Hawker - Solo Merchant RPG
Keep wise of your coin and cargo, Merchant.
HAWKER is a Solo Hexcrawl Journaling RPG set in a fantasy world. Using a Hexmap and a journal. You play as a Merchant documenting your travels as you buy and sell your cargo to distant settlements and seek to establish new trade routes. Gain coin and renown as you become a better and wiser merchant, and discover a route that elevates you to the status of legendary merchant.
This game requires a degree of worldbuilding as the names of your cities, companions and the cargo you transport are left up to you, the player. I'm more than happy to create supplemental material to help create a better experience for HAWKER, so if that's something you would be interested in please let me know in the comments.
To Play you will need
- This Pamphlet
- some d6's (6 recommended)
- a deck of cards
- A small token to keep track of your merchant on the Hexmap
- A method to track your journeys
This is my first game on Itch.io and I plan to continue development on it, so all feedback is welcome!
A tool I have used to generate hex maps during my playthroughs is https://hextml.playest.net/.
Gameplay of HAWKER is available to watch here:
M. Kirins Stream: Here (Pre-Resolution Update)
Board Games With Thomas' Stream: Here
For the Dice & Card Suite Icons - Thank you Game-Icons.net!
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Update to 0.6 - Resolution Clarification & Changes29 days ago
- Update to 0.5 - Rules addendum44 days ago
- HAWKER - Readability and Visual Changes45 days ago
- Art and Typo Update47 days ago
- Hawker - Black and White print version47 days ago
Comments
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This looks super cool! However, I'm confused about one thing.
keep in mind i have only read this, not played it, but it looks to me like your stats don't really matter. From what i can tell, you have a dice pool equal to your stat, but if you don't roll enough successes or failures, you just roll again and add the results together. Doesn't this effectively make your dice pool size irrelevant?
For instance, if i have a stat of 2, and I'm completing a medium difficulty action roll (3successes before 3 failures), and I roll a 2 and a 3 resulting in two failures. This has not hit the failure amount, so i roll them again, and get a 4 and a 5, so now i have 2 successes and two failures. However, this is the same as if i had rolled 4 dice to begin with.
Am misunderstanding or missing a rule here?
Hey there!
Thanks for pointing this out. The intended use for the stats is to give you a basis for your action and dice pool, for instance attempting to deceive a bandit may use “Charm” and give you a base dice pool of 2 if your “Charm” Stat is 2. You build upon that dice pool by including relevant merchant perks (Item, Companion, or Skill) and potentially any cargo that could also assist you.
When you fail to overcome an encounter with a roll you must attempt a different approach. This means that if you tried to overcome this Encounter by using your best stat “Charm” and various perks, then you have to try a different approach that forces you to construct a potentially smaller dice pool or envision a wholly different approach. If you feel that having to make another roll should incur some kind of penalty, that’s something that could be worth looking at. I noticed with my original resolution mechanic failures were a lot more common than successes.
Hope this helps :-)
This game is deceptively big! I showcased it on my stream and even though I played for a while I don't think I even scratched the surface. I'm intrigued to play more for sure!!
If anyone wants to watch the stream and see the game in action, the segment starts at 9m 24s 👍
the print version is color too?
Hey, the print version has better printing settings. If you would like a black-and-white version give me a few minutes and I'll upload one for you :)
I've uploaded Black & White versions for print. Thanks for letting me know that was needed :)
Love the aesthetics of this little rpg!