Frugal GM Review: Mead & Mayhem

This week I have an interesting little RPG supplement that covers probably the wildest and most chaotic thing I can think to GM: a bar brawl.

Mead & Mayhem is a 6 page PWYW supplement pretty much consisting of a single bar-brawl table. The general idea is to consult the table at specific intervals and use the results to guide the brawl to its inevitable conclusion, which is the utter destruction of the establishment.

Put out by D-oom Products, Mead & Mayhem uses the much-maligned d30. Most rolls have a positive modifier to the next roll and when you hit 30......well, it is time to find a new watering hole.

I love the fact that this uses a d30, that the PDF is open, and that they've also included a "printer friendly" version of the cover. I think a little more work could have been done with the "printer-friendly", since the woodcut is not black and white, but it is a minor point. Since it is an open PDF I can (and did) "fix" the cover for my personal file.

While I'm on the point of files, this PDF is way too large in terms of size. Storage-wise this 6 pages comes in at 11.6 MB while the "printer-friendly" cover is 3.71 MB. I don't know if this is a factor of the Ghostscript distiller used or incorrect settings, but a quick "re-print" using Adobe Acrobat set to "Press Quality" resulted in a PDF not much larger than the cover. The PDF is sized for A4 paper, which might seem a bit off to Americans, but is perfectly normal for most of the world.

I think I'm more of a fan of the idea of the bar-brawl resolution table and using a d30, but I think there needed to be a bit more to this PDF than a single chart. Another table to two to run in conjunction with the main table could spice things up a bit so the table could be used multiple times with seemingly completely different outcomes. Speaking of outcomes, it'd be nice if there were multiple options for the end-result. Even something as little as when you hit result 40 roll on a sub-table to generate the ending of the bar-brawl.

Personally I don't think Mead & Mayhem is worth the suggested $3, but I love the idea and the use of a d30. With a little tweaking, some of which I've already done, I think this supplement will find a place at my table.