Halflings and Dwarves and Pooka, Oh My

by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan

In Merryshire, you’ve got a choice of four Kin to pick from – halflings, dwarves, pooka, and boggarts. Players need ways to distinguish their characters from each other. There’s probably another game out there in the Halflings Solving Mysteries And Farting Around Possibility Space that doesn’t include anything but halflings. (I know for a fact there is.) But I wanted to lean a bit more into the fantasy space and distinguish the Riding from other, similar propert – er, provinces.

Each of the kin has their own special ability that only they can use.

Obviously, though, we still need halflings. It’s a game about halfling detectives solving mysteries in the lands of the halflings, so halflings are your default, your baseline, your human – er, wait, no. Not that. But halflings are the norm against which the other folk are compared.

Reinforcing their ubiquity, and further binding the player characters into the setting, the Halfling ability is Cousins. Mechanically, it’s a reskin of the Contacts ability from Night’s Black Agents, where you can always dial up Sergei the Arms Dealer or Dana the Hacker, only here it’s your cousin Horace Who Owns A Big Cart, or Danny the Hairdresser Who Hears All The Gossip. Of course, unlike disposable arms dealers, your Cousins hang around and can show up in future adventures.

Dwarves were the obvious next addition. Not only do they come from the same fictional sources as the Halflings, but they’re also great straight men. A comedy game needs someone who’ll take things seriously and ground everyone else. The dwarves are foreigners in the Riding – their homeland is off in the north – so they open up the setting a bit by providing contrast.

Dwarves get the Craft ability – they’re expert artisans in the field of their obsession, and can even make things that are a little big magic.

Pooka don’t come from Tolkien – they’re out of Irish myth. (That said, Tolkien had lots of talking animals and forest weirdoes.) My own particular touchstone for these guys is Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Pooka are shapeshifting, changeling trickster spirits. If dwarves are the straight men, pooka are the weird neighbour. Pooka get Pooka Magic as an ability.

The final kin are the ones who changed the most over the course of development. They started out as Goblins. I love goblins – anarchic, chaotic, amusing but a little scary. But the ‘anarchic’ bit overlapped with the Pooka, and pushing the goblins more towards their D&D counterparts as ‘monsters outside the Riding, just folk inside the Riding’ didn’t work either. They needed to be a foil to the halflings in some way, like the other kin.

‘Class’, I thought. ‘If the halflings are the respectable, staid, orderly middle-and-upper-class, how about goblins as the disreputable, slightly criminal, GURPS-Goblins-goblins.’ So, I tried that.

And basically recreated classism and racism, because everything now got blamed on the goblins.

Back to the drawing board. We agreed that whatever the goblins became, they needed to be part of society. On the fringes, maybe, a bit weird, yes, but not automatically criminals or monsters.

We started looking at Edward Gorey illustrations and the idea of the Seelie and Unseelie courts, or the Trooping and Solitary faeries from Yeats, and we already had the joke about the ‘Underworld’ investigative ability covering both crime and the subterranean world.

The goblins became the Boggarts, the halflings of the Under-Riding. If the Riding is an absurdly cosy, peaceful-but-for-all-the-murders enclave in the surface world, the Under-Riding is exactly that, only in the Underdark. A land of mushrooms and monsters and caves and dungeons – but polite and staid. The Boggarts are the halflings’ eccentric cousins, visiting from Below, but equally beloved and protected by Them.

For all the tweaks to Boggart nature, though, their kin ability never changed. Bugs and Mushrooms, always Bugs and Mushrooms.