Talk:Morley/@comment-1500935-20180623092916/@comment-37450127-20181206032259

I like that idea but I always thought the watchtowers fired a similar shot as the stilt walkers. They make a very similar sound effect when firing, and function almost identically. And as we know from looting the tallboy's, they fire incendiary bolts, which are - you guessed it - whale oil based.

This actually begs a really interesting question: if literally every projectile/explosive weapon in every dishonored game is whale oil based, and at the start of the first game whale oil is still a relatively new thing (only a decade or so old at the start of the first game), then where is the predecessor? We know it must have existed, but it's odd that there's no mention of gunpowder anywhere in any of the games, books or comics. The only reference I could find is when Harvey Smith said the outsider probably smells like copper and gunpowder on twitter; hardly a confirmation.

An idea could be that the predecessor wasn't the time period accurate black powder, but some other explosive compound found naturally in dishonored's fucked up vision of mother nature. ANd like whale oil eventually became, this substance was eventually used up, making pistols and cannons and the like very expensive to fire, and thus it makes even more sense the spymaster would want the empress to upgrade. It would also explain why there's no evidence of it in any of the games; nobody would pay a couple thousand coin to fire a pistol when whale oil is better in every way and a million times cheaper. But admittedly that's about as headcanon as it gets; it's technically possible but feels off somehow. I dunno.

Would love to hear what you guys think.