Peasant Railgun

The Peasant Railgun, a weapon of mass game-breaking destruction.

Relies on a few basic rules in the DnD system: readying actions and the length of a combat round (6 seconds).

Creating a Peasant Railgun

1. Hire a ton of peasants; let's just say that it is two thousand two hundred and eighty. Line them up in single file; this will form a chain of peasants two miles long. It'd have been four miles back in MY day (witness me hiking up my 2nd Edition suspenders).

2. Buy a ladder. Just buy a standard, ten-foot ladder. Disassemble the ladder into a bunch of rungs and a pair of mighty ten-foot wooden poles. Hand a pole to the peasant at the back of line.

3. First round of combat. Peasant at the front of line readies an action to throw the pole at the enemy. Every peasant behind him readies an action to hand the pole to the peasant in front of him.

4. Next round: peasants fire off their readied actions, passing the pole two miles down the line and hurling it in six seconds or less. Pole accelerates to the speed of 1200 miles per hour, or a little less than Mach 2 at sea level.

5. Peasant Railgun can be reloaded and fired in less than 12 seconds.

6. Variations - Really, your choice. Weapon is scalable, you could use your peasant railgun to fire a number of things at a really long range. Add more peasants to make the weapons even faster; paint them red to make them fasta. Use gobbos to make a DnD grot cannon. Hurl pointy bombs for HEAT weapons. Severed heads make an impressive psychological warfare tool. It's even more wild with a bag of holding - place a team of fighters in it for DYNAMIC ENTRY over castle walls and shit, hurl some fucking bear cavalry directly into enemy lines, who knows. You can also throw a halfling monk to take full advantage of Flurry of Blows at 1200 mph. Combine this with the 15,000,000 gold-a-day trick and you're ready to absolutely ruin your DM's day.

7. ????

8. Motherfucking PROFIT

Practical Applications

A campaign I was in recently employed a peasant railgun in a large-scale battle. Our mage was a dumbass and decided to launch an alchemical flask from said railgun and into the heart of the enemy forces. It blew up and killed a bunch of the enemy. Our DM got back at us by making it tear a big-ass hole in the time-space continuum. The same mage decides to approach the hole, and when he touches it, it blasts him across the fucking map and vaporizes some more enemy troops.

Our mass was 3.6287896kg (8 pounds, the weight of a first edition 10 foot pole), our speed was 536.448m/s (1200 miles an hour). The final kinetic energy was 520,005 Joules. This is similar to 1200g of TNT, or a quarter of a stick of dynamite. It's not exactly a weapon of mind blowing destruction, the maths breaks it before the GM has to. It gets worse (for the weapons sake) when one considers drag, that would tear the projectile apart into a flaming swarm of splinters before it reached the end of your peasant chain. The only way this thing works if if: a)Your GM allows for real world physics to translate into the game b) Your GM doesn't actually know real world physics

Warning

If your DM is paying attention, the projectile just falls harmlessly to the ground at the end of the chain, because there's no rules for acceleration or momentum in D&D. That said, you still have a sweet mailing system on your hands.

Though, if you apply this logic to other things, such as bows, then that means that the arrows literally teleport to where they were shot and the impact doesn't do the damage, it's the partial telefragging effect.

See also

• 15,000,000 Gold a Day