Merryshire Detective Club

Merryshire Detective Club, a cosy fantasy mystery RPG from Pelgrane, Backerkitting now.

You play amateur detectives in a cosy-fantasy setting. Your band of plucky investigators solves mysteries (quite often, murder mysteries) that crop up with remarkable regularity in the lovely little halfling village you design together.

One of the General abilities is called Risky Nonsense.

No Chillo

Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!

Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!

Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!

Bombadilly dooly dillow

Bom de dillow hillow willow

Willow be dong dillow fillow

Tom be jugglin' an armadillo

Goldberry prefers a firm pillow

It's just her little pecadillo

Dong ding dong dillo dillo

Off we dance to Amarillo

Pillow dillo dee dong dillo

La dee dee dee willow pillow

Bong biddly bong bee hillo villo

Dongy ding dong dillo

By Bully The Little Stuffed Bull, after J.R.R. Tolkien

Character Creation Challenge 2026 26f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Gandalf

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

26f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Gandalf

Powered characters in Kids On Bikes are based on shared creation and narrative control by the group, reflecting characters like E.T. and Eleven in the first season of Stranger Things. The GM comes up with a starting concept and the d20 and d4 stats, sets Psychic Energy (default 7) for how often they can use their powers, and the players create or choose Aspects (default 2) which they then control when they come up. This means a character can be wildly powerful or weird without overshadowing the normal PCs. Like a wizard with great knowledge and some showy powers but a tendency to disappear for chapters at a time.

Gandalf The Grey

Powered character

Character Creation Challenge 2026 25f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Pippin

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

25f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Pippin

Peregrin Took

Funny Sidekick

Character Creation Challenge 2026 24f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Merry

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

24f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Merry

Meriadoc Brandybuck

Laid-back Slacker

Character Creation Challenge 2026 23f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Sam

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

23f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Sam

Samwise Gamgee

Blue-Collar Worker (bending the rules for an adult trope)

Character Creation Challenge 2026 22f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Frodo

Character Creation Challenge 2026

PC groups for games I would do with different systems

22f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes

Kids On Bikes first edition

F is for Fellowship. And Frodo.

I’d go with The One Ring for a Middle-earth game, but for the purpose of this challenge I considered a few options emphasising different elements of the saga.

Desperate mission story game Our Last Best Hope would work for the Fellowship overall as a one-shot, although only Boromir and temporarily Gandalf get the dramatic deaths the system runs on.

Pastoral travel game Wanderhome, for contrast, for The Hobbit. Possibly swapping out Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger from The Wind In The Willows for Bilbo, Balin, Thorin and Gandalf.

But I finally settled on Kids On Bikes (first edition, as I don’t have second and it’s apparently a small revision) for the four Hobbits, with Gandalf as the powered character. The rest of the Fellowship could be statted as Teens or Adults.

Leaving home on a great adventure cuts out the town focus and collaborative creation, but hey. And I ran through that last time I used this for the Challenge.

Characters start with Tropes (playbooks) that can be adjusted, or made from scratch. This gives them a stat line, suggestions for their two starting strengths (along with the one they get from age range) and flaws, and some personality questions, with a longer list for making connections to a setting.

22f: The Lord Of The Rings with Kids On Bikes - Frodo

Frodo Baggins

Popular Kid

It's gone. It's done.

On 25 March of the 3019th year of the Third Age, the Ruling Ring was dissolved in the flames of the Crack of Doom, and Sauron was defeated.

A toast to Tolkien

“His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Tales From Black Friday 2024

It's the first of these here, so if we must have Black Friday we shall have #TalesFromBlackFriday also!

Our forces amassed at the edge of the customer parking lot, waiting for the signal.

This time. This time it would be different. We would not let them pass.

Thousands of them this time. Each the product of fell science with a single thought. No mere PS5 or Apple Watch would placate them. No. These things would be satisfied only with one of those air fryers with the grill underneath.

Some might say let them fry their air. But do you truly believe they would stop at that? Never! They would never rest until all air fried, and us along with it!

Already we could hear their death chant - "Grill! Grill! Grill! Grill!" - and see their ragged banners flutter in the chill breeze, promising them thirty - nay, forty, some even sixty percent reductions! A terrible need that could ne'er be sated!

The clock tower of the all-night ASDA struck the fatal hour.

It was upon us.

We thought we were prepared for this. That our walls were strong, that our prices were fair, that we could ride out this storm of insatiable greed. Were we wrong? Soon we would find out.

A gasp of dread runs through our ranks as they unveil their great siege engine, their largest Door Buster yet.

They charge, ready to tear down everything we hold dear - Small Business Saturday, Giving Tuesday, these mean nothing to them!

But we stand.

We stand!

Price shall be halved, credit score be shattered,

A sword-day, a Black Friday, ere the sun rises!

-- With apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien

The War Of The Rohirrim

First look

In ancient days, only the King of Rohan was allowed to have a nose.

Helm Hammerhand and his noseless family

Welp.

The Hunt For Gollum

A spinoff film of The Hunt For Gollum (could be fine with Andy Serkis making it) reminds me of what I imagined would happen if Marvel had gotten the Middle-earth licence and done it like Conan with a few comic series about individual characters (Aragorn, Gandalf, Bilbo... a prequel series about Helm Hammerhand or something) having new adventures vaguely related to the stories - might be fun but not going to be a big deal.

March 25th

Happy Tolkien Reading Day. commemmorating the day the Ring was cast into the fires of Mount Doom.

This joke may become a tradition.

And now, a message from the King. (The Return Of...)

Adventure Calendar 2023 21: The One Ring

Adventure Calendar 2023

21: The One Ring

The One Ring is another one I’ve done festive hooks for, drawing on Middle-earth’s Yule and the Father Christmas letters.

As we reach the shortest day...

Comes The Sun Again

On the shortest day, the sun itself seems far away in a grey sky. The few now living old enough to remember the trees that provided light before worry that the sun’s time has also come to an end. Can it be rekindled?

The Lord Of The Rings on screen

Today marks twenty years since the premiere of The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King. One vision leading so many to visualise one of the stories that really matter. The lighting of the beacons. Sam carrying Frodo. “My friends... you bow to no one.” They get me every time.

The Films Of Lost Tales

Warner Bros. has decided we need more Middle-earth movies. I feel we could have done with one and a half fewer from The Hobbit already.

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power

The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power is beautiful, slow to get started, kind of wasted on this dinky little screen, has a good chance of ending up more liked than The Hobbit films but probably not dethroning The Lord Of The Rings films in popular culture.

Elrond still looks too much like Steve Harrington, though.

The Rings Of Power score

The score to season one of The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power season one is now online ahead of the premiere, with music by Bear McCreary and a theme by Howard Shore.

Cosy games

Cosy RPGs are a genre I haven’t really done, but I have enough of a fondness for Winnie-the-Pooh and the Cosgrove Hall stop-motion adaptation of The Wind In The Willows and Will Quinn’s Daily Bunny that I could consider it for a break from my usual monsters. (And a talking cat would hardly be out of place in Buffy.) And The Hobbit is mostly a cosy story until we get to the battles.

The introductory post links to an article about the style, with some advice for setting tone like an NPC explicitly making the PCs welcome in a new location.