Gotta recommend Mary Gentle’s Grunts for anyone interested in a crossing of the magical world with modern weaponry. The book tells of yet another Final Battle of Good vs. Evil from the point of view of the soldier that always gets the short end of the stick: the common orc.
Setup: a band of orcs raid a dragon’s treasure hoard. Said dragon “collects” weapons from many different parallel worlds. Orcs take a fancy to 20th century infantry type weapons. Unbeknownst to them, the weaponry they steal slowly transforms them into a well-oiled U.S. Marine-type company. Hilarious, if a bit unorganized.
For a more specific gun, check out “Saiyuki” (anime by ADV). Based loosely on the legend “Journey to the West”, the hero carries a “Banishing Gun”, which is a .38 special with a yin/tang symbol. When you shoot demons with it, they blow up.
Well, it’s not quite magical, but the Rogue Trooper strip involved a fairly unusual firearm. The genetically engineered soldiers have their personality and memories recorded in a “bio-chip” that can be embedded into another soldier’s equipment. The idea is that the valuable training is not lost while another body is cloned/grown. In the strip, when his unit is massacred three of the lead character’s fellow soldiers are saved by embedding their chips into his helmet (“Helm”), his multi-functional backpack (“Bagman”) and his rifle (“Gunnar”). Gunnar’s little trick was to be able to aim, fire and change ammunition types without any manual intervention.
Wel, in the Simpsons, Homer created a shotgun that could turn a woman from common housewife to whore in .2 seconds. Don’t know if that counts as “magic”, but it is rather impressive.
In the video game Devil May Cry, the main character had a bunch of guns that were pretty much magical. They all fed on his essence as far as I could tell, giving him infinite ammo and being able to harm undead.
Also, in an issue of Planetary, they met a spirit who carried two guns that would hunt down their intended victim and cause them to burst into flames when hit.
The stated reasoning was that a magical weapon had to be in the hands of its wielder in order to have any special power, so a bullet would lose any magical power as soon as it left the gun. For the same reason, you couldn’t enchant arrows.
They never did explain why you couldn’t enchant the gun itself to make it aim better, but obviously the game designers just didn’t want street samurai running around with +3 Uzis. Magical weapons in general were hard to get in Shadowrun, and could only be used by magicians and/or adepts anyway.
This may not have exactly been magic, but in Pratchett & Gaiman’s book, Good Omens, there are several paintball guns that become real lead-spitting death but also are cursed never to actually hit anybody unless they have a convenient wallet full of credit cards in the way.
There were also a couple of guards that had their weapons do the opposite just in the nick of time. But that would be considered miracle, not magic, I suppose.
Speaking of Garth Ennis, in Shadow Man (the video game at least), Mike/Shadow Man had his pistol/Shadow Gun, which when in the latter form, charged itself with Shadow Power and fired screaming spirit wraiths which ate their target from the inside.
Well, it was never presented as magic as such, but the shots Hawkeye-Deerslayer-Leatherstocking makes in James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Last of the Mohicans” are beyond anything achievable with real technology. So I assume his rifle (which has a name that I have forgotten) is magical. Either that or Cooper couldn’t write…
(what, me bitter because the hours I spent reading it for high school assignments are hours I can never get back? Not really, as it did spawn my classmates’ classic and enduring parody, which spawned the even more classic “Billy Budd, the musical”. Jane Eyre on the other hand… )
Antimagic, that’s a great property for a gun to have! Add that one to the list.
Also, I thought of another: the PsiGun. For use in non-physical combat such as within dreams, hallucinations, illusions, visions, etc. You could shoot Freddy Kruger with it, and he would either be annihilated, rendered powerless forever (all he could make you dream of was that you were looking at his dead corpse), or at a minimum your opponent is defeated for that melee and you return to reality.
In two of Tim Powers’ novels (Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather), the characters have guns and ammo that, through circumstance or effort, have been enchanted to work against ghosts, people taken over by ghosts, or otherwise protected from the magic he uses there.
Quercus, I remember Twain’s essay on how unreal the shooting in Cooper’s work is, better than I remember the Cooper in the first place! He makes the same points, and it’s a great read. (I bet Twain would have been able to do an excellent Pit rant.)
There’s the song “Black Magic Gun” by Wayne Berry (also sung by Tom Rush on “Ladies Love Outlaws”). Your basic cursed weapon – makes you unbeatable until someone shoots you in the back and steals it as you lie dying.
Truly a magical gun. It appears only in fiction and only in one certain area of cyber-space. It does, however, have the ability to transmogrify into a similar style weapon at random and has the ability to magically appear in any post at any given time.
Lazy Guns were the first things I thought of. On the other hand, it’s speculated that those guns are sentient and work on the basis of scale: If you shoot a human target with it, the gun might cause an anvil to coalesce above his head and squish him. A larger target requires something more extravagent. Destroying a city might create a plague that kills everyone. If you targeted a star… well, the wierdness just gets wierder. Further, if the gun doesn’t WANT to destroy its target, then it won’t (blowing up a system’s star might destroy the gun, and it doesn’t want THAT…)
Another one I’d suggest: The Demon Gun, from the Final Fantasy cartoon. It was powered by a demonic heart and attached to a “generic Mysterious Anime Male with a scruffy look” guy. He loaded it with three bullets at a time, each bullet imbued with a different property, and the combination of the three had different effects. And when the gun was fired, it summoned a creature to destroy the target in a really effin’ cool way. Unfortunately, the gun seemed capable only of mass destruction, so sniping is out of the question…
Ah, yes, anime references. The caster pistol (from Outlaw Star) probably also qualifies–or maybe its ammo does. Different caster shells have different effects. Although the details aren’t always clear, most shells seem to produce energy bolts or explosions and can nullify magic (both Tao spells and effects from other caster weapons). Some shells appeared to create something like temporary singularities, and were said to draw on the shooter’s own lifeforce to do so–the most powerful shells visibly weakened Gene Starwind when he fired them.
Another one: In the Amber books, nobody has ever tried to use gun-armed troops to invade the kingdom of Amber, because no known explosive works in Amber. Until the main character discovers that (iirc) a certain powder used elsewhere for polishing jewelry, and normally non-explosive, is in fact explosive in Amber. So he has a bunch of weapons custom-made to use that powder. So the guns themselves aren’t magical, but it’s only due to a magical effect that they (and not other guns) work.
And in 2nd edition AD&D, you could get a rather unreliable arquebus. The gun itself wasn’t magical, but the powder was. Ordinarily, it worked just like a normal gun, but if you were in an antimagic or wildmagic field, it wouldn’t.