Chapter 04 · ShopkeeperFM 93-07

Shopkeeper

You kept a corner store solvent through two recessions — stocking shelves before dawn, haggling with suppliers by phone, and knowing every regular’s credit to the dollar. The apocalypse changed the inventory, not the job.

A corner-store counter, register, and sunlit shelves of canned goods. — Plate III-J. — The counter. The inventory changed. The job did not.

Spec	Issued
Creation cost	−2
Effective start	Commerce 3 · Maintenance 1 · Haggler
Granted trait	Haggler (purchasable 4) — lower personal vendor tax; Commerce XP. Half a Silver Tongue. No hire bonus.
Companion cap	At Commerce 3: still 1 companion (`floor(3/2) = 1`). You grow the party slower than a Merchant.
XP source	Deals, then the Commerce tab. Maintenance 1 keeps the stall and the walls standing.

Who this is for

The stay-at-home trader. You want a named stall on the map, a till you empty at dusk, and regulars. You are not the road. You are the reason the road has a destination. Spend the leftover points on the person who sleeps behind the counter — fit, a weapon trait, Fast Learner.

// FROM THE FILES — CORNER STORE

Corner stores outlasted two recessions and one interstate. They will outlast this if someone is behind the counter at 3 a.m. with nails, water, and a till that is not a crate on the porch.

How to play it

Get inside a claim with vendor rights. Craft the Vendor Kit (planks, nails, sheet, pen — not skill-gated). Green/red preview, name the stall. If you cannot found yet, join. A Shopkeeper with no stall is a Haggler in a ditch. Territory first, then this page’s rest.
Stock boring. Water, canned food, rags, nails, melee that is not precious. The winning stall is still open at 3 a.m. Rare guns sit in a Gunsmith’s lockbox until the town has calories.
Fund the till, hide the number. Public sync never shows the till. Withdraw-all exists so you do not type the balance. Tax skims to the settlement treasury, not your till — Haggler only cuts your personal rate. The owner still gets a cut of every deal inside the border.
Add buy listings. A stall that only sells is a museum. Buy scrap, empty brass, VHS, fertilizer — whatever your specialists eat. You become the routing table of the claim.
Craft the shop. Price tags and a sign immediately. Ledger and coin pouch at Commerce 2 (you spawn at 3). Scales and lockbox at 4 — one level of deals. Strongbox at 7 is the long game. None of this prints money; it makes the fantasy true and gives the skill a bench.
Hire once you can afford the wage, not the fantasy. One companion. Protect doctrine. You do not have Silver Tongue; persuasion is harder. Standing still matters. A Merchant can tour and hire. You hire the person who walks into the shop.

Operator’s note — NPC traders Wandering traders are real vendor records and only appear inside existing settlements. Your stall is how a world without claims stays poor. Plant. Then the Network’s own traders have somewhere to stand.

A week behind the counter

Day 1: live, join or found. Day 2: kit, stall, five honest listings, a funded till. Day 3: a buy order for something a Scrapper is drowning in. Day 4: empty the till before you log off; raids exist; offline raids may exist. Week 2: you are a pin on the map. That is the occupation working.

Pair with every specialist. You are their storefront. A Merchant can be the travelling buyer who stocks you. Do not both fight over the same till unless the town is big enough for two names.