Any spells the you fine people created useing guns/blunderbusts as the insperation for?
for starters here's one of my own-big blast
base effect-the blast from the blunderbust you are using sends out a burst that is double the normal radious of the blast of a blunderbust
prequisite-regoburnum(terran) 15
range-touch(you touch the blunderbust to be effected
duration-inst(when you fire the gun the spell is triggered)
target-the amunitoun(ind.)
According to Wikipedia's "cannon" entry (as in-depth as I wish to research right now), there were real cannon in use in the late thirteenth century.
Which, in my opinion, are better than cannon effects, as they don't get blocked by Parma.
But that's just my bias against "gun" effects; I think using magic to do something directly is usually better than trying to get magic to duplicate a mundane process that's actually pretty efficient (for example, it's probably more efficient to ReHe grind wheat than to enchant a whole mill to do the same thing).
Who needs a gun/blunderbuss when ya got Longbows?!?! I heartell historically they could actually shoot right through castle walls! 
Longbows aren't seen very far out of Wales, though.
Thats why one needs, as our covenant has, a bunch of longbow armed welsh mercenaries.
What fun we initially had when we realised only our single welsh magus spoke a common language with them. The other 8 magi had to pantomime commands until their saxon was up to scratch.
I was joking and being very sarcastic here.
(I have searched/researched/etc and have concluded that bow damage/ranges/effectiveness are exagerrated in all RPGs {oddly guns/xbows always seemd to be greatly weakened})
Early firearms were extremely poor compared to bows.
A decent musket from 16th century could take well over a minute to load(in some cases several minutes even) and accuracy was just terrible, even at normal firing ranges, 20-70m, up to just over 100m if they didnt care about being effective, accuracy wasnt good. Which is why volleyfiring became the norm for almost all armed forces for a looong time.
And about bows, its not so much that RPGs exaggerate them, its that they use the "best case" numbers. On the one hand, excellent archers could routinely hit a person with deadly effect at 200m, or fire high angled and reach above a half km with little accuracy and very random damage, but getting both the really long range and the deadly damage, unlikely to say the least.
And add armour to that "calculation" and the RPGs gets much less realistic. During one of the crusades for example there is mention of how the foot soldiers wearing quilt armour walks around looking like porcupines, with several, sometimes many arrows stuck in the armour.
And crossbows, yeah i expect since they never got as commonly used as they might have been, they never became as popularised. Rather surprising really, as they are much better than early firearms, more accurate, similar or faster rate of fire, no pouch gunpowder combined with the requirement to keep a "match" burning constantly from beginning to end of the fight and much more damaging. The only thing they really had against them(except papal critique at least) was price, several early firearms could easily be made for the cost of a single crossbow, and bolts for the latter cost even more compared to musket bullets.
Hi,
If there is a desire to fling things at people at high velocities you could always make a ReTe lesser enchanted device to fling handy metal pellets at people, ala the Targeted WtIS from HoH:S?
Why you'd spend vis to do this when your have perfectly servicable missile weapons that don't require obscure (i.e. Finesse) training I can't really imagine.
If players badly want to kill stuff with guns I'd recommend using a different setting, or even a different ruleset.
Regards,
You'll never make it as a magus with such a lack of creativity. 
Flinging people at things is so much more original! 
Well, enchanting a crossbow might increase its fire rate dramatically...
Vetrenius devestating crossbow
lesser enchanted item
ReHe 3 (Base: 3, R: per, D: mom: T: ind)
unlimited uses: +10, end level 13
Trigger action: trying to bend both ends of the bow bachwards. This could either be done with two hands or one hand pulling the bow string.
This enables the crossbowman to archieve a rate of fire similar to that of bowmen. The enchantment is rather easy to research and requires little vis. Thus it is especially useful for spring convents.
As the bolt is propelled by mundane force it ignores magic resistance. To aim the corssbowman uses the ability crossbows rather than finesse, which most grogs are missing.
A different Version of the enchantment is used for composite crossbows. This requires an animal requisite resulting in an endlevel of 14.
A metal bow, which are not in use by 1220, will require a ReTe effect of 4 resulting in an end level of 14.
I would just enchant a crossbow to wind itself and create a diameter duration arrow (CrHe, possibly with a requisite) so it could be fired much more frequently.
The crusades provides us with an interesting case of evolution of archery tactics. It goes something like this:
-
Standard tactics in Islamic states was for armies to use large detachments of mounted archers, who would repeatedly attack by charging in, loosing volleys of arrows at their opponents and then charging away again before the enemy could react. Only once the enemy were on their last legs would the troops then charge into close combat to finish them off.
-
Along come the crusaders, who use (among other things) heavily-armoured cavalry. The composite bows of the Muslim horse-archers, though highly effective in most circumstances, have trouble penetrating the armour of the knights at range and hence we see the appearance of the "hedgehog" story.
-
The Muslim forces realise that the answer is to shoot the horses that the knights are riding on, thus reducing their ability to make their feared heavy cavalry charge, which is akin to a locomotive moving at high speed. While a knight is a reasonably mobile warrior on foot, he is not nearly as dangerous as he is mounted, especially in the high temperatures of the Levantine fighting (mainly summer) season.
-
In response, the crusaders start surrounding their knights with crossbowmen, who help to ward off the attacks of the Muslim horse-archers.
And so it goes on...
While generally you´re correct, a few things though.
Not the knights, quilt armour, which on its own was used by many of the common soldiers.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilting
One of its names:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambeson
This is part of why the moslem tactics worked so poorly, because even on common soldiers the archers needed a lucky or well aimed hit(try that from horseback!) while knights had much stronger armour still.
The horses also became targets for another reason, crusaders usually used stallions for their warhorses to get the most possible strength and charge speed, while moslem troops preferred the better stamina of mare´s, and on some occasions this caused some rather "interesting" results, very much not favoring the moslem forces.
Havent stopped yet... 
If you take the story at face value, of course. Such stories are, after all, being written by chroniclers who are well aware of the propaganda value of their accounts. 
By the way, what sources are you drawing on? The accounts that I've read have only ever talked about the knights being the ones whose armour was stuck with multiple arrows.
A whole bunch of them.
Well from what i recall about the translated original texts, it definetly wasnt anything you could call propaganda. At least one text was mostly a long monolouge of complaining about how wasnt supposed to be there and how horrible the climate was etc etc.
I think some texts were arabic in origin as well.
But its years ago since i read it and the books came from the library, ergo, which ones it was i havent the faintest.
I think it was one about military equipment and its development during the crusades but i could be wrong.
I can say for sure though that several of the mentions were indeed specifically about regular soldiers rather than knights.
The use of slings (an underrated weapon) makes the problem of penetrating armor irrelevant.
I'm not sure (I don't have A&A yet), but would firearms even work in Mythic Europe? I seem to recall reading something about explosions not being possible. I remember because I found it odd considering the "Explosion" result on the Experimentation Chart...
EDIT: I've looked up the ArM5 Sling stats - they seem pretty accurate. Therefore I withdraw my complaint that they are underated (at least in this game...).
Eurr..... why? I have not the slightest idea of why this would be the case. Would you mind expanding your answer? Curious minds want to know Are slings any better at armour penetration than crossbows?
(I disregard longbows completely since they were extremely rare in 1200 outside Wales, and they are sadly grossly overplayed and overpowerful in RPGs and other wargame systems IMO. Regular bows were not as powerful as crossbows when it comes to armour penetration as far as what I have read)
Xavi
Penetrating armor? Not really... It was a half-joke based on the fact that slings don't cause damage by penetrating like an arrow does, but by direct transfer of kinetic injury. That said - slings were considered by some scholars (most notably Xenophon) to be superior to the bow as anti-armor weapons.
By way of analogy a knife is a useful weapon because (like an arrow) it can pierce flesh to reach vital organs, but if it cannot penetrate (the victim tucks a newspaper under his jacket) it cannot hurt anyone. By contrast a piece of pipe is useful because (like a sling) it acts as a lever multiplying the force of the attackers blow. Armor also helps protect from the club attack, but not as efficiently as the mode of action is diferent.
I've probably killed this thread by taking it so far from its original topic, but I like slings (and consider them a more likely precursor to catapults and cannons, and thus firearms, than bows of any type).
According to ancient scholars, slings were favored over bows for the following reasons:
- Superior range (especially in rain or strong wind).
- Transportability (Sling ammo can be scrounged and even lead bullets are more compact than arrows).
- Economy (slings and their ammo are cheaper to produce and slingers take less time to train than archers).
- Better against armor (a stone causes injury by its concussive force which can transferred through armor without needing to penetrate - this is one of the reasons for Knights wearing quilting under their armor).
Well, I think that I can claim a reasonable familiarity with at least most of the Arabic material from the period and a reasonable amount of the western material as well, and I've never come across an account that applied the "porcupine motif" to soldiers in anything other than metal armour. I assume that one Arabic source that you are thinking of is Baha' al-Din's biography of Saladin, which is then quoted repeatedly by later sources, both mediaeval writers and modern historians. Here's his version of the story:
"The enemy army was already in formation with the infantry surrounding it like a wall, wearing solid iron corselets and full-length well-made chain mail (my emphasis), so that arrows were falling on them with no effect. They were shooting with crossbows and wounding the Muslims' horses, their cavalry and infantry. I saw various individuals amongst the Franks with ten arrows fixed in their backs, pressing on in this fashion quite unconcerned." (Richards' translation, p. 170)
Well, if you remember the title of the book, please PM me, as I'd be very interested to look at it!
Nope, i have read that one as well, but not one of those referring to the "lighter" armoured troops.
And it may be hedgehogs or whatever, not necesserarily porcupines.
Thinking about it, does porcupines even exist in that area? 
Eh, i think it was one of the books by a Swedish author so i have a feeling you wouldnt have much use of it unless someone did a translation of it.
Next time im at the library ill see if i can find it.