Why fantasy avoids gunpowder?

[Aldarion]

With few exceptions (such as Warhammer Fantasy), most High / medieval fantasy settings avoid gunpowder weapons like a plague. So I thought about why I avoid gunpowder in some ideas I have had for my own original setting and why fantasy authors in general avoid gunpowder. Basically:

• gunpowder opened the gates for industrial way of war
• gunpowder revolution in 14th and 15th centuries led directly though slowly towards the meatgrinder of Somme
• Tolkien despised war, and especially industrialized warfare which he had experienced
• being aware of the historical context, Tolkien gave gunpowder only to his bad guys who present forces of industrialization
• fantasy authors copied Tolkien, and thus largely (but not always) avoided using gunpowder weapons in high fantasy settings

Combined with the above is the heroic nature of much of fantasy which, through Tolkien, also draws on epics such as Beowulf, Illiad, Odyssey and so on. As mentioned in the first point, gunpowder implies advent of industrial forms of warfare. This type of war is extremely impersonal, lethal and technical, focused on weapons instead of man. Side with the most shells wins. This fact makes it diametrical opposite do traditional heroic forms of warfare: instead of individual prowess, you have luck and chance. Instead of face-to-face combat, soldiers are slaughtered en masse by artillery barrages. This was something that Tolkien was deeply affected by, and Middle-Earth was his form of escapism.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Gunpowder seems to be the nice division point between typical fantasy settings and later settings. With how influential Tolkien was in helping formulate modern fantasy, your points seem pretty well taken. I haven't read much fantasy stuff outside of mainstream but I know in a lot of Dungeons and Dragons settings gunpowder is still a thing, though I suppose it's not as "OP" as it might be considering it's largely a rules based tabletop game.

I recall in one of the later Drizzt books, Passage to Dawn IIRC, where famous Drow Ranger Drizzt Do'Urden spent six years with Captain Deudermont in fighting pirates, they were confronted with a bombard equipped pirate vessel and everyone on the vessel was thrown for a loop and very worried about how powerful the weapon was. Thankfully, IIRC, the bombard misfired (I think there was a 2nd Edition DnD rule where such things could suffer a catastrophic misfire on a critical fail) and the ship exploded during the engagement and Drizzt and company were making commentary on what a powerfully devastating weapon these smoke powder weapons were.

Further on in the Forgotten Realms setting, you have the Hippopotami race known as Giff who are famous for using firearms, and hand grenades... and smoke powder bombs as well as the island nation of Lantan which also uses smoke powder and where many adherants of Gond Wonderbringer also reside, who happens to be a God of smithing, crafting and invention and IIRC is also a deity not just for Humans, but Gnomes as well where he is known as Nebelun.

So in the Forgotten Realms setting, smoke powder is a thing but the current setting seems to have it be perpetually a new technology so it won't upset the high fantasy setting too much.

It's not Arcanum after all.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Shooting someone at the distance is not as sexy as defeating them in sword combat, it is one of the reasons why future warfare franchises like Warhammer 40K, Gundam and BattleTech (to just name a few) prominently feature hand to hand combat, also if you look at modern action movies, many combine shooting and hand to hand, because it is more striking to show both combatants in the same screen.

 

[Bear Ribs]

A large percentage of fantasy has wizards using Magic Missile and Fireball as a replacement for firearms and cannons. Adding in the gunpowder weaponry as well becomes redundant.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Magic is elitist while guns are egalitarian.

 

[S'task]

So there's a few different reasons why many fantasy stories may shy away from gunpowder.

The first is that fantasy stories are often set in feudal periods, and gunpowder pretty much is tied to the fall of feudalism and rise of central governments in the Western mind. The Big Early Gunpowder Wars that come to mind for most of the English speaking world are the English Civil War, which was Monarchists vs Parliament. The French and Indian War (Seven Years War) which is arguable the first world spanning war and was distinctly Nation vs Nation. The American Revolution, which is generally framed as a republican vs monarchy war, even though it was really more of a Congress vs Parliament war, and finally the Napoleonic Wars which, well... pretty much is the starting point of modern warfare.

These stories don't lend themselves to the individual heroes that fantasy storytelling is built around in the same way as earlier periods, due to the larger forces involved.

Another aspect is that gunpowder makes magic less, well... magical. A wizard tossing fireballs is no longer as impressive when a Grenadier functionally does the same thing, but without the mysticism and earned power that most fantasy mages have around them. This is something that often comes up in RPGs when you end up with gunpowder weapons alongside a magic system, you often end up with situation where grenades are as effective damage wise, but cheaper from a gameplay perspective to use as AoE weapons. This is not always the case though.

That said, there's actually been Black Powder Fantasy over the years. Some very popular novel series for instance The Powder Mage trilogy, and even some video games, one of the best being GreedFall. And, perhaps the most famous and biggest of all would be the movie series Pirates of the Caribbean.

So it is done, it's just not as common. I think, in part, it is because storytelling in the early modern period is dominated by historical fiction, whereas if people want stories focused on feudal periods there's simply not so much done with those in historical fiction, and so fantasy became one of the major genres that actually explored the ideas of feudal societies.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Magic is elitist while guns are egalitarian.

Agreed, however fantasy in general tends towards being elitist and revolving around a small number of heroes who do everything important, so this is entirely in-theme.

 

[Free-Stater 101]

Swords and other middle aged weapons are more personal, and fights with them are prolonged for suspense, which fuels a good narrative, unlike gun fights which are much harder to do.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Swords and other middle aged weapons are more personal, and fights with them are prolonged fo suspense which fuels a good narrative unlike gun fights which are much harder to do.

Flintlocks can make for very tense scenes, as the protagonist basically gets one shot to get it right. The moment they shoot, they give away their position (noise and huge cloud of smoke), and they won't be able to reload in time before the enemy closes upon them, forcing the protagonist to either flee, or switch to a melee weapon like a sword.

It's also easy for a writer to make flintlocks useless when he doesn't want it for that scene. Just write it so that the powder gets wet (ie, because it's raining, or the heroes are on a boat rowing down a river and some water splashes over, or because there is fog so dense that the powder is wet, or the heroes are wading through a marsh/sewers, or they are fighting in a brewery and someone stabs/shoots a brewing vat or it spills. Or the heroes are on a night stealth mission and can't use flintlocks or it'd give themselves away, etc.).

 

[prinCZess]

Honestly, it's always somewhat surprised me how few fantasy novels attempt to have the introduction and early-stages of 'Gunpowder Revolution'. Using it as the mass-production version of powerful magics that gets hauled out for sieges (in the case of cannons) or as specialized and very focused parts of a fantasy-army's setup (matchlock-and-pikemen tercios INNN SPACE FANTASY!) seems like it would 'fit' a lot of fantasy themes very easily and make something that could be assigned to the 'big bad' or 'big good' militaries as necessary for maximum drama--as mentioned by OP, the big bad army can use it to nefarious ends, while alternatively, the 'cavalry' that comes to the rescue having the backing of big-ol' cloud of powder-discharge over them prior to closing with the enemy would make dramatic entrance.

It's honestly odd, I think. There seems more instances of bizarre, super-advanced gunpowder-tech put into fantasy worlds for broad, plot-changing purposes than there is a little bit of it put in at minor points as part of worldbuilding (where it seems like it'd make more sense? A gradual introduction of a technology, starting with someone who it most makes sense for and has access to the right things seems more fitting to fantasy worlds than does 'mysterious strangers with hyper-advanced development in this vein). It's always just struck me as a thing that persists by convention, expectation, and inertia more-so than how fitting it is to the story or world.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

This is exactly the premise of the "Gunslinger" player class in Pathfinder, except for a *lot* of GMs arbitrarily banning it.

 

[Captain X]

Berserk uses it for cannons, but nothing smaller than the literal hand-cannon that Guts ends up with as the Black Swordsman.

 

[DocSolarisReich]

With few exceptions (such as Warhammer Fantasy), most High / medieval fantasy settings avoid gunpowder weapons like a plague. So I thought about why I avoid gunpowder in some ideas I have had for my own original setting and why fantasy authors in general avoid gunpowder. Basically:

• gunpowder opened the gates for industrial way of war
• gunpowder revolution in 14th and 15th centuries led directly though slowly towards the meatgrinder of Somme
• Tolkien despised war, and especially industrialized warfare which he had experienced
• being aware of the historical context, Tolkien gave gunpowder only to his bad guys who present forces of industrialization
• fantasy authors copied Tolkien, and thus largely (but not always) avoided using gunpowder weapons in high fantasy settings

Basically most 'high fantasy' is low effort Tolkein pastiche, written by people who do not understand the mythic themes that made Tolkein Tolkein. You have to go to the earlier pulp tradition, before the Big Men with Screwdrivers set forward their false dichotomy that separated "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" along arbitrary lines, so as to claim SF as a space for materialist progress!, to find authors who could play with the technology-magic (these are really the same thing and not at all opposites) continuum in interesting ways.

 

[Aldarion]

Basically most 'high fantasy' is low effort Tolkein pastiche, written by people who do not understand the mythic themes that made Tolkein Tolkein. You have to go to the earlier pulp tradition, before the Big Men with Screwdrivers set forward their false dichotomy that separated "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" along arbitrary lines, so as to claim SF as a space for materialist progress!, to find authors who could play with the technology-magic (these are really the same thing and not at all opposites) continuum in interesting ways.

Except for Warhammer... though there is not much originality to be found there.

 

[DocSolarisReich]

Except for Warhammer... though there is not much originality to be found there.

Ah, well Warhammer's Old World started as a set of rules for Moorcockian multiversal battles between sorcerer-kings and their armies, raiding each other across the planes of reality. And Moorcock himself was plugged into the older Pulp tradition to plunder it for images while creating his anti-pulp eternal champions. Thus the rules had to handle firearms from the beginning. Then later the Empire became an HRE expy, the wars between the Empire and Chaos took on elements of the Wars of Religion, including the pike and shot warfare (which was also being used to drive the development of Rogue Trader's imagery).

 

[BlackDragon98]

There's this fantasy comic series published by Soleil called "Orcs and Goblins" which features humans using flintlock weapons, but not in an overpowered fashion.
It honestly depends on how good the writer of the story is, because good writers can usually incorporate flintlock/matchlock firearms into fantasy stories without making them overpowered (i.e. long reload, powder getting wet, exploding guns, etc.)

 

[S'task]

There's this fantasy comic series published by Soleil called "Orcs and Goblins" which features humans using flintlock weapons, but not in an overpowered fashion.
It honestly depends on how good the writer of the story is, because good writers can usually incorporate flintlock/matchlock firearms into fantasy stories without making them overpowered (i.e. long reload, powder getting wet, exploding guns, etc.)

As I mentioned, it can be done and often has. Fantasy though, is often tied up with tales of chivalry, which was a dominate idea well before gunpower.

I'd also say folks might be emphasizing Tolkien a bit much as the person who grounded fantasy in the medieval milieu. I think you might be missing a much more important contributor to the idea of Heroic Medieval Fantasy stories: Arthurian Legend. It has most of the classic fantasy tropes people tend to think of as core to fantasy: magic swords, knights, heroic adventures, prophecies, magic, wizards and witches, fae, powerful clerics, and it kinda long predates Tolkien...

 

[DocSolarisReich]

As I mentioned, it can be done and often has. Fantasy though, is often tied up with tales of chivalry, which was a dominate idea well before gunpower.

I'd also say folks might be emphasizing Tolkien a bit much as the person who grounded fantasy in the medieval milieu. I think you might be missing a much more important contributor to the idea of Heroic Medieval Fantasy stories: Arthurian Legend. It has most of the classic fantasy tropes people tend to think of as core to fantasy: magic swords, knights, heroic adventures, prophecies, magic, wizards and witches, fae, powerful clerics, and it kinda long predates Tolkien...

And Roland and Beowulf and even Folk and Faerie tales. Thus the point about the purposefully Mythic working that Tolkein undertakes with his epic. But it was in imitation of JRR that his imitators set out. Just like it is true that HP Lovecraft's oeuvre owes much to a rich tradition of ghost stories both literary and oral, his imitators are imitating *him*, not his sources, which is why they largely fail.

 

[ATP]

Becouse gunpowder meant that everybody after two week training could kill hero/dragon.Fantasy is about heroic/tragic deeds,which are no longer needed in gunpowder world.

 

[DarthOne]

Becouse gunpowder meant that everybody after two week training could kill hero/dragon.Fantasy is about heroic/tragic deeds,which are no longer needed in gunpowder world.

I’d disagree and only say that is the case if the writer lacks imagination.