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 […]
Tag Archives: design diary
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 […]
by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan Back in the day at Irish cons, we had a system where multiple tables would play the same scenario at the same time, tournament-style. One of the joys of this setup came after the game, when the players and GMs met up to compare notes. “We killed the dragon in two rounds […]
by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan There are game designers who quail at the sight of a lengthy skill list, who argue that brevity and simplicity is the goal of game design. Such game designers are, of course, cowards. Merryshire’s ability list is enthusiastically baroque. Here’s the very first list, from 2023. And the current list. See, […]
by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan Whence came Merryshire Detective Club? If we wish to be exceedingly nice and accurate, we can date it to after lunch on November 29th, 2023. Dragonmeet in London is one of the few times when all the far-flung Pelgranes return to the nest, and it’s become a tradition for one of us […]
Pelgrane’s forthcoming RPG Ballad Hunters — described in this Page XX article — is about the Child Ballads. They’re named for their compiler, Harvard folklorist Francis James Child. His five-volume collection, published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads in the late 1800s, is today the standard. Child did not tramp through the British countryside […]