(Crowdfund Quest) Merryshire Detective Club

Pelgrane Press’ Merryshire Detective Club is a cozy fantasy mystery TTRPG written by Gareth Hanrahan and powered by the GUMSHOE system. The game sees you take on the roles of amateur detectives in a lovely little halfling village, and try and solve mysteries… quite often murder mysteries which seem to happen with alarming regularity given the small peaceful setting.

In Merryshire Detective Club you play amateur detectives in a cosy-fantasy-with-bits-of-Victoriana setting that might slightly resemble a well-known and well-beloved intellectual property behemoth. Think Agatha Christie bumping into PG Wodehouse and mistaking him for JRR Tolkien. Your band of plucky investigators solve mysteries (often, but no means exclusively murder mysteries) that crop up in your quaint littl cosy village.

You’re investigators - halflings, dwarves, pooka, and boggarts - uncover secrets, scandals, and suspicious happenings across the Riding, a countryside full of gossip,. tea, and entirely too many cousins. The Riding is a land of rolling green hills, muddy lanes, canal paths, butsling inns, eccentric festivals, and gossip-heavy villagers where everyone knows someone who knows someone who’s done something they shouldn’t have…

So, you all live in the land of the Riding, and it’s lovely. Green fields, olling hills, hedgerows, scenic villages, little laneways, quirky little shops, charming eccentrics and salt-of-the-earth rustics, a general turn-of-the-20th-century-only-it’s-a-light-hearted-period-drama vibe. Thoroughly delightful and cosy. Springtime brings gentle rain, flowering meadows, crisp bright mornings. In the summer, it’s lashings of ginger beer and strawberries and cream and sunshine. The autumns are all harvest festivals and big piles of satisfyingly crunchy leaves and maybe some spooky mists, and winters are proper winters, all frosty and snowy and perfect weather for staying inside by a roaring fire with hot cocoa and a good book.

The majority of the inhabitants of the Riding are halflings. You know halflings, of course. Hald the size and twice the appetite of Big Folk. They love simple things - good food, good friends, good gossip, juicy scandals. Simple, honest folk.

There are a few other sorts of folk living here, and as long as they don’t disturb the peace, they’re welcome to stay. Life in the Riding continues much as it alwayss has, with all the urgency of a stunned educk bobbing on a gentle river.

There are rather a lot of murders and other interesting crimes, but on the whole - lovely. Just ignore the murder rate.

Now, outside the Riding… well, out there is pretty grim, and dark. News from the Wider World is usually something about dire portents, or dark lords, or prophecies and curses. Things being in thrall to other things, or things being rent asunder. Portals. Dragons. That sort of stuff. All very upsetting.

Alongside the core rulebook, the crowdfunding campaign is also offering The Dreadful Hare - a collection of 9 cozy crime scenarios and a selection of maps. Both the Merryshire Detective Club Rulebook and The Dreadful Hare have faux leather limited edition hardcovers available as well as their standard printings.

Merryshire Detective Club is funding on Backerkit until Saturday 22nd August 2026.