those round could be filled with other payloads, and any with a burster charge will have a 'proper' fuse that could be used with an explosive or incendiary charge.

Excellent. It sounds like much of what they need to make lethal grenades and anti-personnel mines could be sourced legally and then illegally made into the required ordnance, using mostly Explosives (Demolitions) and Machinist.

I suppose that a person aboard should probably be responsible for any fuzes and suchlike and would arm any ordnance before a mission and no sooner. That might be the Hollywood pyrotechnics guy.