I just bought this short supplement. 14 pages counting the cover and the afterward stuff. It's dirt cheap and the bulk of the thing is a table you roll every round of combat in a tavern brawl with results getting worse the higher the roll. Many of the rolls will add or subtract from the previous roll increasing or decreasing the temperature of the thing.
The table is long, and whimsical, and brilliant.
This is the sort of thing we should have for regular combat. I can see a monster manual with a similar, but shorter, table per creature creating ambiance in addition to the normal dice mechanics. The table could include Gelatinous Cube humming some kind of strange music (making it see more Lovecraftian), or spouting out strange liquids on everyone blinding or making things slippery, or the muffled screams of a previous partially digested victim, that sort of thing.
Add to that a short table of room related things that might happen (Stone or dirt falling from ceiling, tremor in the floor, blast of air that puts out torches, torch fell over and started a fire, whatever). A good fight in a movie always has extra stuff going on. I'm not talking the mini-stakes the character has to manage in addition to the fight like Indiana Jones trying to get the vial of antidote in the middle of the fight at the start of the Temple of Doom, but more like trying to avoid the propeller blade and the landing gear of that weird German plane during his fight in Raiders. Jackie Chan movies are filled with incidental things he uses in his fight, a lot of that stuff could be put on a table and tossed around, broken, or just become an extra hurdle to manage during a fight. Some may cause benefits or difficulties, most will just provide atmosphere beyond to hit and damage rolls.
Let the GM roll and pick their preferred result every round. I think I'm going to have to work on this sort of thing in the back of my brain and see what comes out.
Anyway Mead & Mayhem is a great product cheap, creative, and it spurs the creativity in all the best ways. Check it out.
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