Ars Mundi: Redpowder

Resembling a fine, glittering dust, as if a farmer had accidentally ground ruby into meal, redpowder gives off mystery and otherworldliness like a vapour. The European powers trade for it from the East, the scintillating red stuff coming west along the Silk Road from the farthest reaches of the Earth, perhaps beyond even Cathay. The man who discovered its fantastical properties was unfortunately struck blind and burned badly by his discovery, though learned much from the experience and is still regarded today as the father of prismatic muskets.

Redpowder annihilates utterly when ignited, giving off bright red light of such intensity that it can burn, blind and set fires. Since its introduction to Europe, it has quickly soared in popularity and usage with the invention of prismatic weapons. These weapons use a carefully-measured charge of redpowder, contained within a chamber polished to a mirror shine with a lens on one end. The redpowder is ignited by a spark from a flint striker, the intense light travelling through the lens down the barrel, where yet more lenses focus and intensify the beam. When struck with the beam, stone shatters, metal melts and flesh burns.

Statistics
Prismatic weapons use statistics for TL4 gunpowder weapons (GURPS Low-Tech pp. 92-96) with some modifications. Change damage type to tight-beam burning with a (2) armour divisor, double Accuracy, triple range, reduce Recoil to 1 and triple cost. In general, prismatic weapons take 10 seconds to reload. Since they are loaded by the breech instead of the muzzle and there's no projectile or wadding to load and ram, they take no modifiers for position or length of the barrel. Using pre-measured charges of redpowder (in paper, flasks, etc.) halves loading time to 5 seconds. No further improvement is possible. Prismatic weapons cannot gain extra Acc from careful loading. If using conventional tech levels, prismatic weapons are TL4^. Redpowder costs 50 times as much as corned blackpowder, or $1000/lb. Prismatic weapons typically ignite a small measure of gunpowder which in turn ignites the redpowder within the chamber, since burning redpowder in the open runs the risk of blinding the user.

Even though redpowder doesn't actually explode, redpowder 'bombs' can be used to blind. These bombs must have transparent cases to work, so are often made of very thick glass to avoid premature shattering. Work out the dice of damage of the charge of redpowder as if it had an REF of 0.5. This deals no actual damage but anyone who can see the detonating redpowder must make a HT roll to resist an affliction, at a penalty equal to the dice of damage. Failure causes blindness for minutes equal to the margin of failure. Failure by 5 more more, or a critical failure, causes the blindness to be permanent.

Prismatic weapons may replace gunpowder weapons or compete side-by-side with them during the same period. Prismatic weapons are clearly superior; they have greater armour penetration and range as well as being faster to load, harder to break and vastly simpler to use. However, redpowder is very, very expensive and must be bought or traded for, whereas gunpowder can be created by anyone with the know-how. Prismatic weapons also require more precision engineering and expensive materials, since the barrel must be made of exquisitely-polished copper or bronze and the lenses of clear and flawless glass, compared to the rough-forged iron barrels and simple wood stocks of early firearms. Mishaps with redpowder are comparatively more dangerous, risking permanent blindness to anyone in line of sight.

Technology Marches On
The introduction of redpowder into a setting will have knock-on effects. Just as gunpowder resulted in an increase in knowledge of chemistry, metallurgy and ballistics, so too will redpowder stimulate interest and research into optics in pursuit of better-focused beams, more reflective chambers and more accurate weapons. Silver-backed glass mirrors, telescopes, microscopes and spectacles are just some of the technology that may surface or become wide-spread earlier than the real world, thanks to developments in the pursuit of ever more effective weapons.

Eventually, an enterprising player will think to put redpowder in pre-measured packages which can be placed wholesale into the breech of a prismatic musket. Paper is the obvious choice, since it's cheap, disposable and ignites easily. This is actually a very good idea – paper-packaged measures of gunpowder were used extensively before metallic cartridges were invented. However, if you want to preserve the mystery of redpowder or make it clear that it isn't gunpowder, you can rule that anything non-transparent within the chamber absorbs the emitted light and explodes violently, dealing 1d [1d-3] burn ex damage and ruining the weapon's chamber. Transparent casings like glass or crystal cartridges may work but would-be innovators will have to find some way to allow the powder within them to be ignited from the outside without leaving any debris within which might explode.

An even cleverer player will realise that placing the redpowder within a reflective casing can replace the chamber entirely... and possibly invent cartridges made from brass or bronze with a polished interior and a crystal or glass window in the front that locks into place with a similar window in the weapon's breech. This technology is as improvable as real-world firearms and could be extrapolated out to fully-automatic magazine-fed prismatic arms, expelling smoking cartridges when fired just like modern firearms. There are some limitations, however. In the real world, firearms progressed through variations of blackpowder, gunpowder, smokeless powder and cordite, giving smoother and more complete burns for more efficient and deadly weapons. Without knowing how to create redpowder, the formula cannot be improved, imposing an upper limit on the effectiveness of prismatic weapons. 

But Where Does it Come From?
This is largely up to the GM, as well as how they want to define how redpowder works. 

Artificial
By combining finely-milled serpentine powder with a silken dust of rubies the resulting explosion releases an intense flash of light while scattering the ruby into a floating dust of particles, which can cause Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (the actual acronym LASER). The resulting coherent light is then focused and directed by the mirrored chamber and lenses. This isn't entirely pseudoscience – in real life, ruby has been used as a lasing material almost since their invention. 

Experimentation with both gunpowder and precious stones is exorbitantly expensive, highly impractical and thus best suited to the Chinese. They will have almost certainly tried to combine gunpowder with powdered jade first. If you want, they may have first created greenpowder using jade. This might be a replacement for redpowder, in which case it has the same stats but the beams and powder are green, or might be a primitive early version that was perfected with the creation of redpowder.

This opens up an entirely new world of prismatic powders: sapphire, quartz, emerald, jet... Various types or blends of precious and semi-precious materials may give different effects, with significant research focusing on finding the optimal blend. Battlefields might be streaked by one army using blue beams and the other using red because their generals or quartermasters favour one kind of powder. This also provides an easy way to colour-code the allegiances or moralities of your armies.

Extraterrestrial
If someone with the technology to produce superscience lasers takes an interest in Earth, they may provide one or more nations with the powder and the expertise to use it. Obviously the extraterrestrial patrons would be intending to give a massive advantage to some nations but humans are both greedy and terrible at keeping secrets. Much like how the secret of silk production was eventually smuggled out of China in the sleeves of a young woman, the secret of how to acquire or make redpowder and prismatic weapons will eventually be spilled, either by greedy traders, espionage or conquest. 

Magical
Redpowder might be created by cabals of secret sorcerers spread across Central Asia and China. The recipe could be as benign as using pomegranate seeds or rubies, or as macabre as requiring fresh human blood. The need for fresh blood may be used as an explanation for the expansion of the Sunni and Tengri steppe hordes during the Early Modern Era; they fight wars to take captives to expand their reserves of redpowder until they have enough to use the superior weapons to subjugate everyone around them. You could even use this for a kind of "advanced alien invasion" plot in 15th-Century Europe, if that's your kind of thing. Instead of sectoids with plasma guns, it's Kazakhs and Oirats with laser muskets.

Magical redpowder could also simply be natural. A result of meteorites moving at high speeds through the Earth's mana field as they fall towards Siberia, or leftovers of transplanar visitors, who emit the dust as they move or open portals. 

Either way, if redpowder is magical, it should only function in low mana or greater. In a no mana area, the powder is entirely inert and fails to ignite. It might even lose its colour to signify this, turning grey until has reabsorbed enough mana to work once more. This might even be useful. If mages exist, making munitions stores that hold barrels of redpowder into a no-mana zone is a very good idea.