Cursed Hunters TTRPG

You are pariahs. Rejected by society for reasons that were perhaps not entirely your own, you have become Hunters, pursuing contracts on the rivers of the Marches, tracking what others will not face, surviving where no one expects you to.

Your band travels by barge through flooded forests, canals, and peat bogs. You hunt Beasts, Outlaws, Abominations, and Vectors. You gather Trophies and Fate. You face what lives in the troubled water. Beyond the pains and the failed hunts, you are trying to find a Why — something shared, something worth the journey.

This game was born as a solo journaling experience: one player, one journal, automatic writing, no limits. It can also be played as a group, GM-less or with a referee. The rules adapt. The spirit does not change.

They travel together, hunt together, survive together. That is where the commonality ends. The band is not a fellowship, it is a forced assembly of people who had nowhere else to go. Different origins, different grievances, different ways of reading a situation and different ideas of what constitutes a good decision. Without a shared Why to pull toward, the tensions are always there, just below the surface.

You are not heroes. You are pariahs: people marked by past deeds, real or invented, that no community was willing to forgive. The marks are not only on your skin. They are in your eyes, the colour of dawn trapped inside a two-toned iris; the way you sidestep people's gaze without thinking. They are in your movement, the inclination of your back, the irregular rhythm of your step. They are in the silence you keep when others talk of home. 

Hunters earn their living through contracts: bounties offered by villages, lords, and merchants who need something hunted, found, or removed. The relationship is not respect but need. Those who hire Hunters hold their noses while they do it. But they pay.

The Marches is not empty between settlements. Things move through it, and none of them are indifferent to your presence.

BEASTS -The great fauna of the Marches wanders the rivers in their current course, the deep shadows of the forests, the blurring horizon of the infinite grass fields. Enormous, often solitary, occasionally sacred. They do not accommodate humans.

ABOMINATIONS -Born of corruption, mutation, or something older that has no name yet. They are drawn to the same waters the hunters travel. 

VECTORS -Things that exist between dimensions, trapped, wandering, neither fully here nor fully elsewhere. 

OUTLAWS -The Marches has no single people. It is a layered land, ancient blood rooted in the wet soil, grey heirs rusting in their towers, hopeful strangers arriving with empty hands, wanderers who measure the world in river bends, and riders who were never asked permission to be here.

The Marches is a vast water country at the edge of the known world, neither kingdom nor wilderness, claimed by no crown and tamed by no law. Two immense rivers cross it from north to south: the Lethe, slow and treacherous, and the Ache, savage and untamed. They meet at Confluent, the great city at the junction, before continuing south together into the still and far-reaching solitude of the Lake. Between those rivers lies a savage world: flooded forests, peat bogs, wet fields, canal towns, clan lands, and the ruins of lords who tried to build something permanent in a land that refuses permanence. The Marches swallowed their ambitions.

-- The DarkWaters run in both rivers...

 How to start

You build a Hunter in seven steps, who you were before the river, and who you're becoming. 

Download the Character Sheet and the Band Sheet --> https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1K629Rc8AZW3Y7NuIYqc07v-39pwcYsLY

Light rules. Heavy consequences

No hit points. Nothing to whittle down, no health bar to watch. Harm arrives as Afflictions: physical, mental, the slow rot of the DarkWaters. Afflictions don't heal on a rest. They accumulate. They are how hunters break.

One die. A d10, rolled under one of four characteristics — Primal, Umbra, Art, Arcane. Under is a success. That is the whole of it. Skills, equipment, and edibles bend the number by one. A Mark, your curse, bends it against you.

Shared Fate. Three pools the whole band draws from: Alterity, Fortune, Exile. They rise as you push your luck. When they rise too far, the world answers. Fate is not a resource you spend freely, it is a debt the Marches is keeping track of.

Keys. Hunts don't open because you found the plot. They open because you spent a Key, earned by paying attention, listening, or going where you shouldn't.

 Simple to learn. Merciless in play.

Cursed Hunters was designed first for solo play. Group play is not an afterthought, but the rules were calibrated, from the beginning, for one player navigating uncertainty alone.

SOLO JOURNALING

One player takes every role: protagonist, narrator, and world. No game master. No audience. No performance. Just you and the fiction you build, page by page, using prompts, oracles, and personal writing.

"Solo journaling gave me back my motivation to play, and unleashed a creative freedom I had forgotten. When you play alone, there is no performance anxiety, no scheduling conflicts, no compromise on tone or pacing. You become both the chronicler and the protagonist of your own journey."

ON AUTOMATIC WRITING

The Surrealists wrote without pausing, without correcting, without worrying whether it cohered, letting the hand move before the mind could intervene.

Cursed Hunters asks for the same thing. The DarkWaters bring fever and strange visions. The world is oneiric: things shift, blur, and dissolve at the edges. When you journal, let that blurring in. Write what your character feels before you decide what actually happened.

GROUP PLAY — SHARING THE NARRATION

Cursed Hunters adapts naturally to a table. Start with a Game Master who establishes the world, builds the first hunts, sets the tone. Once the flow is established, the regions explored, the band's tensions visible, the Why beginning to form, share the narration. Rotate control. Invite every player into the construction of the world: let them name places, invent the people who live there, decide what the troubled water hides.

I built Cursed Hunters because I wanted a game that fit my perception of solo-journaling. The Marches is not a setting. It is a condition: wet, uncertain, alive. A place where pariahs become hunters.

What I hope you find here is not a system to master, but a river to follow. The rules are light by design. They interrupt the story briefly and hand it back. The Marks and Afflictions are not punishments, they are the texture of a life lived close to the edge of the known world.

Follow your hunters. Follow your questions. Follow the Why when it appears, and do not force it before it is ready.

Two editions. Both yours, at every tier.

Cursed Hunters comes as two PDFs (100+ pages) — the same complete game, laid out two ways.

-- Spreads (desktop) — the book as designed, two facing pages at a time. Read it on a screen the way it was meant to be seen.

-- Single pages (tablet & phone) — one page per screen. For reading at the table, on the couch, wherever the hunt takes you.

TIERS

-- EARLY BIRD HUNTER — €10 (limited to 50)
The full game, both editions, at the hunter's price. First fifty into the Marches only.

-- DIGITAL HUNTER — €15
The full game, both editions. Plus every stretch goal unlocked during the campaign.

-- AULOS PATRON — €25
Everything above, plus your name in the credits and early access to the next Aulos Games project.

STRETCH GOALS

MEDIAS

Facebook: @Aulos games https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61565071204878