Developing Azoth-7

graham_s · 04-08-2012, 08:44 PM

Hey Guys/Gals,

I'm toying with the idea of running a campaign set on Azoth-7, and since there's only a couple pages of published material on that setting, I'm having to fill in quite a lot of details myself. There's one area where I've hit a bit of a snag in terms of design, though.

The description of Azoth-7 in Infinite Worlds mentions rubies from Regulus that make cannons of holy flame. This sounded quite cool to me, and I decided that it would be even cooler if you could make small arms with those rubies. Now, I could treat these basically as fireball-shooting wands that happen to have a trigger on them, but I don't like that idea. I want them to feel like a product of the same industrial design that produced the mundane firearms that the PCs are using, but with different sorts of strengths and limitations.

With that in mind, I came up with these principles: first, that the Regulan rubies are effectively the ammunition that these guns use, and each ruby gets you several hundred shots. Second, the process of firing these weapons produces a great deal of heat, and managing that heat so that the barrel of your gun doesn't melt is the weapon's limiting factor in a firefight. Third, since the setting is TL 4+2, the heat limitation should restrict the use of these weapons approximately as much as ammunition concerns restrict use of TL 6 guns.

So for example, the Browning Hi-Power has a RoF of 3 and a clip of 13+1 (3), so after five or so rounds blazing away with the thing you have one to three rounds of downtime reloading. My goal with the heat management system would be to have a flame pistol that's roughly analogous to the Browning have a similar ratio of uptime to downtime.

The challenge for me has been to actually come up with a system for all of this. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I could start?

04-08-2012, 08:44 PM	#1
graham_s Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: Los Angeles, CA	Developing Azoth-7 Hey Guys/Gals, I'm toying with the idea of running a campaign set on Azoth-7, and since there's only a couple pages of published material on that setting, I'm having to fill in quite a lot of details myself. There's one area where I've hit a bit of a snag in terms of design, though. The description of Azoth-7 in Infinite Worlds mentions rubies from Regulus that make cannons of holy flame. This sounded quite cool to me, and I decided that it would be even cooler if you could make small arms with those rubies. Now, I could treat these basically as fireball-shooting wands that happen to have a trigger on them, but I don't like that idea. I want them to feel like a product of the same industrial design that produced the mundane firearms that the PCs are using, but with different sorts of strengths and limitations. With that in mind, I came up with these principles: first, that the Regulan rubies are effectively the ammunition that these guns use, and each ruby gets you several hundred shots. Second, the process of firing these weapons produces a great deal of heat, and managing that heat so that the barrel of your gun doesn't melt is the weapon's limiting factor in a firefight. Third, since the setting is TL 4+2, the heat limitation should restrict the use of these weapons approximately as much as ammunition concerns restrict use of TL 6 guns. So for example, the Browning Hi-Power has a RoF of 3 and a clip of 13+1 (3), so after five or so rounds blazing away with the thing you have one to three rounds of downtime reloading. My goal with the heat management system would be to have a flame pistol that's roughly analogous to the Browning have a similar ratio of uptime to downtime. The challenge for me has been to actually come up with a system for all of this. Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I could start?