Pelgrane Press delves into the cozy murder mystery genre with a newly announced GUMSHOE game: the Merryshire Detective Club.
Pelgrane Press, makers of all manner of RPGs, from 13th Age to The Dying Earth RPG to Trail of Cthulhu, have just announced a new RPG. Like Trail of Cthulhu, it involves the detective-oriented GUMSHOE RPG system, but that’s where the similarities end. There aren’t any cosmic horrors or secret cultists to unearth in the newly announced Merryshire Detective Club. Instead, it’s a cozy mystery game. Which means that usually the worst thing that happens is someone gets gruesomely murdered in a quaint, pastoral village.
Merryshire Detective Club – What If The Shire Was On Britbox?
It’s basically the stuff you’d see on PBS or, these days, Britbox. A cozy little village wherein murder and other crimes happen on a fairly regular basis. If you look and go by episodes alone, it seems that country villages are a hotbed of homicide – with at least one murder happening every week, often at primetime. But that’s exactly the kind of thing that Merryshire Detective Club leans into.
Especially since the premise has you set up in a cozy-fantasy village. You’ll play the same sorts of folk who enjoy a second breakfast and stealing vegetables from a farmer’s garden before getting swept up into an extremely off-the-rails journey are at their best in their little holes in the ground.
Only instead of dealing with magic rings and ancient kings, you’ll deal with mysteries as members of an amateur detective club. The book, like any GUMSHOE book, talks at length about how to set up mysteries and run them in an RPG, which is good, because those are notoriously difficult to do.
“In a hole in the ground… they found a body.
In Merryshire Detective Club, an upcoming core GUMSHOE game from the brilliantly comforting mind of superstar writer-designer Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, you play amateur detectives in a cosy-fantasy setting. Your band of plucky investigators solves mysteries (quite often, murder mysteries) that crop up with remarkableregularity in the lovely little village you’ll design together. Gameplay mixes deduction and investigation with comic absurdity and plenty of cakes. (No giant tentacle monsters or vampiric conspiracies, we’ve quite enough of those, thank you.)”
In the announcement we get a few details: you can play as a halfling, dwarf, goblin, or pooka. You’ll build your village collaboratively, and of course, find all the tools for making your own mysteries, including a sample scenario: The Case of the Great Ring.
If you’ve never played GUMSHOE before, it’s a surprisingly fast-paced detective game. You can pick it up and play in the span of an hour or two. Build a character out of a collection of skills and move from scene to scene. You investigate, interrogate, and unearth clues in a surprisingly natural fashion. It captures that “detective” feeling.
Look for more from Pelgrane Press and the Merryshire Detective Club in the near future!
Don’t Miss:
Read more at this site