s&box

1.1

24 August 2026

Firearms. A culture that has walked the whole way through metallurgy, steel and gunpowder can finally learn firearms, raise a powder mill and put musketeers into the line. The musket outranges the bow, takes half a man's health in a single shot and almost never misses, but it reloads for seven seconds, and in those seconds the musketeer is helpless unless the swordsmen cover him
The road to the first shot is long on purpose: six discoveries one after another, two buildings and a store of powder that has to be made before anything can be fired. A measured world reached its first musket in the year 896
Powder is spent, not owned. Every shot takes one charge out of the village store, a powder mill makes eight a month out of stone and wood, and a village whose store runs dry disbands its musketeers and hands them swords again
A powder mill that catches fire does not burn, it goes up. The whole store detonates at once, the mill is left in ruins, the quarter around it is set alight and a crater stays in the ground. Burn one down and the kingdom is left without firearms for years
The first shot ever heard in the world is written into the chronicle once, as the turning point it is
Fields have ranks now. A worked strip can be raised into a holding and then into a grange, and every step means more furrows, more of the square under crop and about twice the harvest

The plain field is drawn as a field: seven furrows filling almost the whole square, instead of five with a wide empty border around them. That border was land the village owned and did not sow
A hungry village now puts its wood into the field it already has instead of only marking out new ones. A new field needs free land, and land runs out sooner than mouths do, so a village could sit at its cap of fields and starve inside full borders
Raising a field asks nothing of the town hall, because the ones that starve are the hamlets that have no town hall: three yards, one strip and nine mouths