Plaguedoctor's Pearl Blunderbuss

Plaguedoctor's Pearl Blunderbuss rests on a damp wooden table, its barrel a moonlit pearl that seems to glow from within. Brass bands coil around the muzzle, catching the lamp-light as if they were rings worn by a craftsman who has spent a lifetime listening to stories in metal. The stock is wrapped in pale hide stitched with blue thread that flickers like dried venom, and a single iridescent bead sits just behind the breech—the eye of the weapon, a quiet talisman from a guild that chased cures as eagerly as it chased down outbreaks. The gun carries a clean antiseptic scent, a memory of tiled clinics and winter air, and when you lift it you feel the weight of a tale pressing back, ready to be told with each deliberate breath before a trigger is pulled. Along the barrel, sigils are etched with patient care—a plague doctor’s mask flanked by two quills and a thorned branch—signs that this tool was born of necessity and precision, not vanity. The Pearl’s lore is thick with the city’s fevered nights and the quiet courage of those who stood between infection and innocence. It’s said to have been forged in a workshop where medicine and metal met, a weapon crafted for plague doctors who walked through outbreaks as if through rain, steady and unflinching. In the hands of a practiced marksman, the weapon becomes more than steel and peppered brass: a storyteller that writes its own fate in the quick spray of a close-range cone. In combat, it spits a tight, pulsating cloud of powder and shot that clings to skin and cloth, applying poison and a harsh, bright burn. It’s not a long-range instrument; it thrives in cramped hallways and bottlenecked corridors, turning chokepoints into chapters of the protagonist’s ascent. The first blast blasts away the clutter of lesser threats, the second carves a moment of breathing room; with a rhythm, it becomes a ritual—a grim dance that makes the battlefield feel almost choreographed, as if the world itself conspired to open a path for one more decisive moment. In the larger narrative of the world, the Pearl is intersected by lives: a courier who survived a plague’s fever whisper, a healer who learned to read a battlefield like a fever chart, a trader who traded legends for a price. It’s a weapon that asks questions as much as it answers them, prompting stories about what it means to cure by force and to defend by fearsome precision. Its presence in your kit is a quiet reminder that every scar on the map has a backstory—and every backstory needs a witness ready to tell it. I first heard the whisper of its price at Saddlebag Exchange, where caravans roll into town with crates of oddities and relics. The merchants were careful, weighing the Pearl against a bundle of rare herbs, a ledger of favors owed, and a handful of glinting coins. The negotiation was a dance—glinting eyes trading stories as much as goods—and the final figure felt less like a price than a pact. The saddlebag trader slid it across the rough plank, and the Pearl settled into my palm with a cool, almost affectionate weight, as if it had decided to join a new chapter in an old, winding ledger.