Last Updated: July 11, 2022

If you’ve been enjoying Kobold Press’s recently-released Tome of Heroes, you may be eying one of the many new subclasses. I was fortunate enough to meet Alexander Stangroom at Garycon this year, and he described to me a subclass which allowed a spellcaster to hold a brace of pistols in their mage hands and fire all of them. Naturally, I was very excited about that, so when I got my hands on the book I started planning a subclass handbook. We were lucky enough to have Brian Suskind, who wrote the Gunpowder rules, on the RPGBOT.News and we had a great time discussing it.

Now that I’ve dug into the subclass a bit, there are definitely some challenges. The concept of the subclass is really exciting and the ideas behind the features are really cool, but there are some frustrating limitations with the action economy. I suggested some fixes which should make the subclass function more as it was intended, and if your group is willing to experiment with some patches, Black Powder Sorcery should be a lot of fun.