Choice of Rebels: Stormwright (XoR2 WIP)

If you want the all-piercing effect, you’d need to modify the bullets rather than the gun – and that’s a lot of blood to spend on something that you probably won’t get back. (An all-piercing bullet will probably end up buried in a hundred meters of rock somewhere after it’s fired – unlike a crossbow bolt, whose head can be made all-piercing to get through armor, but whose shaft and fletching create enough drag to slow it down after impact and make it usually retrievable.)

You could alter the teloi of the gun itself to try to make it shoot further or more accurately; but those alterations wouldn’t change the likelihood of breakdown (which is reasonably high, given how many fiddly parts under high pressure are involved), so you’d be investing lots of blood in a weapon with a relatively short lifespan.

All in all, crossbow bolts with super-piercing heads are the preferred way of boosting the efficacy of missile weapons with Theurgy. They’re small enough that in an unstoppable/immovable encounter, as with Theurgically enhanced clothes or Plektoi armor, the bolt will usually be the thing that fails (which is why big enhanced glaive-spears are the traditional anti-Plektos weapon, and anti-Theurge doctrine involves lots of regular missiles rather than trying your luck with an incredibly costly enhanced one). But they do great at getting through ordinary infantry armor, or sniping someone through a thin wall.

Yes, but it varied by region. More on that to come in the chapters I’m writing.

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