Description
These guys came from a city in which there is a guild of alchemists who raise for the defense of their city a force of firespitters armed with basic handguns . However while these were effective, it also prompted them to look into other weapons. Eventually they came up with something by experimenting with the mineral slime that sailors put on the bottom of their ships to fend of worms and other such wood eating creepy crawlies and distilling it like wine into brandy. With some assistance from the Guilds of Shipwrights, Coopers and Blacksmiths they managed to contrive a system that could turn this into a formidable weapon.
What it was in short was a wine barrel filled with this liquid connected to a pump. The barrel is carried by a stout fellow on his back while another junior guy pumps the pump to drive up pressure. The barrel carrier is given a long wand shaped thing of metal made at considerable expense with a release lever. When pulled a rush of liquid is squirted out and ignited by a pilot light, turning it into a jet of fire up to twenty meters long. All but the best trained war horses generally turn tail at the sight and sound and smell of this, those which somehow are spurred onwards end up proving that a lot of time and effort was wasted as they are engulfed. Plate and maile are of little use when you suddenly find yourself roasting in a cloud of burning hydrocarbons. Those that survive the initial blast are generally not up to keeping up the fight.
The weapons are cumbersome, expensive, require regular maintinence and have been known to explode taking their operators with them. Even so, properly applied they can lay waste to even the best soldiers. As such, the men tasked to use these alchemical weapons are often called Knightcookers.