by Tristan Zimmerman
‘My boy was scarcely ten years old
When he went to an eerie land
Where wind never blew, nor cocks ever crew
Woe for my son, Leesome Brand!’
– Leesome Brand, Child Ballad 15
Britain, 1813. You are amateur folklorists working as agents of the Crown. Across the island, the folk ballads of the common people are coming to life. The dead walk, dragons rise, lovers betray one another, authorities condemn innocents to die — whatever happens in the song happens in real life. It’s up to you, armed with a little ballad magic, to decipher the clues in each song and keep people from getting hurt. Welcome to Ballad Hunters!
Ballad Hunters is the first in the new GUMSHOE Labs line of games from Pelgrane Press. These games take what we all love about GUMSHOE and remix it, to produce exciting, experimental designs. Ballad Hunters rebuilds GUMSHOE for brief but intense two-hour adventures and adds mechanics from RPG storygames.
‘You need no basin, Lamkin
Let it run on the floor
What better is the heart’s blood
Of the rich than the poor?’
– Lamkin, Child Ballad 93
The game is set in Britain in the year 1813. For the rich, this is a time of splendor and elegance. For everyone else, times are hard. The forever war with Napoleon has been stealing Britain’s sons for a generation. Farmers are being thrown off their land while the well-bred attend the most elegant balls. Textile workers are rising up in the Luddite revolts. And the inscrutable fairy folk in their hollow hills are never far away.
Across Britain, the folk ballads of the common people are coming to life. Where ballads are sung, sometimes the lyrics take hold of people, forcing them to act out the events of the song. Enchanted victims take on the roles of characters in the ballads. Imagery and danger from the songs manifest supernaturally.
Investigators (player characters) are amateur folklorists working as agents in service to the government. Their hobby of documenting and studying folk traditions has earned them the attention of Walter Scott, the government’s point man on the ballad crisis. The future author of Ivanhoe needs the investigators to anticipate these events, mitigate the damage they cause, and help people where they can. In a Ballad Hunters campaign, the investigators may seek to learn the reason ballads are coming to life and try to put a stop to it.
O I have dreamed a dreary dream
Beyond the Isle of Skye
I saw a dead man win a fight
And I think that man was I
– The Battle of Otterburn, Child Ballad 161
The most powerful tool each investigator possesses is their compass verse: a specific magic verse from a folk ballad. Once per game, you can make your particular verse come to life. You get to explain what elements of your verse are going to manifest in the game and how that helps the investigators overcome whatever obstacle they’re facing.
Because you’re limited to the text of a single verse, it encourages you to get creative. It’s the number one thing that people talk about after they play the game: how much fun they had with their verse, and how differently the game would have gone if they’d had a different verse.
While the GM has the final say on whether an investigator’s compass verse works the way they expect, GMs are encouraged to approve uses of compass verses in the spirit of “yes and.” Compass verses take the storygame technology of “respond to this open-ended prompt” and make it the most powerful tool an investigator has to influence the world around them.
When day was gone, and night was come
All people were asleep
In glided Margaret’s grimly ghost
And stood at William’s feet
– Fair Margaret and Sweet William, Child Ballad 74
Ballad Hunters investigators start the game as a seasoned team that knows what to expect when a ballad comes to life. Some nearby people will take on roles from the song in a sort of mind control. They will try to do in real life what their characters did in the ballad. Imagery and metaphors from the lyrics spring into real existence, usually in ways that make it hard to change the song’s tragic ending, and not always in the order you expect.
There are a few tactics the investigators have seen work to keep innocents safe.
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First, it’s often helpful to figure out what roles are being played by what people. If you know who specifically is going to do something bad, maybe you can stop them from doing it.
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Second, you can try to anticipate what’s going to happen before it happens. Maybe you can make the things a mind-controlled victim wants to do impossible before they get a chance to do them.
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Finally, you can turn the lyrics against themselves. If you try to make something happen that goes against the story, but you do it in a way that’s consistent with some part of the lyrics, the ballad may help you along.
Playtesters have called Ballad Hunters “a textual interpretation roleplaying game.” A lot of play involves going back to the lyrics of the song to connect the text to whatever strangeness the party is witnessing. But critically, the game’s rules empower the GM to change what they thought was happening and quietly swap it out for a clever interpretation the players just devised. No one wants to play an RPG called “guess how the GM interpreted this text.”
‘We must not change our loud, loud song
For no duke’s son you’ll bear
We will not change our loud, loud song
But aye we’ll sing the more’
– Rose the Red and White Lily, Child Ballad 103
When you’re playing a game about ballads with your friends, it can be a lot of fun to sing around the gaming table the ballad that’s coming to life. You don’t have to sing in a game of Ballad Hunters, but why on earth wouldn’t you? Singing around the gaming table is the best — especially when you realize it doesn’t matter whether you’re any good at singing!
‘Often have you traveled this road, Willie
Your bonny love to see
But you’ll never travel this road again
Till you leave a token with me’
– Willie’s Fatal Visit, Child Ballad 255
While Ballad Hunters works great for one-shot play, it’s even better in campaigns of six or seven adventures, each lasting two to three hours. A Ballad Hunters campaign culminates with the investigators solving the central mystery of the game: who or what is making ballads come to life, and can the party stop it?
The book includes a variety of possible solutions to the mystery of why ballads are coming to life. That lets the GM determine the solution halfway through the campaign and tailor it to the experience the players have pursued.
The question of how to stop these ballad incidents is left in the hands of the players. Because the rules encourage (and sometimes require) the GM to endorse player interpretations when they’re well-supported, learning how the ballad magic operates is a joint effort between the GM and the players. The rules of magic thus differ from group to group. So does the way to put a stop to these incidents.
At the start of each session of campaign play, each investigator replaces their compass verse by rolling on a table of 100 handpicked verses. This helps your compass verse always feel fresh and full of possibilities you haven’t explored yet.
The book includes thirteen premade adventures (each centered around a different ballad) and thirteen more ballads suitable for building your own adventures.
Gloomy, gloomy, was the night
And eerie was the way
As fair Janet, in her green mantle
To Miles Cross she did gae
– Tam Lin, Child Ballad 39
The songs in Ballad Hunters are called Child Ballads after their compiler, Harvard folklorist Francis James Child. His five-volume collection, published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in the late 1800s, is today the standard. Child did not tramp through the British countryside collecting songs. He drew from older manuscripts. People like Walter Scott and the investigators are the original source of the 305 Child Ballads and their thousands of documented variants.
If you’re not familiar with the Child Ballads, you’re in for a treat. I’m particularly fond of this playlist on Spotify.
‘Now hold thy tongue, thou rank raider
There’s never a Scot shall set ye free
Before ye cross my castle gate
I say ye shall take farewell of me’
– Kinmont Willie, Child Ballad 186
Robin asked that I introduce myself in this piece, so hello! I’m RPG designer Tristan Zimmerman (he/him). My best-known work is either my Molten Sulfur Blog or the Ennie-award-winning RPG Shanty Hunters, which became something of a prototype for Ballad Hunters. I sing folk music, including Child Ballads, with a group that’s been meeting in one form or another in Northfield, Minnesota since the 1970s. I’m a U.S. Navy veteran, I’ve circumnavigated the globe, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with Pelgrane on this project!
We anticipate Ballad Hunters going to crowdfunding in 2026. The game’s already playtested and written, and is currently in proofing. If you want to make sure you don’t miss it, you can sign up for my mailing list here.