Pelgrane Press has launched a campaign on BackerKit for Merryshire Detective Club, a cosy fantasy investigative tabletop roleplaying game written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. The campaign has already comfortably cleared its £30,000 funding goal, sitting at over £33,600 pledged by nearly 500 backers with 30 days remaining until it closes on 22 August 2026.
In Merryshire Detective Club, players step into the shoes of amateur sleuths living in the Riding, a charming, bucolic landscape dotted with canal paths, rolling green hills, and gossip-heavy villages. Players collaboratively design their home village before taking on mysteries that plague the local countryside. Investigators can play as halflings, crafty dwarves, chaotic pooka, or eerie boggarts. The game runs on Pelgrane’s GUMSHOE system, adapted here with setting-specific investigative abilities like Nosiness, Politeness, Eavesdropping, and Bugs & Mushrooms, alongside General abilities such as Risky Nonsense and Scuffling.
The campaign offers several pledge tiers, ranging from a digital-only £20 New Arrival option to a £35 Villager tier for the core hardback, and up to physical collection tiers such as the £80 Village Doctor (which includes both the core rulebook and The Dreadful Hare campaign book) and highly limited collector levels.
Writer Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan sat down with Geek Native to discuss the origins of the project, diegetic desserts, and balancing magical pooka with locked-room mysteries.
What design problem does Merryshire Detective Club solve in the cosy fantasy genre that other games have not yet addressed?
Not using GUMSHOE, of course.
More seriously – I’ve compared the mysteries in Merryshire to the crunchy nut centre of the cosy chocolate. Certainly for me, a purely cosy game feels a little hollow; it needs something for the players to do, and that core activity here is solving murders and other mysteries. GUMSHOE’s built around clue-finding and investigation; it’s designed to handle this sort of game.
You have pivoted from the cosmic dread of The Dracula Dossier to village gossip and stolen pies. Why make this tonal shift now, and in what way did Pelgrane Press react to the initial pitch? Or how did you react when asked to lead the project?
It’s not like I’m Mr. Cosmic Dread all the time; I’ve written plenty of PARANOIA material and other lighter stuff. I’ve also done a lot of Tolkien-based writing for The One Ring, and part of the challenge there is getting the tone exactly right. A lot of Merryshire was inspired by jokes and parodies that wouldn’t fit in Middle-earth.
The game started out as a one-shot. For many years, Pelgrane’s scattered staff have gathered on the Friday before Dragonmeet at the home of beloved publisher Simon Rogers to play a game, and beloved publisher makes a beloved sticky toffee pudding. In other years, when we were playing Fall of Delta Green or Hillfolk or Yellow King or whatever, we had to pause the game in order to eat the pudding. A key design criteria of that Merryshire one-shot was ‘a game where one can eat sticky toffee pudding in character.’ Mmm, diegetic dessert.
Anyway, we played the one-shot, everyone had fun, the concept seemed to have potential, so I kept expanding that initial one page of rules and notes into something playable.
In your recent article for See Page XX, you discussed how specific ability names like “Bugs & Mushrooms” or “Puzzles” do a lot of tone-setting work. How do these hyper-specific abilities change player behaviour at the table compared to standard GUMSHOE rules?
That is standard GUMSHOE rules! The very first GUMSHOE game was Esoterrorists, which has abilities like Forensic Entomology or Document Analysis. Night Black Agents has abilities like Human Terrain or Traffic Analysis. Trail of Cthulhu forefronts things like Theology and Library Use and Fleeing. Every GUMSHOE game offers different ways for the players to obtain information that are especially suited to that setting, and Merryshire’s no different. You’re always trying to give the players ways to be as creative and ingenious as possible within the confines of a particular genre.
The game features the ‘Respectability’ mechanic, which essentially acts as social health for halflings. How do you balance the mechanical penalty of losing Respectability with the comedy of disastrous social faux pas?
There are ways to restore your Respectability beyond just solving the case. The idea isn’t to punish the players for getting into embarrassing scrapes, it’s to reward them for finding amusing ways to recover. It’s very rare for a character to actually lose that much Respectability permanently – more often, everything’s put right at the end of the story.
GUMSHOE guarantees investigators find the core clues. With amateur halfling detectives, how do you prevent the story/plot from feeling too straightforward while keeping the mystery engaging?
Core clues just tell you the bare minimum needed to ensure you’re never stuck, that no portion of the mystery is walled off behind a failed skill check. You’ll always find the matchbox that suggests you should check out the Inn of the Dancing Donkey, you’ll always be able to get the innkeeper to confess that he was blackmailed by a mysterious dwarf with an outrageous accent, you’ll always find the footprints leading into the haunted woods. But working out how those things are connected, discovering what the dwarf’s sinister plan is, finding out what’s lurking in the woods – all that requires actual investigation and deduction. GUMSHOE ensures the clues are always available, it doesn’t put them together for you.
The mysteries in the book range in complexity. What seems quite straightforward from the GM’s side can appear fiendishly convoluted from the players’ perspective. And even when a player’s insightful or lucky enough to work out what’s going on, they still need to bring the story to a conclusion. Just knowing whodunnit isn’t enough if you can’t prove whodidit.
Let us look at the Pooka. You have given them ‘Pooka Magic’ and a mandatory ‘Tell’. From a mechanical perspective, how do you stop a magical shape-shifting creature from entirely breaking a locked-room murder mystery?
I take it that we’re positing here that the Pooka is the murderer, and not the detective.
Well, here we loop back an earlier question about GUMSHOE and clues. Abilities like Spot Tell or Themology let detectives work out that a Pooka must be involved. Depending on the setup of the scenario, that’d probably be a Core Clue – as experienced amateur detectives, you know that this locked-room mystery is physically impossible, and when you’ve eliminated the possible, whatever remains is probably the fault of a Pooka. So, the next step in the investigation would be to talk to local Pooka, or try to work out what the victim might have done to anger the spirits. Making it a Core Clue means you can skip the players getting frustrated by trying to solve a literally impossible locked-room mystery, and move on to finding who used magic.
Magic requires special treatment in an investigative game like this. You want to have a little magic in the setting, to maintain the legally mandated level of charming whimsy, but as you’ve pointed out, magic can gum up classic mysteries something rotten. Our solution is to give tools – investigative abilities – that flag when magic’s involved, so the players know not to look for mundane explanations when they should be looking for supernatural ones.
You integrated ‘Cousins’ as a General Ability for halflings, allowing players to invent helpful relatives on the fly. What is the mathematical impact of this on action economy and spotlight sharing during a session?
This is not a game where ‘action economy’ is a concern.
But no – Cousins don’t significantly impact spotlight time much more than other abilities. You don’t play your cousin as a second player character, they’re a GM-controlled character that you get to design. You can go “Oh, my cousin has a really fast horse” if you need a fast horse, or “my cousin works at the village library” if you need a librarian.
Or “my cousin is an eccentric bibliophile, and his horse would be really fast if it wasn’t dragging along a giant wagon full of books”, if you want to try min-maxing.
Arguably, they’re a time-saver as they run off and do things ‘off-screen’ for the most part.
There is a tension between high-art production values and affordable entry points in roleplaying games right now. Where does Merryshire Detective Club sit on that spectrum for consumer pricing?
The core rulebook tier is £35 pounds, or around $50 of your American dollars (or a Douglas Adams-y 42 euros), which is solidly in the middle. I originally conceived it as a shorter, cheaper, more humble game, but we decided to expand it into a full-on corebook.
How does Merryshire position itself against the current trend of cosy roleplaying games, and in what way does it offer something fundamentally different to the broader market?
I’m not sure if that’s a question I can answer – or usefully answer, anyway. It wasn’t designed with any thought to the wider context or the market. Obviously, there’s an upswing in cosy games at the moment and we’re happy to ride that current, but we didn’t set out to do a cosy game. It’s sticky pudding + GUMSHOE + halfling jokes.
In your recent appearance on the Narrative Damage podcast, you discussed connecting with players through writing. How does authoring a rigid mystery module differ from writing an open-ended sandbox when player reactions are notoriously unpredictable?
Even a murder mystery with a fixed solution shouldn’t be rigid – there have to multiple lines of inquiry to make it a satisfying rpg experience. You want to give the players plenty of choices and different ways to go, you want to get them in tune with the genre and the feel of the adventure, and give the GM ways to draw the players back towards the spine of the story in ways that don’t feel intrusive or forced.
Individual players are unpredictable, but as a scenario writer, you’re dealing with players in the aggregate, in percentages. I can guess with some degree of confidence that, say, 75% of groups will choose option A in a mystery, 20% will pick option B, and 5% will do something I haven’t anticipated at all. So, I can give the GM lots of support and help running option A, a smaller amount of detail on B, and then it’s question of making sure the scenario is robust and flexible, and giving the GM some tools and suggestions that can be used to improvise a response to Option C.
You have a new novel arriving in the next few weeks. In what way does your experience writing prose fiction inform how you design a tabletop mystery, especially in such a structured environment?
The big difference is structural. In a novel, you want to cut down options and courses of action, so the only choice left to the characters is the one that evokes the most drama and emotion. In a tabletop rpg, you want to maximise choice as much as possible, while still keeping everything manageable; you want to have options that evoke drama and emotion, but as you don’t know who the player characters are or what a particular group wants out of the game that night, you can’t be too proscriptive. I find tabletop scenarios a lot easier to write, as you can provide a whole bunch of options and let the GM pick the one that works best at their table in that moment. Novels, from an rpg designer’s point of view, are like running a game for a player who’s on Pluto. The lag is so great you just have to anticipate what they’d probably do and run with it…
Finally, outside of Merryshire Detective Club, what other independent creator or community project in the hobby deserves our attention right now?
I’m super excited about 7 Part Pact, as I’ve always liked Wizard Nonsense, but that’s got lots of attention already. I’m also keeping an eye on Old Oak Games’ Ink Ribbon – Emmet’s doing interesting things with survival and exploration.
Whether you are drawn to the charming village life of the Riding or the clever mechanical tweaks brought to the GUMSHOE rules, Merryshire Detective Club offers a distinct blend of cosy charm and genuine investigative depth. Designing a custom home village alongside fellow players provides a rich foundation for long-running mystery campaigns, while hyper-specific abilities ensure that every investigation remains packed with character.
The campaign runs until 22 August 2026. You can check out the full details, download a free preview PDF, or back the game directly on the Merryshire Detective Club BackerKit page.
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