On Mysteries of Merryshire

by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan

Mysteries are undeniably tricky things.

They’re closely related to crosswords.

When you’re doing a crossword, bits of the solution come early and easy. 1 Across, six letters, “the crime of killing another person”.

MURDER

3 Across, eight letters, “figure of speech, not unlike a simile”.

METAPHOR

Other bits are a little more obscure, like seven letters, “talkative aerial carnivore of the Dying Earth”, but you can figure them out with a little thought.

(It’s PELGRANE)

And then there are the down clues, the ones that only make sense once you’ve filled in some of the context. You might get the D of 2 down early on, and then the G from Pelgrane, but you’re seeing disconnected bits of the solution and can’t yet put them together. D….A…G… Dagger? Dragon?

That combination of linear progression, of progressing from clue 1 to clue 2 to clue 3, while also picking up cryptic glimpses of a greater truth along the way, until at last you slot them all together and everything makes sense – yum. Delicious mystery!

But it’s tricky to pull off in a novel, and much, much harder to do in a roleplaying game where the detectives are bouncing around like over-caffeinated pinballs. GUMSHOE, of course, helps ensure that the players never miss a key clue and you’ve always got that linear progression, but it’s the other clues that elevate a mystery. The minor detail in scene 1 that pays off in scene 10, the cryptic clue that doesn’t quite fit until the end.

Merryshire takes a traditional approach to mysteries. The GM sets up a mystery with a pre-determined solution and a bunch of clues pointing to that solution. The players use their investigative abilities to find those clues, then interpret them to work out the solution. So far, so GUMSHOE.

The game also benefits from a purity of approach. It’s not “solve the mystery so you can defeat the Cthulhu monster” or “solve the mystery so you can slay the vampire”, or even “solve the mystery and by the way the skin is sliding off your face and you wear no mask!” Once unmasked, you can shoo most Merryshire villains away with a rolled-up newspaper. The baddies are greedy aunts or murderous postmen, not gribbly monsters. It’s the mystery that takes centre stage.

(You may ask why we nerdtroped this at all; if the game’s all small-stakes ratiocination, then why stick in halflings and dwarves and talking animals? Partly it’s because we like halflings and dwarves and talking animals, and partly because adding the fantastical element is the equivalent of a glass of wine when it comes to plotting mysteries – not so much that things get wobbly and make no sense, but pleasantly blurry.)

The biggest change in Merryshire is in the nature of the investigators. They’re not elite spies or space cops or even hardened professors from Miskatonic University. They’re amateurs. Their approach tends to be somewhat more… well, not necessarily oblique, but certainly less direct. The game’s designed to reward tangents and pinball-bouncing. There’s a lot more chaos and wandering off on tangents and subplots compared to other GUMSHOE games, so the book contains advice and tips on redirecting things back towards the core mystery.

Like, to murder the metaphor, a scribbled note on a newspaper that just happens to line up with the clues in a crossword…

Merryshire Detective Club is a cozy fantasy mystery RPG from Pelgrane Press, powered by the GUMSHOE investigative system. Build a living village together, solve clever mysteries, and play as halflings, dwarves, pooka, or boggarts in a countryside full of gossip, suspicious neighbours, and the occasional murder. The BackerKit campaign launches on July 21.