What would happen if one of us actually got into a world with magic?

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That said, technology does one thing magic doesn't do: scale

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Whaaat? Let's say you got a factory with 3000 workers in 3 shifts and assembly lines and whatnot and I got a 10th level sorceress with Fabricate. We're making MG 42 machineguns. Each one takes 75 man-hours to make in said assembly line and takes up 1/10 of a cubic foot in volume. So the factory can make 318 guns per work day. The sorceror can make 100 guns in one minute with a single casting of Fabricate - and she has 5 spell slots of 10th level for every 8 hours she is in restful calm, such as reading her favorite novel, sunbathing or sleeping. She can thus make 1500 guns per day and work all of 15 minutes.


But wait, this is totally inefficient. Our sorceress doesn't want to spend her whole life making more guns than 5 factories at once. She thus does the following every day for 3 months - the same 3 months your engineers will be building said factory;

1) Resting for 8 hours/day.
2) Lesser Planar Binding 5 outsiders per day, then killing them for the XP and potential treasure.
3) Working 8 hours/day on her Rod of Fabrication.

After 90 days, our sorceress has completed her Rod of Fabrication, which allows its wielder to Fabricate at-will. She now can, in a single hour, fabricate 6000 cubic feet (a thousand tons) of metal goods or 60.000 cubic feet of nonmetal goods, provided she has the skill.


She can literally build a mansion in one hour, or the Empire State Building in a couple of months, on her own.

They'd best come back and get the rest of us.

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Originally Posted by Yahzi

We would do pretty well.

We all have a huge advantage over people in fantasy books, or even just the past. We have exposure. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." Now I had to google to see who said that, but the text of the quote I remembered on my own; and more importantly, the idea of it you already heard of.

You don't have to understand the scientific method. The mere knowledge that such a thing can exist is a huge step forward. You have watched TV since you were old enough to walk. You have been exposed to more ideas, situations, cultures, technologies, and philosophies than most ancient geniuses had in their lifetimes. You already know that the stars are suns, like ours; that the natural force that keeps them in orbit is the same thing that makes apples fall; that lightspeed cannot normally be exceeded; but even more importantly, you know that democracy is possible, money doesn't have to be backed by gold, women are essentially equal to men, and so on. The mere knowledge that the rich are not genetically superior to the poor is so explosive it would have gotten you killed a few hundred years ago.

When it comes to combat, you may already know that gunpowder is not that hard to make and that spinning the bullet (rifling) makes it more accurate. Those two ideas alone end the reign of knights. Even D&D knights, who can take several longsword blows before dying - the power of even a moderately advanced black-powder design (say the Civil War era Sharps .50) will drop a freaking buffalo in one shot. Go look up how many hit die a buffalo has. And guns do it at longer ranges than magic; and more to the point, you've seen a WWII movie. You know how combat is supposed to look with guns and artillery and flying strike forces.

It's not just the technological knowledge you need. You can't join a Celtic tribe and start a factory. You need cultural knowledge; you need to know how to share the rewards and labor of the factory in a way that will make everyone buy into it. And you have that knowledge, even if you don't know it, because you've seen it done your whole life.

You have the accumulated wealth of 7,000,000,000 people's stories and 400 years of the Scientific Revolution. The stuff you learned from Bill Nye the Science Guy shows would make Issac Newton green with envy. Yes, translating it into actual practice would be hard; but the fact is you have Knowledge: Technological Culture at 10 skill ranks. And it's a class exclusive skill.

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This. This right here is probably the single best point anybody in this thread has made.
It's not that we're smarter than those wizards with their 18+ Intelligence scores, it's that we've seen, lived with, and done things that those guys have never even dreamed of. We do things on a daily basis that were impossible a hundred years ago.

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Originally Posted by Yahzi

(Edit: you might also want to check out Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" series)

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Where do you think I got the idea of how to introduce an Industrial Revolution?
I really liked the first half of the series. I think it kind of petered out after that.

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Originally Posted by Belial_the_Leveler

Yes it does. If it isn't backed by intrinsic value, spellcasters can copy it, conjure it or otherwise fabricate it in vast amounts. And if you have banks and ATM, you're just begging someone to magically persuade the bank workers to do what he says, or animate the ATM and have it give up all money it contains.

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Debt-based fiat currency and gold-based currency aren't the only possible forms of currency, nor are counterfeiters unique to a realm with spellcasting.

We already have bank workers vulnerable to persuasion and ATMs vulnerable to various forms of molestation. That's not a new problem.

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Originally Posted by Belial_the_Leveler

About as ugly as with created undead and summoned demons. Except demons can teleport up to your face and have a bazillion immunities and all it takes is a few seconds of effort to summon one with a spell, whereas it takes millions of dollars and hundreds of man-hours to build a tank, let alone drive and fuel it.

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Just because an anti-tank rocket is cheaper and easier to make than a tank hasn't obsoleted the tank... especially if anti-demon warding spells are a thing.

Created undead, especially of the mindless sort, are pikers compared to clever troops armed with cartridge firearms.

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Originally Posted by goto124

Aaand I'm confused. Are we in a game world, or a real world that somehow resembles DnD?

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I was under the impression we were in a real world fantasy type setting where magic and monsters existed but we got there from our actual world.

Think a "magic Kingdom for Sale" scenario by Terry Brooks

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Originally Posted by Belial_the_Leveler

Whaaat? Let's say you got a factory with 3000 workers in 3 shifts and assembly lines and whatnot and I got a 10th level sorceress with Fabricate. We're making MG 42 machineguns. Each one takes 75 man-hours to make in said assembly line and takes up 1/10 of a cubic foot in volume. So the factory can make 318 guns per work day. The sorceror can make 100 guns in one minute with a single casting of Fabricate - and she has 5 spell slots of 10th level for every 8 hours she is in restful calm, such as reading her favorite novel, sunbathing or sleeping. She can thus make 1500 guns per day and work all of 15 minutes.


But wait, this is totally inefficient. Our sorceress doesn't want to spend her whole life making more guns than 5 factories at once. She thus does the following every day for 3 months - the same 3 months your engineers will be building said factory;

1) Resting for 8 hours/day.
2) Lesser Planar Binding 5 outsiders per day, then killing them for the XP and potential treasure.
3) Working 8 hours/day on her Rod of Fabrication.

After 90 days, our sorceress has completed her Rod of Fabrication, which allows its wielder to Fabricate at-will. She now can, in a single hour, fabricate 6000 cubic feet (a thousand tons) of metal goods or 60.000 cubic feet of nonmetal goods, provided she has the skill.


She can literally build a mansion in one hour, or the Empire State Building in a couple of months, on her own.

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Fabricate is going to make the individual components of a rifle, it's not going to make it completely assembled so you're still going to need an assembly line of people to put them together. Admittedly it's still faster but not as much as you're estimating.

I doubt you're going to find many spell casters willing to risk the wrath of a small army of outsiders to make mundane weapons for someone when there's much easier safer ways to make more money.

The example about the mansion is also wrong. It's going to take much longer than that.

Also you can't prepare spells three times in one day

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If a wizard has cast spells recently, the drain on her resources reduces her capacity to prepare new spells. When she prepares spells for the coming day, all the spells she has cast within the last 8 hours count against her daily limit.

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It's going to have to be a pretty high level caster as well. An exotic weapon has a craft check of 18, a modern mechanical rifle is going to at least be in the mid 20s. Of course there are ways to to get around this but then you're using up more of your resources as a caster decreasing even further the amount of rifles you can actually make and the time in which you can make them.

OK, let's see what a company of well-trained troops with modern firearms could do vs a company of disposable minions by a competent wizard;

Well-trained nonelite troops are ~lvl3. They got around 20 hp, AC 18 that works vs bullets. Armed with an assault rifle, they can attack in 5 round bursts dealing 2d6 piercing at +7 attack roll, assuming weapon focus and masterwork assault rifles. They also got binoculars, survival gear and a few grenades dealing 5d6 piercing damage or forcing DC 17 fortitude saves vs blindness/deafness. They cost ~500 gp to train and ~3000 gp to equip each.

The competent wizard Lesser Planar Binds a few Shadow Demons then Geases them to work for him. It takes him half an hour of work to do it and can call 5 demons/day. Shadow Demons are invulnerable to all nonmagical attacks thanks to their incorporeality; no amount of modern weaponry will ever harm them. The wizard sets the demons to hunt down enemy troops. Some hours later, hundreds of enemy troops are horribly slain or rounded up and sacrificed to the demon lord of your choice.


@Invader:
Assembling a modern assault rifle takes a few minutes and every trained soldier knows how to do it - it's the medieval equivalent of knowing how to put on your armor. As for the mansion, the time is for the house itself, not the interior decorations and furniture. Those are up to the owner.
Do note that frabricate's casting time isn't affected by how difficult an object is to make - you only need to be able to make it in the first place. For a 10th level caster, we got +13 skill ranks, +5 ability modifier, plus taking 10 for a total result of 28. That kind of result is more than capable of making most any item that isn't electronics - the highest Craft DCs are around 25.

And yes, you can prepare spells multiple times/day. You will notice that the limit is 8 hours, not 24 hours. So you can regain them every 8 hours.

What would happen? Well, how good are you at scrounging for food in a medieval system? Most of us would likely starve. Those of us with some form of marketable skill would live long enough to die happy. Those of us with a 14+ int could get accepted to a university and learn magical powers, provided we had some way to pay. Overall though? Not much,most likely. Very few of us would have the skill or actual intellect to master even the most basic spells, and even fewer would be able to survive long enough to find a mentor. Hell, even for myself, I would only likely have a 14 int (I speak 5 languages and put ranks in linguistics, my college major), so my confidence in most people's ability to master magic is low.

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Originally Posted by GreyBlack

What would happen? Well, how good are you at scrounging for food in a medieval system? Most of us would likely starve. Those of us with some form of marketable skill would live long enough to die happy. Those of us with a 14+ int could get accepted to a university and learn magical powers, provided we had some way to pay. Overall though? Not much,most likely. Very few of us would have the skill or actual intellect to master even the most basic spells, and even fewer would be able to survive long enough to find a mentor. Hell, even for myself, I would only likely have a 14 int (I speak 5 languages and put ranks in linguistics, my college major), so my confidence in most people's ability to master magic is low.

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With fourteen intelligence, you could become a wizard. Hell, a good enough one. By twentieth level you'd be able to cast 9ths, even without magic boosts.

The hard part is surviving until you've found a Wizard Mentor who's willing to take you in.

And then surviving the apprenticeship (going by some of the fluff, especially in Forgotten Realms, being an apprentice is harsh at best and downright horrible at worst).

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Originally Posted by hamishspence

The hard part is surviving until you've found a Wizard Mentor who's willing to take you in.

And then surviving the apprenticeship (going by some of the fluff, especially in Forgotten Realms, being an apprentice is harsh at best and downright horrible at worst).

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Summon Pazuzu. Get your wishes there, folks. And spendin' money.

You don't know what your alignment is when you arrive in the D&D-verse though.

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Originally Posted by hamishspence

You don't know what your alignment is when you arrive in the D&D-verse though.

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Definitely not chaotic evil.

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Originally Posted by Belial_the_Leveler

OK, let's see what a company of well-trained troops with modern firearms could do vs a company of disposable minions by a competent wizard;

Well-trained nonelite troops are ~lvl3. They got around 20 hp, AC 18 that works vs bullets. Armed with an assault rifle, they can attack in 5 round bursts dealing 2d6 piercing at +7 attack roll, assuming weapon focus and masterwork assault rifles. They also got binoculars, survival gear and a few grenades dealing 5d6 piercing damage or forcing DC 17 fortitude saves vs blindness/deafness. They cost ~500 gp to train and ~3000 gp to equip each.

The competent wizard Lesser Planar Binds a few Shadow Demons then Geases them to work for him. It takes him half an hour of work to do it and can call 5 demons/day. Shadow Demons are invulnerable to all nonmagical attacks thanks to their incorporeality; no amount of modern weaponry will ever harm them. The wizard sets the demons to hunt down enemy troops. Some hours later, hundreds of enemy troops are horribly slain or rounded up and sacrificed to the demon lord of your choice.


@Invader:
Assembling a modern assault rifle takes a few minutes and every trained soldier knows how to do it - it's the medieval equivalent of knowing how to put on your armor. As for the mansion, the time is for the house itself, not the interior decorations and furniture. Those are up to the owner.
Do note that frabricate's casting time isn't affected by how difficult an object is to make - you only need to be able to make it in the first place. For a 10th level caster, we got +13 skill ranks, +5 ability modifier, plus taking 10 for a total result of 28. That kind of result is more than capable of making most any item that isn't electronics - the highest Craft DCs are around 25.

And yes, you can prepare spells multiple times/day. You will notice that the limit is 8 hours, not 24 hours. So you can regain them every 8 hours.

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At most you can prepare and cast spells once a day, I posted the rule that explains it.

There's not a rifle in the world that you can simply assemble from raw parts in a few minutes. Yes there are components that you can assemble/disasemble yourself for cleaning etc. but there are many more than require rivits, welding, specialty tools and machines to actually put together.

You're still just producing the raw materials for the mansion. You're producing boards not assembled walls for example. It's going to still take a long time.

My point about the skills is, it seems unlikely that you're going to find a high level caster that spent his whole life as a spell caster pumping up a mundane crafting skill that he was going to use for years and years. Thats how a PC works but we're assuming it's a real world situation and that's not how it works in the real world.

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Originally Posted by hamishspence

You don't know what your alignment is when you arrive in the D&D-verse though.

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True neutral. You haven't performed enough actions when you arrive to dictate any alignment, much like a baby would be considered TN.

Personally, TN, bordering NG. More and more, I'm becoming less inclined to help people and instead study the fabric of life, the universe, and everything, but still posers possess the desire to help others.

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Originally Posted by GreyBlack

True neutral. You haven't performed enough actions when you arrive to dictate any alignment, much like a baby would be considered TN.

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There might also be an element of "judge by personality rather than actions" for new introductees.

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At most you can prepare and cast spells once a day, I posted the rule that explains it.

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No, the rule you quoted specifies once per 8 hours, not once per day.

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You're still just producing the raw materials for the mansion.

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Nope! Fabricate turns raw materials into finished product. No assembly required.

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Originally Posted by Belial_the_Leveler

No, the rule you quoted specifies once per 8 hours, not once per day.



Nope! Fabricate turns raw materials into finished product. No assembly required.

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And it says any spells cast within the last 8 hours count towards that days spells and every other table and list in the PHB states spells per day, not 8 hours. 8 hours is not a day.

A board is a finished product, cut stone is a finished prodect, fabricate doesn't assemble anything.

1) You cast some spells. Then you rest for 8 hours. After that rest you prepare spells - spells cast in the "last 8 hours" will be exactly zero because "the last 8 hours" will be said rest. Then cast spells again, rest for another 8 hours and so on and so forth.
Wizard spell preparation and sorceror spell slot recovery only need said 8 hours of rest. Only divine casters like clerics are limited to recovering spells a single time per 24 hours.


2) I choose to fabricate guns. Fabricate turns raw materials into guns. I choose to fabricate a house. Fabricate turns raw materials into a house. Unless you claim that neither the gun nor the house are products or that crafting skills can't build a gun or a house, I don't see a problem - Fabricate mentions no limitations on how complex the product can be, the number of its parts, or whether assembly is required or not.

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Originally Posted by Belial_the_Leveler

1) You cast some spells. Then you rest for 8 hours. After that rest you prepare spells - spells cast in the "last 8 hours" will be exactly zero because "the last 8 hours" will be said rest. Then cast spells again, rest for another 8 hours and so on and so forth.
Wizard spell preparation and sorceror spell slot recovery only need said 8 hours of rest. Only divine casters like clerics are limited to recovering spells a single time per 24 hours.

If you can cast 10 spells a day and you cast all of them, just because you can prepare them after 8 hours of rest doesn't excuse the fact that youve already cast your allotment of spells for that day.


2) I choose to fabricate guns. Fabricate turns raw materials into guns. I choose to fabricate a house. Fabricate turns raw materials into a house. Unless you claim that neither the gun nor the house are products or that crafting skills can't build a gun or a house, I don't see a problem - Fabricate mentions no limitations on how complex the product can be, the number of its parts, or whether assembly is required or not.

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You can only cast a certain amount of spells per day that number is listed with the description of the spell caster. there's a difference between how long it takes to prepare spells and and how long it takes before you can cast them. You can't cast more than your daily allotment of spells regardless of how long it takes to prepare them.

We'll just agree to disagree in how fabricate works since its not definitive either way.

I think fabricate is the logical way to do an assembly line. I once had my players assault a weapons factory; when they got inside, they found a single high-level Dwarf Psion with a pile of raw materials on one side and a pile of finished products on the other, flanked by two mid-level Penguin Warlocks firing hellrime blasts into the dweomer of transference produced by the magic chair he was sitting on. (I thought it was a pretty nice setup, since it also spiced up the ensuing combat encounter by giving him minions and making him immune to magic. They eventually beat him by bull rushing him off the chair so the party's blaster could burst him down.)

As for myself, I have nowhere near as much courage as my most cowardly PC's. If I were to see something so much as a small monstrous spider, I would be in tears and would want to come back home.

This is kind of what I think would happen:

1) A playgrounder ends up in a fantasy world.
2) The Playgrounder starts attempting to reshape the world TO style..
3) The Playgrounder offends the local powers, madness ensues.
4) ???
5) The powers of the fantasy world come to our world for revenge.

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Originally Posted by Troacctid

Penguin Warlocks

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I should get one.

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Originally Posted by atemu1234

With fourteen intelligence, you could become a wizard. Hell, a good enough one. By twentieth level you'd be able to cast 9ths, even without magic boosts.

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Originally Posted by hamishspence

There might also be an element of "judge by personality rather than actions" for new introductees.

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Eughhhh.... judging by personality indicates that we can map personality traits on a good/evil axis, and could potentially limit access to tropes like the heroic sociopath. Additionally, it's a nature vs nurture debate there that gets hairy, because it leads to "always chaotic evil" stuff. Better to just say actions speak to it and not touch it again.

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Originally Posted by Belial_the_Leveler

OK, let's see what a company of well-trained troops with modern firearms could do vs a company of disposable minions by a competent wizard;

Well-trained nonelite troops are ~lvl3. They got around 20 hp, AC 18 that works vs bullets. Armed with an assault rifle, they can attack in 5 round bursts dealing 2d6 piercing at +7 attack roll, assuming weapon focus and masterwork assault rifles. They also got binoculars, survival gear and a few grenades dealing 5d6 piercing damage or forcing DC 17 fortitude saves vs blindness/deafness. They cost ~500 gp to train and ~3000 gp to equip each.

The competent wizard Lesser Planar Binds a few Shadow Demons then Geases them to work for him. It takes him half an hour of work to do it and can call 5 demons/day. Shadow Demons are invulnerable to all nonmagical attacks thanks to their incorporeality; no amount of modern weaponry will ever harm them. The wizard sets the demons to hunt down enemy troops. Some hours later, hundreds of enemy troops are horribly slain or rounded up and sacrificed to the demon lord of your choice.

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Congratulations, you've established that... a character of at least ninth level can probably beat a group of third-level characters. That's not impressive. He could likely have done that at fifth level with fireballs, assuming he won initiative. "Level-inappropriate encounter" is the term here... especially when you're assuming set-piece battles with everyone standing around waiting on the wizard to do something.

You're also lowballing the assault rifle damage by quite a bit (d20 Modern assault rifles deal 2d8 on the regular shot, and with Burst Fire are dealing twice that), but that's besides the point. The point is that you're not winning an argument by massively stacking the deck against the other side in so blatantly transparent a way that precludes anybody's suggested course of action - or indeed, any reasonable and intelligent method of operating in the setting, up to and including the idea that the soldiers would have some manner of operational intelligence (including possibly divinations).

Let's take mine, for example. Sure, your demon-summoner might win a fight against some unsupported line troops - but what happens when he comes up against those troops supported by another mid-level wizard from the guild masterminding the Industrial Revolution? A simple greater magic weapon makes your demons go 'poof' under a hail of now-magical bullets. Heck, hand all of the troops a 50-gp oil of magic weapon and go to town on the demons.

This is without even getting into the different numbers of characters at different levels. It's swell your mid-to-high level wizard can outperform fifty people - too bad regular people outnumber her thousands to one.

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Originally Posted by Norren

This is kind of what I think would happen:

1) A playgrounder ends up in a fantasy world.
2) The Playgrounder starts attempting to reshape the world TO style..
3) The Playgrounder offends the local powers, madness ensues.
4) ???
5) The powers of the fantasy world come to our world for revenge.

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So what you're saying is that this is a win-win situation.
Through my actions I will either save their world... or destroy this one's established order. Either way, I get what I want.

Fabricate allows for converting one sort of material into another of the same sort. It says nothing about making different sorts. So you could use a block of stone and Fabricate it into a throne or something made of stone. So, a Fabricated mansion gives you a mansion made of one material with nothing else in it. With a high craft result, you can make a really nice stone throne, but you can't make a wooden door. Given what is required for guns (both wood and different kinds of metal) that wizard/caster isn't Fabricating any firearms ever. To do that, they need either Major Creation or Wish. Nothing else can cut it. You would closer to 4 or 5 wizards to make a firearm's parts then somebody to assemble it. One makes the wood parts, another makes the steel metal parts, another makes the copper metal parts, another makes another of the metal parts. I don't actually what different metals are used with wood to make early muskets and rifles, but I am thinking something like 3-4 of them. So the wizards are limited here.

Using magic to make magical bullets or magical firearms is easier since you could treat the firearm like a bow and the bullets like arrows. So you should be able to enchant the firearm to fire magical fire bullets. There is already precendent in the game with magical arrows plus magic sling bullets. They would hurt stuff now.

A main point when guns trumped knights and Longbowmen: Guns required less skill and training to use and became more accurate. Plus the amount of force being delivered was stronger than average what most armors could deflect. A bunch of peasants with decent accuracy could mow down knights with firearms. Until Kevler, standard armor disappeared for a while.

I don't think a wizard that takes a shogun blast to the face is really going to be casting a bit now.

I have no opinion on the effectiveness of a shotgun blast to a wizards face, but...

Www.paultwister.com is a story about a guy stuck in a fantasy type world. The author brings up a lot of these ideas over the course of his 3 books. He's amateur, but writes a good, and believable story

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Originally Posted by russdm

Fabricate allows for converting one sort of material into another of the same sort. It says nothing about making different sorts. So you could use a block of stone and Fabricate it into a throne or something made of stone. So, a Fabricated mansion gives you a mansion made of one material with nothing else in it. With a high craft result, you can make a really nice stone throne, but you can't make a wooden door. ...

Using magic to make magical bullets or magical firearms is easier since you could treat the firearm like a bow and the bullets like arrows. So you should be able to enchant the firearm to fire magical fire bullets. There is already precendent in the game with magical arrows plus magic sling bullets. They would hurt stuff now.

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If fabricate can't make guns because multiple materials, it equally can't make bullets more advanced than the powder-and-shot musket-ball variety, and can't even attempt gunpowder.

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Originally Posted by goto124

I would try to search for optimum builds, then get frustrated as I realise there's no internet...

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This is truth.

re: many people's gun arguments, not going to quote them all

Gunpowder already exists in D&D, or an equivalent at least (tindertwigs). Problem solved. If a person in the real world can handload a cartridge that will cycle an autoloading pistol with strike-anywhere matches or snap caps, you can be very certain that a sufficiently skilled alchemist will be able to reproduce at least that with alchemy checks and some time. If you put the idea in the head of an alchemist who can manage a DC25 craft check you'll be producing smokeless powder via alchemical means in a year or two (given time for experiments and such). If you happen to know about the interactions between nitric acid and cellulose, you can probably cut that down to a few months. Once the process is known, you can outsource it to other alchemists.

Firearms don't contain copper parts generally. Literally all the components of a gun can be made out of steel. Wood furniture is not needed to make a gun; skeletal stocks made of steel have been around since mass production was invented. If you want to be extremely technical, yes you do need different kinds of steel; specifically spring steel for the sear and buffer/slide springs, hardened steel for the parts of the action subject to wear (slide rails, bolt face, firing pin, hammer, barrel, etc.) and any cheap steel for the frame and the other parts. In practice you could still do it in one cast though, since you could use fabricate to replicate the process used to make different kinds of steel (since most of it is heat treatment and different kinds of forging).

Cartridge cases you need brass (a copper/tin alloy), but bronze has already been discovered if steel objects exist, so just buy the bronze and fabricate it to make the cases. You can make steel cases too if that's a problem, Russia already does that and steel is more common than bronze.

Bullets you just need lead alloy, ideally lead + bismuth or lead + antimony. You could make them with pure lead, but that's really soft and not super ideal. You'll probably create a market for lead overnight, since it's much more common than the other metals you want and not useful for much. Have the lead alloyed before it gets to you and fabricate it into bullets once you get it. Better yet: make steel bullet molds and have someone else do it. Make sure that you discuss the issues of working lead with any potential workers, and have some form of toxin resistance available to smiths who are smelting it.

Loading simple cartridges is something you could mass produce with unseen servants or animated skeletons. It's pretty simple stuff; fit a primer (made by alchemists, essentially a tindertwig) into the cartridge case, put (measured) gunpowder in the case, double check the powder charge to make sure it's the right amount, then seat the bullet into the case mouth and crimp the case (which would require you to make a case crimping device, also not a very hard task). If anyone reading this thread wanted to learn to do it, it would take less than a minute of explanation at each step to show someone how. It's really that easy to do.

Fabricating Sten guns or an equivalent would not require a very difficult Craft check (with Fabricate), and producing rudimentary cartridge-fed breechloading smoothbore guns would be even easier. Combine that with oils of magic weapon or a custom spell similar to Flame Arrows (sor/wiz3) that worked on bullets...