Ballad Hunters Design Diary: Designing for Shorter Adventures

by Tristan Zimmerman

Pelgrane’s forthcoming RPG Ballad Hunters — described in this Page XX article — does something new for Pelgrane Press’ GUMSHOE games. Ballad Hunters adventures are only two or three hours long. Each adventure is centered around a single traditional folk ballad, and such songs contain only so many gameable details. If your gaming group has long sessions, you can squeeze in two adventures a night. And that requires changing GUMSHOE’s point economy.

‘If this be true you tell to me
My curse be upon thee
But if it be a lie you tell
You shall be hanged high’
– Lady Maisry, Child Ballad 65

In my experience, most mainline GUMSHOE games are at their best when adventures are played across multiple sessions totaling ten or sometimes even fifteen hours of play. That’s not to say one-shot GUMSHOE games aren’t great; they are! But they’re not the form at its absolute best, at least in my experience. So how do you build a GUMSHOE game that’s at its best when played in two-to-three-hour adventures?

(As an interesting aside, Robin D. Laws disagrees with me here. Obviously, I have enormous respect for Robin, and can only speak for how GUMSHOE has played in the one-shots and campaigns I’ve run and played in.)

From a mechanical standpoint, the most important factor in GUMSHOE adventure length is that your investigative pools tend to refresh at the end of each adventure. Investigators in shorter adventures are thus more expert. They can aggressively spend their Investigative ability pools and still not run out before the adventure ends. In shorter adventures, there’s not really a decision whether you should make an Investigative spend. If you’re eligible to make a spend, you should just do it. It’s in the longer adventures where the decision whether to make that Investigative spend gets interesting. 

He is either himself a devil from hell
Or else his mother a witch must be
I would not have ridden that wan water
For all the gold in Christentie
– Kinmont Willie, Child Ballad 186

So if you’re going to design a GUMSHOE game for short adventures, you have to change the point economy. What I did in Ballad Hunters (which is itself a refinement of what I did in Shanty Hunters) was to do away with the distinction between General and Investigative abilities and collapse the number of abilities down to seven, of which investigators are proficient in five. When you make a spend (in Ballad Hunters, “ticking a checkbox”), there are multiple things you can use that spend to do. Some are akin to an Investigative spend in mainline GUMSHOE. Some are akin to a large General ability spend. Some are unique to Ballad Hunters. And they’re all quite powerful.

(I also added a rule to make it so investigators in one-shot play can only tick three of their five checkboxes in an adventure. Players in playtesting reported really appreciating having that limit placed on their characters. When investigators are too powerful, much of the drama evaporates.)

John murdered was at Caerlanrig
And all his gallant company
But Scotland’s heart was never so woe
To see so many brave men die
– Johnie Armstrong, Child Ballad 169

Then I changed the way you get your points back. At the start of each adventure (which is usually synonymous with the start of each session), you get one point back. Just one. That makes the decision to make a spend something worth pausing to think about, even in such a short adventure. You have five points (five “check boxes” in the language of the game), so getting all your points back takes five adventures, or ten to fifteen hours: the same length of time that, in my opinion, is most fun for mainline GUMSHOE point refresh.

I wish I could say I was forward-thinking enough to have started with what worked for mainline GUMSHOE and reverse-engineered from there. But I’m not and I didn’t. It took me a lot of playtesting and refining to reinvent the ten-to-fifteen-hour-refresh that smarter designers than me had already figured out.

But even with that noteworthy parallel, the Ballad Hunters point economy plays differently from other GUMSHOE games. And I’m confident that when you get it to the table, you’ll agree that this point economy is a good fit for the constraints of the game.

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