u/VitriolUK

Deadlands game I'm GMing. Very badly wounded mad scientist PC, no bennies left, throws a Blast before fleeing the fight that covers the two main enemies. Since he has exactly 5 power points left figures he might as well pay the extra 2 for the extra d6 of damage.

39 and 33 respectively.

It was his first time using the Blast power - the rest of the group now insist its kept for *very* special occasions when they are well out of range.

Prior to that roll I was very worried I was about to kill the entire party as things had been going pretty badly for them; after that action that was no longer a concern.

In the 40K podcast, Robert mentioned that Space Marines carry bolters (or boltguns), which are essentially pistols or rifles that rather than bullets shoot rounds that contain tiny rockets, which have their own propulsion. He also mentioned that at a 2025 gun convention in the US a company had brought one of their grenade launchers painted and decorated to look like a Warhammer 40K bolter.

Now, I'm not a gun person, but I am the sort of nerd that loves weird machines of all types, and so one of the Youtube channels I watch from time to time is Forgotten Weapons, where the host Ian McCollum (aka 'Gun Jesus') shows and explains weird and wonderful historical firearms in quite a bit of technical detail.

And thanks to him I'm aware that back in the 1960s a company did genuinely manufacture real-world 40k bolters, albeit at a scale appropriate for normal humans rather than genetically engineered supersoldiers.

Behold the Gyrojet, a pistol that rather than explosively propelling a round out the end of the barrel, instead has rounds that contain tiny rocket motors that launch themselves out of the gun and towards the target. Here is the Forgotten Weapons video about the gun.

They do have some advantages - the gun itself is very light and simple, and firing the gun has very little recoil (since there's no big explosion pushing back on the gun as the bullet is pushed out the other end). But they also have some rather major disadvantages - rounds were expensive, prone to failure, not very accurate, and very expensive. Most hilariously, because the rocket motors burn for a prolonged period, continually accelerating the round, it also means that the weapon is completely ineffective at close range, because the round isn't actually travelling fast enough yet to do any actual damage...

If you're interested in this I'd actually recommend this video, where the Youtuber in question actually fires the gun a number of times, capturing it all in slo-mo. This is special because the only ammo for the guns are the original rounds manufactured by the now defunct company in the 60s and 70s, making it very rare and expensive (per Wikipedia they now go for about $800 per round), as well as being prone to failure thanks to half a century of aging. The shots of it firing and hitting a target in slow motion are really cool, and this shot of a round going through a block of ballistic gel is the absolute highlight. Note that this is the only video I've seen from this guy and I have no idea of his politics (mentioned as guntubers are often... not great in that regard).

Those who enjoyed the strangeness of the Markovian Parallax Denigrate postings would probably enjoy learning about the Toynbee tiles: hundreds of custom-made tiles set into the ground in cities all over America since the 1980s with the cryptic message:

>TOYNBEE IDEA
IN MOViE `2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPiTER

Some are coloured, some are black and white. Some are just the above message, some have further inscriptions, while others are just portions of the core message. This site has a timelines of examples with dates and details.

Who made them? What do they mean? Why would someone go to this much trouble for so long? There doesn't seem to be any kind of consensus (though there are plenty of theories). But they're certainly cool and weird.