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.)