Gunpowder Artillery For AD&D1E

This is a demi-culverin, roughly equivalent to
a basilisk from these tables

Gun Name	Proj Wt (gp)	Pwdr Wt (gp)	Range		Damage		Rate of Fire
			Min.	Max.	S-M	L
Ribald	2	1	1”	5”	2-6 (x12)	2-6 (x12)	1/24*
Serpentine	25	16	1”	90”	2-12	3-24	½
Saker	60	40	2”	160”	3-30	3-30	1/3
Basilisk	120	60	2”	210”	3-30	4-32	1/3
Culverin	180	120	3”	260”	4-32	5-30	¼
Dolphin	320	215	3”	210”	5-30	5-40	1/8
Cannon	400	275	3”	170”	5-40	5-50	1/10
Bombard	2000	1500	10”	50”	5-50	6-60	1/20

* 1/24 with 1 crew, 1/12 with 2 crew, 1/8 with 3 crew.

Gun Name	Cost of weapon (gp)	Wt. of weapon (lbs.)	Siege Attack: Points of damage against:				Def. Pt. Val.
			Wood	Earth	Soft Stone	Hard Rock
Ribald	380	80	–	–	–	–	½
Serpentine	1000	1000	3	–	2	1	3
Saker	2000	1800	6	½	4	2	6
Basilisk	2200	3000	7	½	5	3	7
Culverin	2500	4000	8	1	6	4	8
Dolphin	3500	5000	9	1	6	4	9
Cannon	4500	6000	10	2	7	5	10
Bombard	5000	8000	12	3	9	6	12

Use the Artillery rules (DMG, p. 108-109) with these weapons. Note that a Ribald is 12 barrels, each loaded separately, with up to three people loading.

Use the Firearms rules for potential exploding guns (note that artillery always uses unpackaged powder [EDIT Nov 2019: I would change this to packaged powder instead]). Damage is as follows:

Ribald: 3d6 for one barrel. Add 1d6 per 3 barrels or fraction above 1 barrel. Burst radius is 1”, damage to others is 2d6.

Serpentine: 3d8. Burst radius 1½”, damage 2d6.

Saker: 3d10. Burst radius 2”, damage 2d6.

Basilisk: 4d8. Burst radius 2”, damage 2d6.

Culverin: 5d6. Burst radius 2½”, damage 3d6.

Dolphin: 5d8. Burst radius 3”, damage 3d8.

Cannon: 5d10. Burst radius 3”, damage 3d10.

Bombard: 5d12. Burst radius 3”, damage 4d8.

 

(Multiply burst radius by 3 if using "indoor" scale.) 

A professional artillerist is treated as having proficiency in the artillery pieces and also to have the Gunner proficiency (see the Firearms rules for details). Fighters (only, not Paladins, Rangers, or other classes) may choose the Gunpowder Artillery proficiency to use any of these weapons, and the Gunner proficiency acts as normal.

Cost of powder for one shot is a number of gold pieces equal to the powder weight (in gp equivalent) divided by 5, plus the projectile weight (in gp equivalent) divided by 100. This price includes the powder, shot, wadding, and so forth. For example, a Saker costs 8gp + 12 sp (or 172sp) to fire once, a Bombard 320gp per shot. (Exception: a Ribald costs 4sp per barrel.)

In the Middle Sea/Terra Ultima setting, basilisks are the guns most commonly found on ships, though sakers and culverins are not uncommon.

(edited to change exploding weapon damage, correct the ranges, and alter cost per shot)

(further edit to add, because a column was inadvertently deleted from the charts when converted to blog format)

Gun Name	Crew (min-max.)
Ribald	1-3
Serpentine	2-4
Saker	3-5
Basilisk	3-7
Culverin	4-9
Dolphin	4-12
Cannon	5-15
Bombard	6-15

(another edit to make a note about packaged powder)

(edit on 8/7/2026 to alter burst radius slightly) 

Firearms For AD&D1E

Since the Middle Sea/Terra Ultima game includes firearms, and since I'll be using the AD&D 1E rules nearly RAW (I'll write up some of my modifications soon), I figured I should come up with some statistics for handguns. These started off with the Ed Greenwood article "A Second Volley: Taking another shot at firearms, AD&D style" in Dragon Magazine #70, but Mr. Greenwood neglected to include the AC adjustments for the weapons, and had no solid rule for firearm malfunctions. So, I reworked the weapons a bit and came up with this:

Weapon Type	Approximate Weight in Gold Pieces	Damage vs. Opponent		NOTES	Cost in GP
		Size S or M	Size L
Caliver (matchlock musket)	110	2-9	1-8		45
Dragon (“Dagg” or “horse pistol”) (wheel-lock pistol)	45	1-6	1-3	+2 on saves against weapon explosion	60
Flintlock pistol	20	1-6	1-4		55
Flintlock musket	100	3-12	1-10		80
Blunderbuss	80	1-10	1-10		50

Weapon Type	Fire Rate	Range			Armor Class Adjustment
		S	M	L	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Caliver (matchlock musket)	1/2	4	8	14	+3	+2	+1	0	-1	-2	-3	-4	-5
Dragon (“Dagg” or “horse pistol”) (wheel-lock pistol)	1	1	2½	4	+2	+2	+2	+1	+1	0	0	-1	-1
Flintlock pistol	1	2	3	5	+2	+2	+1	+1	0	-1	-1	-2	-2
Flintlock musket	1	10	20	30	+5	+4	+3	+2	+1	0	-1	-2	-3
Blunderbuss	1/2	1	2	3	+2	+2	+2	+2	+1	+1	+1	0	+1

Cost of Powder and Ball:

Caliver: 1gp

Dragon: 10sp

Flintlock pistol: 10sp

Flintlock musket: 1gp

Blunderbuss: 1gp

Powder and ball come in pre-packaged paper cartridges, which are broken apart to make use of the pre-measured powder, the paper used as wadding. The cartridges are water-resistant, though full immersion will ruin them. For simplicity, each paper cartridge weighs 1 gold piece equivalent (1/10 lb).

It is possible to buy unpackaged powder and cast your own balls. This reduces the cost by 80% (to 2 or 4sp per shot), but explosion checks happen on a natural 1 or 2 on the “to hit” roll (see below).

On a “to hit” roll of 1 on the dice, before modification, the firing character must roll a save vs. Breath Weapon, modified by Non-proficiency penalty if applicable, with Fighters and Fighter subclasses who are rolling using the Fighter saving throw table getting an extra +1 bonus and Magic-Users and Magic-User subclasses taking a -1 penalty, or take 2d6 damage from an exploding pistol, 3d6 from an exploding musket or blunderbuss, which also ruins the weapon. If the save is made, the weapon merely misses the target. In addition, anyone within 1” (or ⅓" if in the "outdoor" scale) of the firing character who failed the save must roll a similar save or take 1d6 damage.

Any class other than Monks, Psionicists, Witches, Magic-Users, or Illusionists may take proficiency in firearms. The proficiency categories are: Musket (including Blunderbuss) and Pistol. Fighters (including Paladins and Rangers), Outdoorsmen (new class for Middle Sea/Terra Ultima), Thieves, and Spies (Assassins) may, if they have proficiency in some type of firearm, take the additional proficiency Gunner, which gives a +5 on saves against exploding firearms.

I may work up statistics for a flintlock revolver at some point, but mainly it would be like a flintlock pistol with a higher Fire Rate until it ran out of chambers, plus a penalty to the weapon explosion save and potentially worse damage if it does explode. I've already converted some of the artillery pieces from Mr. Greenwood's first article on gunpowder in AD&D (in Dragon #60), but I need to format them for the blog. (edit 8/7/2026 they can be found here)

(edited on 6/11/2014 to change exploding weapon damage and alter loose powder costs)
(edited on 6/22/2014 to change the weapon costs, because come on, what were you thinking, Mr. Greenwood?)

(edited on 8/7/2026 to make a minor adjustment) 

Middle Sea Or Terra Ultima?

Very, very roughly, this is about 800 mi. x 1200 mi.
More accurately, the distance between the two mountain peaks
that make up the base of the triangle of peaks to the west of
the Triple Sea area in the northern part of the map is
34.2 miles.

I'm considering using this map, which I call Middle Sea, for my game instead of the Terra Ultima one. This is a map that I've wanted to use in a game for years, and I've worked up several versions over the last 20 years or so. The first was done using tracing paper (remember that?) by hand from an atlas. I think I may still have those sheets around somewhere. I did a version when I had Fractal Terrains and Campaign Cartographer (I had those on disk, and the disks were stolen). This time, I found a website that does most of what I needed done, so I did that, then modified the images in Paint Shop Pro. They're still rough, but I do still have the working files and will probably clean them up over time.

There's another really interesting part of the world off to the east, which is where Middle Sea gets its name, but I haven't put those maps together yet, so I thought that I'd just show off the western coast of the continent.

If you haven't yet figured out where the map comes from, it's a map of North America with the water level raised by 1000 ft (308m). I got the idea from the old Chaosium wargame Lords of the Middle Sea. In that game, there is also a collapse of a large portion of the midwest due to helium extraction or something, but this game world doesn't include that.

The map that inspired the Middle Sea world

The basis of the Terra Ultima world map

Oh, what the heck. As a bonus, here is the not-nearly-cleaned-up-enough map of part of the Middle Sea itself:

The Middle Sea, surrounded by island nations to the east and south,
 and by the mainland to the west. There are also more islands
to the north and to the northeast of this map

Updates

First, the sad news. I have decided to abandon my attempt to make a GURPS random-character generator, as it is simply too much work. Instead, I will go back to the Sixguns & Sorcery setting for the basis of my solo game. I still have work to do for that, but at least it is pretty clearly defined and doesn't involve massive feature creep.

For the Sixguns & Sorcery project, I need to develop the religion a bit more, enough to be able to stat out some of the spirit/gods and their possession effects, similar to the Loas in GURPS Voodoo. I'll talk about the religion another time. I've already converted the NPC templates from The Knuckleduster Cowtown Creator, which is a great wild west resource, but which was only statted out for Deadlands and D20 systems (and a nod toward FUDGE). Happily, there are available conversions for Deadlands to GURPS Deadlands in Dime Novel 1: Aces and Eights. Those are to 3E, of course, but converting from there to 4E is a snap. I did discover that the templates are pretty high-point valued if taken straight, so I tinkered with them to bring them down to power levels I think are appropriate to the basically gritty, yet still somewhat cinematic, nature of the genre as I envision it in the setting. It was disconcerting, to say the least, to see an NPC type called "Loafer" come in at over a hundred GURPS points, but I've chopped it back to 56. Still a fair amount, but it fits the character description. Many of the other NPCs similarly had to be cut back considerably from their raw converted state. I'll probably post them somewhere for others to make use of them. GURPS really needs more "generic" NPC statblocks for Referees to use, especially ones who are just getting their heads around the system. I hear experienced GURPS Referees say that they just set some numbers that look right, but it's getting to the point where the numbers that "look right" are also actually right that Referees need assistance with.

What else? I have returned to my AD&D 1E (mostly) sword & sorcery setting, Terra Ultima. I've made some decisions about it, definitely deciding, at last, to restrict players to human characters. I have, however, opened out the character classes somewhat, so that there are fifteen available options: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Illusionist, Magic-User, Monk, Mountebank, Outdoorsman, Paladin, Psionicist, Ranger, Spy, Thief, and Witch. The Bard and Mountebank are pretty much the versions from Adventures Dark & Deep, though I keep looking at the Bard material in Dragon 56 (the stat requirements of that version, though, make the Bard less common than the Monk). The Outdoorsman is a slightly modified version of the "Bandit" class from Dragon 63 (main change: HD are d8 rather than d8+1). The Psionicist is mainly the version by Arthur Collins in Dragon 78 (I changed the XP progression a lot and set the HD to d4 only). The Spy is a reskinned version of the Assassin. The Witch, right now, is mainly from the version in Dragon 114, but I am playing with ideas from Tim Brannan's The Witch. His class is pretty solidly written for D&D, though, so the AD&D-isms are coming from the Dragon magazine class. He does include an appendix on using the class in AD&D, so if I get around to picking it up in hardcopy before any witches show up in the game, maybe I'll use his version completely. That would change the demographics slightly (see below), but I can live with handwaving that, or changing just the stat requirements to the Dragon magazine version - if I get ambitious, and bored enough, I could always recalculate them.

I'm pretty interested in fantasy demographics and what they can do to flesh out a setting, so I worked out how frequent each of these classes are. My method was somewhat interesting, if I do say so myself, at least if mathematics and basic arithmetic don't scare you. I started by noting Gary Gygax's assumption that only one in a hundred people have the potential for having a class and level (DMG, p. 35). Then I went through each class and figured out what would be the chance of a character, rolling 3d6 in order, to qualify for it. Some of the classes are ridiculously difficult to qualify for under that default system. Even worse, there is a certain chance that a character will not qualify for any class at all (I called these "Hopeless characters" in my results). At the rate of one in a hundred having even a chance, for example, it turns out that only one in 250,000 people can become a Monk (and that is still only one in 2500 characters if you roll without any of the gimmick methods), which is rarer than Paladins (at one in 111,111).

My next step was to set a societal preference scale. That is, I set the priority of classes based on how important the class was to the society on the average. Lower-probability classes were typically set higher than the "usual suspects", and various assumptions were incorporated into the list. My list of preferred classes went like this: Paladin, Illusionist, Monk, Ranger, Outdoorsman, Fighter, Bard, Mountebank, Thief, Spy, Psionicist, Druid, Witch, Cleric, Magic-User. My assumptions were that it is very difficult to become a magic-using class even for those qualified, that people would typically prefer to be in a class that has wider abilities than more limited ones (such as preferring Rangers to Outdoorsmen), and that some orders actively seek out qualified applicants (notably Illusionists and Monks, who represent the more advanced priesthood of the Denialist Church, and Paladins, who represent the warrior-monk elite of the Radiant Church). I assumed that people would prefer to be a member of the various Cleric-like classes than to be a Magic-User, since the former have social and economic benefits that do not accrue to the latter. Finally, I assumed that people in the setting would prefer honest occupations to dishonest ones. Placing the Psionicist and Bard where I did are more intuitive, and I can't tell you why they are at those particular places in the preferences.

For each stage of preference, I figured out the percentage of the population would qualify, multiplied that by the percentage that remained and recorded the result. Then I subtracted that percentage from the total percentage (so that, for example, if 5% could qualify for a class out of a remaining 20% of the population at that stage in the preferences, 0.2 x 0.05 = 0.01 of the total population would be recorded, and that 1% subtracted from the running total of 20%, leaving 19% for the next stage in the preferences). Rounding all of the values to the nearest 0.0001 (0.01%) gave me the following table to roll d10,000 (which I will mainly use to replace the table on p. 35 of the DMG):

d10,000 (4d10) (only 1% of random NPCs even get to roll on this table)

0001-0088: Bard (1/11,364)
0089-0747: Cleric (1/1517)
0748-0779: Druid (1/31,250)
0780-6433: Fighter (1/177)
6434-6468: Illusionist (1/28,571)
6469-6723: Magic-User (1/3922)
6724-6727: Monk (1/250,000)
6728-7323: Mountebank (1/1678)
7324-7561: Outdoorsman (1/4202)
7562-7570: Paladin (1/111,111)
7571-7615: Psionicist (1/22,222)
7616-7631: Ranger (1/62,500)
7632-7714: Spy (1/12,048)
7715-9773: Thief (1/486)
9774-9838: Witch (1/15,385)
9839-0000: Hopeless Character, no class/level

The fractions after each class represent how many of that class there are per how many total population. I may come up with a class for characters who don't qualify for any other class, so I have something I can do with the Hopeless Characters.

For reference, here are the stat requirements for each of the fifteen classes:

Bard: S6 I6 W6 D14 C6 Ch14
Cleric: S6 I6 W9 D3 C6 Ch6
Druid: S6 I6 W12 D6 C6 Ch15
Fighter: S9 I3 W6 D6 C7 Ch6
Illusionist: S6 I15 W6 D16 C3 Ch6
Magic-User: S3 I9 W6 D6 C6 Ch6
Monk: S15 I6 W15 D15 C11 Ch6
Mountebank: S6 I10 W6 D9 C6 Ch12
Outdoorsman: S12 I10 W6 D12 C12 Ch6
Paladin: S12 I9 W13 D6 C9 Ch17
Psionicist: S3 I10* W10* D3 C9 Ch10* (*one of these must be 16)
Ranger: S13 I13 W14 D6 C14 Ch6
Spy: S12 I11 W6 D12 C6 Ch3
Thief: S6 I6 W3 D9 C6 Ch6
Witch: S6 I13 W13 D6 C6 Ch6

(Note that the Psionicist breaks the rule about Strength below 6 being limited to Magic-User and Dexterity below 6 to Cleric. This is deliberate.)

Finally, I've returned to working on the Top Secret retroclone game that I had set aside for too many months. No idea what I'm going to call it. I'll probably figure it out when it is closer to being complete. I have decided to incorporate some of the better ideas from Dragon magazine into it, such as rules for car chases and a better Contact (NPC reactions) system.