Hand Cannon

Basic Information

The ancestor of all small arms the hand cannon was humanity's first foray into portable black powder weapons¹.

Nothing more than a tube for a barrel² with a crude handle and a cannon lock firing system it was traditionally inaccurate and unsafe to use. As a weapon it was only really suited for firing at packed masses of men or very large targets like elephants, but had impressive penetrating capacity and created a very intimidating flash and cloud of smoke.

These primitive designs were upgraded over time and eventually replaced by the matchlock - although they saw extensive battlefield use they were unable to outcompete the bow and crossbow in the relevant niche. Purely a military weapon with no sporting application they remained something of a gimmick even when sucessfully applied.

The term hand cannon is also used as a slang term for high powered and/or large calibre handguns …

Sources

Bibliography

1. full source reference

Game and Story Use

• An unlikely weapon for a PC - unless he's going after elephants (or dragons or giants) - this is better used as set dressing.
• Unless he is able to invent buckshott early and make a primitve shotgun.
• An ogre PC might have a chance at controlling one of these, but is still unlikely to hit anything with it.

Footnotes

1. At least as far as missile weapons go - the Chinese may have used some kind of short ranged incendiary spray weapon before this.

2. and not even a metal tube in all cases - it appears that the Chinese sometimes used bamboo.