Ballad Hunters Design Diary: Compass Verses

by Tristan Zimmermann

“Compass verses” are the best mechanic in Pelgrane’s forthcoming RPG, Ballad Hunters, a game described in this Page XX article. It’s the mechanic my playtesters consistently 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.

Then of his coat he’s made a boat
And of his shirt a sail
And of his cane a good topmast
Dry land till he came till
– The Bent So Brown, Child Ballad 71

Each investigator possesses a specific magic verse from a folk ballad. Once per game, you can make your 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 lyrics of your compass verse, it encourages you to get creative.

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.

‘There’s never a clean shirt go on my back
Nor yet a comb go in my hair
There’s neither coal nor candlelight
Shall shine in my room forever more’
– The Coble of Cargill, Child Ballad 242

I can’t take credit for the compass verse mechanic. It was invented on the fly by a playtester on my last RPG, Shanty Hunters. A little sliver of the rule found its way into Shanty Hunters, but that game was too far along to redesign it around the mechanic. So when I started on Ballad Hunters, I built it around compass verses from the very beginning.

‘Thou sayest thou could sing me out of hell
Now prithee sing thyself out of the well’
The friar sang with a pitiful sound,
‘Oh help me out, or I shall be drowned’
– The Friar in the Well, Child Ballad 276

The core activity of Ballad Hunters is dealing with whole ballads that have come to life and are causing trouble in 1813 Britain. That was also the case for Shanty Hunters, except with sea shanties on the sea lanes in 1880. But in Shanty Hunters, the investigators didn’t initially have a way to bring verses to life.

My servants all from me did flee
In the midst of my extremity
And left me by myself alone
With a heart more cold than any stone
– The Famous Flower of Serving-Men, Child Ballad 106

I was running a playtest campaign of Shanty Hunters for some friends. One, Kelly, was playing a sort of sea witch. The nature of her powers was intentionally nebulous. She would generally just talk with other sea witches in the party’s ports of call and learn extra information about what the ocean was up to.

We were playing an adventure based around the shanty Lowlands Low, and there was trouble coming towards the party’s ship from another ship. The courses of the ships were such that Kelly’s character was able to swim to the menacing ship, but once she had finished her business over there she had no way back. Kelly frowned and pointed at the handout from the last adventure’s shanty, Bound to Australia. “This is the shanty that came alive last week. It has a verse with imagery about boarding a ship. Were that verse to come to life again, that imagery would be able to get me back to our ship. I’m a sea witch who knows a thing or two about this shanty business. Is there any way for me to make this verse from last week come to life again?”

While I board me a ship for the south’ard to go

She’ll be looking so trim and so fine
And I’ll land me aboard with my bags and my stores

From the dockside they’ll cast off each line

– Bound to Australia, traditional anchor shanty

I was gobsmacked. The idea was so cool that I had to find a way to shoehorn it into Shanty Hunters as an optional rule. And then when I started work on Ballad Hunters, I not only included Kelly’s idea as a core rule (you can always make a spend to bring to life a verse from a ballad encountered earlier in the campaign), I expanded on it. I wanted all players to have access to this sort of mechanic at all times. So I combined it with the magic compass I was already using to handwave getting the party to the next adventure. Ta da! Compass verses.

Ballad Hunters includes a table of 100 compass verses, all handpicked from among the 305 Child Ballads and their thousands of variants. To get your compass verse, you roll on the table three times and pick the result you like best. We’re also laying out the table so you can print it out and cut it up to turn it into a deck of cards from which you can draw your three options. In campaign play, you begin each session by replacing your compass verse. You discard the compass verse from the last adventure, roll or draw three options, and pick this adventure’s compass verse from among them.

Compass verses look pretty familiar to anybody who’s played a “storygame” like Fiasco, For the Queen, or Alice is Missing. It basically boils down to “Here’s an evocative prompt. Respond to it.” That technology is a pillar of the storygame scene. But I haven’t seen it used much in more trad systems like GUMSHOE, so I did a lot of the design on implementing compass verses with an eye towards finding common ground between these two styles of play. You’ll get to tell me whether I succeeded.

As a coda to this story, Kelly has no memory of it. For me, Kelly’s idea was a thunderbolt I had to build a game around. For her, it was Tuesday.

We anticipate Ballad Hunters going to crowdfunding in 2026. The game’s already playtested and written, and is currently being illustrated. If you want to make sure you don’t miss it, you can sign up for my mailing list here.