Firearms are rare across Sarnout due to a scarcity of the rare-earth elements required for gunpowder and the relative complexity of manufacturing weapons and ammunition. While training a soldier to use a firearm takes only weeks compared to the years needed to teach combat magic, standard black powder requires rare-earth elements uncommon to most known allods. Mana-tech weapons are highly effective alternatives, but they require significant industrial infrastructure, more complex and finesse approaches and formulae, and much more competent personnel. This is why in most of the world, apart from the Empire, armies still prefer to use magic and traditional ranged weapons and artillery.

Hadaganians, however, are infamous for their intrinsic magical inferiority (comparing to other magically-gifted races), and given total magical impotency or orcs and small numbers of the Arisen, the Empire was determined to put the firearms to maximum use. To accomplish this success, they attempted to use its heavy industry to produce a synthetic propellant for the ammo to replace the black powder. The state-run Rubzov Design Bureau eventually engineered cordite, which was free from the drawbacks of black powder (slow ignition, strict storage requirements, limited range of raw materials). It would have been a perfect solution, if only not for the high industrial and technical requirements compared to black powder, which would prevent it from being mass-produced to arm the Empire’s valiant army; and the mixture’s increased instability, as a stabilising component and the relevant technology are not yet developed.

However, prototypes and even production lines already exist; converted lines at some defence factories (mainly artillery plants) have begun producing trial batches of weaponry incorporating cordite in their design. To optimise the design, it was decided to use scaled-down versions of shells for cannons and mortars; thanks to a highly skilled engineering team, this made it possible to quickly rectify the most obvious shortcomings of the weapons being produced, such as selecting the optimal cartridge case size, the volume of cordite used inside the ammunition, and the shape of the cartridge case and the rifle’s chamber.
Unfortunately for the Imperial Army, the mass arming of troops with cordite rifles is unlikely to begin in the near future, as scientific and technical research into the stabilisation of the explosive substance is still ongoing, as is the planned modernisation of the Empire’s manufacturing facilities.
The use of cordite in automatic weapons is currently impossible due to the mixture’s high instability; at high rates of fire, the internal components of the prototype weapons heated up to temperatures that caused unsecured rounds to self-detonate, resulting in the deaths of several prominent members of the testing commission during the trials of these prototypes.