To return briefly to the topic of firearms on Alternia - there’s a post somewhere on tumblr dot org about guns in Middle Earth, and why it’s so much better for the elves to use bows, specifically. It’d be a pain for me to find the post, but I remember the basic gist, and the same basic logic applies pretty well to Alternia too.

Guns rose to superiority over bows because you can mass produce a bunch of guns and give them to a bunch of dudes and they can just run out there and kill people with little to no training, because guns shoot and do damage at the pull of a trigger.

This is great when you’re up against a bunch of archers who are limited in that they need to be trained for some time before they’re proficient with their weapon; but on Alternia, archery is the highest form of martial art for highbloods, who are physically strong enough to both use a bow really well and also resist a lot of bullets.

Obviously a musket isn’t going to be very effective against a big strong highblood, especially given that by the time you get to reloading the thing, there’s going to be an arrow or a juggling club in your skull. If you invent a weapon that pretty much penetrates an inch or less of highblood flesh and not a whole lot else, you’re probably not going to continue research and development on that line of weaponry; it’d be a waste of time.

So who’s going to actually develop guns on Alternia? Lowbloods have no real use for them. Highbloods have no real use for them either! So I definitely see guns on Alternia as more like “”hobby weapons””; things that trolls build and use individually because their combat strengths and weaknesses suit them. Which is essentially how I see weapons working on Alternia in general.