Mayhem Playtest

I recently ran a session of the Mayhem RPG for my gaming group. It's a game I picked up at the Salt Lake Comic Con a couple years back. It's whole thing is centered around balance: light vs. dark, chaos vs. order, good vs. evil, etc... Overall, I think this is a pretty fun game and it's a unique system. For one, there is a combat clock mechanism for fighting that makes the combat interesting. The clock is used for initiative, or in other words, who gets to go when. Actions you take during combat are tagged with a speed that puts you so many spaces down the clock, and you don't get to go again until the clock comes around to your spot. So if you do quick actions, you can go sooner; however, if you choose to do slow actions, it may take longer, but the payoff might have been with the amount of damage you inflicted on your enemy.

Other things I liked, were the amount of races and/or talents/curses that come with the core book, allowing you to make crazy and unique characters. There aren't classes per se, because everything is based off of the skills you choose during character creation. The mechanic of play is pretty simple, your attribute (i.e. strength, agility, intelligence, etc) determines which die you roll, then you add any skill modifiers and try to beat a target number.

There are some drawbacks to the game. First, the layout isn't the most user friendly in my opinion. For example, not everything is presented in a logical order, and sometimes one important piece of information is buried in a paragraph of text in odd places. Also, they give conversion rules for D20 systems allowing you to convert monsters from other RPGs without "too" much trouble, but I would have liked some pre-made monsters in the book to make things easier because at the heart of this game is combat techniques which really add flavor to the battles.

Overall, I'd give this game 7/10. It's face-paced in that the combat scenarios did bog down and seemed to move quickly. Character creation wasn't very difficult either, even with the amount of combinations to be had. Just be prepared to annotate the book or make your own index.

You can get the book here: http://midnightcampaign.com/midnightc..._nsite/mayhemsplashpage.html