Heirloom Items advantage

As the resident gunslinger with an heirloom gun, and access to the gemforged gun recipies, I'll try to explain a few things.

1) You don't have to pay for an Heirloom weapon out of your starting gold. Its parts of the CP cost when creation your character.

2) There is a limit in that general they are of max gemforged quality, and usually of only one type of gem. Depending on your background write-up about it, there could be abilities that are Find-Out In Play. Also most come unattuned, meaning that you will not have access to these abilities at the start, and must figure out in play how to attune yourself and activate them again. For example. I have an heirloom shotgun that is made of Obsidian. I know that it has maxed out abilities, but I haven't attuned it. By researching it through downtimes, I've discovered that it was last owned or rebuilt by my rival, and if I want to attune it to myself, I will need to reforge the parts by hand, attuning it to me via that method. Every heirloom item is different, and it is up to plot staff to figure out how it works appropriate to your character, based on your background, questions, reactions in game, researching through downtimes, et all.

3) There used to be a list up, and not sure what happened to it, but essentially gemforged weapons are weapons with extra abilities, made out of specific gems. For melee weapons, that means taping majority of it in that specific color, for example, Red for Ruby, Blue for Sapphire, Lime Green for Jade, Silver for Silver, Shiny Black for Obsidian. For guns, the phys rep needs to be mostly painted in wood-tones, with dull silver/grey for metal, along with the color as close to the duct tape colors on the barrel, the trigger, and some other parts. Essentially an NPC or Player needs to be able to quickly identify what type of gem it is at a glance, in case they have immunity or vulnerability to said gem. You can make your gun as fancy as possible, but for the most part, it needs to be recognizable for people. Currently, a person using the Gemforging skill can take a weapon and reforged it, though these do not work for firearms. You do not have to have the crafting skill for the weapons to reforge them, except for guns, as far as I've been told. Another player and myself are the only two in game currently that have the recipe to reforge firearms, though he has gemforge and I have gunsmithing, so it can't be done just by ourselves. I'm working on getting the gemforged skill so that I can finally start making gemforged firearms, but that's still a ways off.

I don't recommend going all out on customizing a gun. These things get dropped, smacked, repeatedly used, and from experience, take a lot of wear. You can still add little details, but you really want to be able to pull the gun out of a holster real fast, put it away easily, and the more you add to it, the harder that becomes. Its cool to look awesome, but it sucks when something you've worked on breaks because of an accidental fall or an accidental hit in melee combat. I recommend following videos on youtube for painting and accessorizing them. I tend to use a black vinyl car paint for my base, as it can be done at any temperature, dries quickly, and coats evenly. The best paints I've heard to use are Game Workshop, as they are designed for heavy use, though you could easily get away with using any paints and clear coating (which I should follow my own advice since my guns are starting to wear).