Interlude: Cheese Guns
When I was a teen my players suddenly got heavily into gun porn. Some mix of James Bond 007 rpg, GURPS, and Twilight 2000 did it to them, and they all suddenly knew about the relative merits and problems of SA80s and M16s and H&K machine pistols. And I said “this is fetishism” and they replied “what’s the rate of fire on that M40 sniper rifle?” and “no, that’s famous for jamming, you should use this instead.” Funnily enough this was in Britain, where none of them had access to any actual firearms. It was all just armchair kung fu talk. I can only imagine what it was/is like in some corners of the US.
So I ran a Flash Gordon campaign, with cheese guns. Name a cheese – that’s the noise the gun makes when fired. Stats follow from the implications.
So a Cheddar is a slow-repeating machine gun, like a Tommygun. A Brie is a railgun with an ultra-fast rate of fire. Emperor Ming’s guards carry Gorgonzolas: freaky purple deathray blasts, weird electrical kirbykrackle around the muzzle.
Limburger.
Danablu.
All guns go “Cheshire” when being readied to fire. And (thanks Anne), a “Swiss” is a silencer, which is versatile and practical but sadly makes the damage the gun does really bland.
…they loved it. They never seemed to understand I was making fun of their gun fandom. They kept top-trumping guns in their other games, but in Flash Gordon they just took off searching for the rare and mysterious Stilton.
Mascarpone.
(PS: in those days if anyone threatened to spend half an hour telling me why their sword/fencing style was the best, I’d just grant them +1 when fighting with that particular sword. They were happy, I could get on with the game, it worked. But now we can just chorus “that’s not a talwar, it’s a nodachi!” and move on.)
(PPS: all polearms do 1d8, except those that are especially lovingly described, which do 1d10. There.)
I am in awe of this. I legit love this.
thanks! If you do any riffs off this please share!
Thanks for sharing this Richard! Ever since you first told me this, I’ve imagined machine-gunners yelling “gouda guoda guoda!” at each other while firing.
discarded rinds spilling all over the floor… Soft-nosed cheeses, shaped curds. The smell of parmesan in the morning…
This is the best idea in a long time. And I guess you could stretch it to other areas as well – sausages for armour etc.
Silly and awesome.
Thanks!
So many sausages are named after their town of origin that the armor thing might work really well – the metalsmiths of Wien and Frankfurt compete in ever-milder steel. The main armor to avoid: Hamburger.
Bleu has to be a generic laser blaster.
Love this idea! I had to track it down a month later as I thought about it again. Camembert would be big, slow-firing artillery, I guess – although it seems odd for it to be so different to Brie.
OMG this is SO good. 😀
Can’t wait to run a campaign where my players search for a legendary artifact gun known as the pule. (pule is the world’s most expensive cheese.)
what kind of gun would that be anyway? I’m leaning towards some sort of laser or hand cannon. Or both.
sorry for the long delay – having hunted for the correct pronunciation and been informed that it’s exactly what you’d imagine from English, I can only imagine that a pule is a sort of pre-Star Wars scifi zap gun. Pyoool Pyoooul. Probably does light burn damage, then a massive moral majority blowback 3 months later.