The Tavern

I don't remember ever seeing an artefact blowgun, do they have a chance to appear?

For an unrand artefact, how about something that always has a chance of combining some of the different needle effects. So if you've quivered poisoned needles, there'd be some chance that paralysis, rage, sleeping, confusion or curare could also get applied to the quivered damage type.

Or for extra jazz, a tiny chance to do also do Dazzling Spray or Airstrike. Thematically, that's magical confetti spray or a smite attack. % chance of Summon Butterflies too for an extra festive run away from trouble.

I figure if we've got oddities like the Obsidian Axe and the Shield of the Gong, there's at least some occasional fun in the item being situationally risky to you. Firing off poisoned needles at a wolf spider: on the 5th needle you also apply curare, a few more plain poison shots, then with a 1-tile gap, the next needle applies rage. Oops....

There used to be randart blowguns and a fixedart blowgun. They were removed because it turns out artefact versions of a weapon that does nothing except allow to you use certain ammo... don't do anything except allow you to use certain ammo. It's like having randart staves of energy, it's not gonna do anything except make you swap more often for resistances or whatever (which is bad).

A fixedart blowgun that had smite targeting (Permanant portal projectile effect) might be interesting, but yeah, mostly what duvessa said, blowguns are too limited of a case to make the additional overhead of a randart useful.

Thanks for weighing in, I figured this might have been kicked around before.

Arrows and crossbows also shoot just one certain kind of ammo too. But, they also have the upside of actually doing very respectable physical damage with enough skill training, and their damage type never really loses usefulness since no monsters fully resist physical damage.

I'd agree that blowguns are pretty niche and I suppose unless the fixedart had some % chance to deal actual physical damage, or some "Infusion"-style effect to apply irresistable magical damage, it'd be a lot of weapon slot swapping.

FR remove blowguns, rename needles to darts, remove about half the dart brands.

Really though let's just roll all of Hellcrawl into mainline