Who wants to work with their friends to solve cozy, fantasy mysteries using GUMSHOE TTRPG gaming engine? Pelgrane Press has you covered with Merryshire Detective Club on Backerkit from author Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and developer Robin D. Laws. With some of Pelgrane’s biggest talent on one book, let’s talk to the author about the book, the system, what inspired it, and what types of mysteries you’ll solve.

EGG EMBRY (EGG): I hope you’re doing well. What media inspired Merryshire Detective Club?

GARETH RYDER-HANRAHAN (GARETH)

: Well, the original working title was Shires Out. From the mystery side, it’s classic English murder mysteries – Agatha Christie primarily, a bit of Conan Doyle. The cosy fantasy stuff is obviously Tolkien-inspired, mainly The Hobbit and the early chapters of Lord of the Rings, but also Farmer Giles of Ham. And then the bridging elements come from Wodehouse and Flann O’Brien and the like, a touch of the absurd.

EGG: You’re using the best (in my opinion) mystery-solving TTRPG engine, GUMSHOE. For detectives unfamiliar with the system, how does it work?

GARETH:

The core concept of GUMSHOE is that it’s always more fun when the players get clues. The interesting bit of the mystery isn’t finding clues, it’s working out what they mean and how they all fit together. So, GUMSHOE does away with rolling to see whether or not you spot the footprint in the flowerbed, or if you can recall the ancient family feud between the Storkfoots and the Gullcatchers. If you’ve got the right ability – Notice or Genealogy in those two examples, you get the clue. There are a few wrinkles and additional options, but that’s the heart of it – give the players information, ensure they always have a lead to follow.

EGG: Your club solves small mysteries and the occasional murder. With the adventure modules, will they focus exclusively on murder mysteries or will the smaller crimes be a part of gameplay?

GARETH:

They’re a mix. Mostly murder, to be fair, because murder mysteries are fun to write – and murders give you two very strong opening lines of inquiry, as you’ve got the circumstances of the body and the backstory of the victim to investigate. But you can play smaller-scale mysteries too, and there are guidelines in the book for quickly coming up with little cases for your detectives to solve.

EGG: Is this game designed for one-shots, multi-session adventures, a full campaign, or all of the preceding?

GARETH:

In order, yes, ehhhhhhh, yes.
It works really well for one-shots. Mysteries are great for one-shots – you’ve got a dramatic opening, a chain of clues for the middle of play, a clear conclusion where the mystery’s solved, and the players know what they’re supposed to be doing – ask questions and poke around. (The Call of Cthulhu one-shot is the perfect haiku of scenario design).
It works really well for campaigns where you’re stringing a series of one-shot mysteries together. The game encourages the players to define their village, their neighbours, to create their supporting cast (Halflings have an ability that lets them whistle up a different cousin with a useful skill every session), so in a campaign, you’ve got this lovely organic growth of this shared setting.
Multi-session adventures… now, it works perfectly well for that sort of game, and honestly, most one-shots in Merryshire can sprawl to multiple sessions unless the GM keeps an eye on pacing. It’s a game that rewards tangents and tangles and subplots and so forth. But it’s hard to keep a mystery coherent over multiple sessions, not without really diligent note-taking. You can do it, certainly, but I’d advice breaking that multi-session adventure into a series of mostly self-contained mysteries. For example, there’s one mystery I’m working on for The Dreadful Hare, our scenario anthology, that’s definitely a multi-session adventure. But each session mostly wraps itself up, with only one or two clues left over that feed into the bigger, overarching mystery.

EGG: Why play as a halfling, dwarf, pooka, or boggart instead of humans? (And what is a pooka and boggart?)

GARETH:

Halflings are human, or a sort of caricature or cartoon of humans. They’re people with certain aspects exaggerated for comedic effect, like their appetites, their hobbies, their parochialism, and other aspects downplayed. They let us play in a setting that looks and behaves pretty much like our world (or this fuzzy oldy-times Merrie England version of our world, with cobbled streets in little villages and scrumping for apples and squires and vicars and constables), but it’s in soft focus and everything’s a little bit gentler and a little less consequential, and you can stop for tea and cakes in the middle of a murder investigation. Halfings are the default player character type; we encourage most groups to be mostly halflings.
Dwarves… well, they got dropped in partly because of the initial inspiration from Middle-earth, and because they’re the right height. But they fulfill two useful roles in the setting. Firstly, they’re great at being straight guys – they’re more gruff and serious than the halflings, so the halfling absurd jokes play well against the contrast of the stoic, sober dwarves. Second, they bring in elements of the wider world beyond the Riding – beyond the land of the Halflings, there’s this grim and perilous classic-fantasy realm, which is a handy source of plots. My word, old Gaffer Grummukins was a secret spy for the dark lord! Dwarves are good for players who want to focus on the mystery-solving and not the nonsense.
Boggarts changed a lot over the course of development. They started out as a sort of goblin-meets-gollum, and have ended up as these inverted halflings, with ‘spooky’ replacing ‘cosy’. The goblin element was a bit too chaotic, which overlapped with the Pooka. Boggarts are for players who like being weird and a bit sneaky and oblique.
And Pooka… they’re from mythology, they’re shapeshifting trickster spirits. They crept in from At Swim Two Birds, which is one of my favourite books. They’re there to add a little bit of magic – not too much, just enough. Too much magic and it’s hard to do logical deduction.

EGG: As you play, you make the town that the mysteries take place in. How do you go about building the locations?

GARETH

: We’ve got a lovely default village map, and a default set of villagers that you can use or ignore as desired. As part of character creation, the players pick their homes and decide on their Business in the village; they also describe some of their neighbours and come up with odd rumours about them. They name the village, pick what it’s known for. Importantly, they decide who the village constable is and why the constable can never solve a mystery without their help.
Now, the villages are all of a piece. They’re all cosy little country villages with a market and a pub and a tea shop and a little church, so similar you can get away away with using the same map for every village. But each one’s subtly different, and doing the village creation collaboratively makes sure all the players have a good idea of the mood of their group.
(Also, I should point out that not every mystery takes place in your home village. There’s a second map, the Environs, for the lands around. That’s where you drop in things you only need for one mystery and might never be seen again – the isolated country house, the bog where bodies get dumped, the seaside you need because the players have decided they want to have a picnic on a beach.)

EGG: Beyond Merryshire Detective Club, what else are you working on?

GARETH: Merryshire’s

companion volume is The Dreadful Hare, an anthology of mysteries by Robin Laws, Kevin Kulp, and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. We’re also putting the finishing touches to the Trail of Cthulhu 2nd edition books.
Also coming out soon (not from Pelgrane) is my next novel, The Dungeon Book, which as the name suggests takes Rudyard Kipling’s classic Jungle Book and sticks it into a D&D-esque dungeon. And a billion other projects, some of which would get me murdered if I talked about them prematurely.

Merryshire Detective Club from Pelgrane Press
End Date: Aug 22, 2026 at 3:00pm EDT.
“You play amateur detectives in a cozy-fantasy setting. Your band of plucky investigators solves mysteries (quite often, murder mysteries) that crop up with remarkable regularity in the lovely little halfling village you design together.”

Egg Embry does not use AI in any of his writing. He participates in the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, Noble Knight Games’ Affiliate Program, Kobold Press Affiliate Program, and is an Amazon Associate. These programs provide advertising fees by linking to DriveThruRPG, Noble Knight Games, Kobold Press, and Amazon. If you like the articles at EN World please consider supporting the Patreon.