I was talking with someone on Twitter last week about poetry and verse, and she asked me if I had ever written a book of poems. I haven’t, for the record, but it got me thinking of all the verses and poetry I have written. Turns out the vast majority of it has been for games I’ve run or had planned to run that never got off the ground. I love adding poetry, rhyming riddles, or verses of prophecy to my campaigns, I think it adds some extra depth to the campaign world and can grab the interest of my players in a way prose text might struggle to do.
But why, though? Well, I’m not expert, but I think the development of poetic language and verse followed pretty hard on the heals of language itself. In an effort to better understand the world, we began comparing things to other things, often using something we understood to try and understand something unknown and possible unknowable. Lightning, for instance, could be described as “fingers of light from the heavens”, and from there it wasn’t a hard step to imagine that Someone had to own those fingers, and voila, the Gods were born. That’s all heavily simplified, of course, but I think makes the point. Poetic language has been used to affect how we see the world throughout history. Which means it can be used the same way to affect how your players see your campaign world.
“But Brent,” I hear you cry, “I’m no poet! How can I possibly use verse to impress my players?” Well, before you jump into writing verse of your own, let’s talk about using existing poetry and verse.
You don’t need to be a poet if you use some aspect of an existing poem as a clue in your game. Maybe it’s the poem’s title, a line or two, or an entire verse. You can use some aspect of the poem to help direct your players along a course of action. For example, maybe they search a desk and tucked under a drawer is a torn out page with Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” on one side, with “Tue. 9pm” scrawled next to the title. If your game is set in London that’s a pretty solid clue your group had better check out Westminster Bridge at 9pm on Tuesday. Maybe it’s a bit more abstract; you aren’t in London, but the city or town you are in only has one bridge. A bit more sleuthing needed but still a solid clue.
If you want to delve into the verse itself, you may need to do a bit of world building to make the clue work. Consider this line, the first from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29:
“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes[…]”
Doesn’t seem like a lot on its own. But what if you wanted to direct the players to a new locale in your setting? Maybe a pub called “The Drunken Occulist” located around the corner from the local medical school, favoured hangout of optometry students and rumoured to host an illegal gambling den. This might take a bit more work on the part of your players, and need additional clues to support it. But not only do you look super clever in your use of verse, you get to build out a bit more of your game world.
Another way to use verse in your game is to use keywords from a poem. In this case, the poem or the subject of the poem isn’t important, it’s the specific words in the poem that combine to form the clue. Let’s revisit Sonnet 29 again:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, (Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Say the adventurers find a copy of this poem with the words in bold, above, set out somehow. “Eyes beweep my curse one possessed break gate”. What does it mean? On its own maybe nothing. It could point to someone suffering under a curse, and breaking some sort of gate would free them. But who is cursed and what gate? Now the adventure is afoot!
For a bit of extra fun, you could have them find a strange bit of card or paper with holes cut out in an odd pattern. Try as they might the pattern itself doesn’t mean anything…until they come across a copy of this poem and discover the holes line up with the bolded words. Single use cyphers like this were used quite frequently throughout history. And it gives you an opportunity to make some simple props for your players.
Finally for today, maybe the lines of the poem are instructions for the players to puzzle out. Back to our good friend Sonnet 29, this time just the first four lines:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
There are some good, solid action words in there to help us embed instructions, even if we have to abstract them a bit. Riffing on “The Drunken Occulist” idea from above, one could interpret these lines like this:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, (go to The Drunken Occulist)
I all alone beweep my outcast state, (sit alone at the bar)
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, (remove your boots/footwear)
And look upon myself and curse my fate, (look in the mirror behind the bar and swear)
What will happen if one of the characters follows these instructions? That’s for you to set up and them to find out! But you are going to look all sorts of clever in the process.
This is just a small look at using verse to enhance your games. In a future article, I’ll talk about creating verses of your own and hopefully demystify that seemingly daunting prospect.
In the meantime, do you use poetry and verse in your games? I’d love to hear about it, either on our Facebook or Twitter.
