I must admit to being a little dubious about this product, how useful it might be and whether it would truly add anything other than titillation to my games. But I was pleasantly surprised. It deals with the topic tastefully (even the silhouette images are evocative but not outrageous) and presents a great new type of magic. I really liked the feel of the "Roses" (or spells) that sex magic can create - to me they had a kind of fairytale quality, allowing the caster to "curse" a target or cause them to become infatuated with a subject. The effects of the spells at first seems a little at odds with the way in which they are powered, but it just feels "right". I am not going to comment on the d20 class, as I don't play d20 games that often these days and I don't think my opinion would be that valid. The "mechanical" elements of the magic power and spells are pretty story-focused and don't have a lot of mechanical crunch to them, which I like but I am not sure how well this will mesh with other types of games. Overall, I like this a lot.

Normally sex in RPGs is pretty salacious and remarkably cheesy. Here, the focus of the game mechanics hinges on the fact that there is a relationship between the magician and the target of the spells - a wonderfully good addition. A more legalistic GM might want things to be more defined and less ad hoc than what's presented here. It's not an expansion for less mature groups. It calls for better social rules than are in most d20 games (IMNSHO). The art is tasteful, but kind of ... well, not for everyone. It's a good supplement... but not a great one.

I once wrote an adventure around Michael Moorcock's idea of the Eternal Champion. Heroes that existed through time, space, and dimensions. I planned it all in d20, keeping to a very specific storyline. The Flux makes that concept possible to translate across RPG system in addition to everything else. It's a spectacular method for turning short-form games into long-term epics. Hats off to you Mr. Wick. I can't wait to see what else you have in store.

This game takes the very ripe and ready genre of "High School Supernatural Romance" and run with it. And yes I do mean things like "Twilight" and many other books and TV shows like "Vampire Diaries". Set it all in some small town where the girls are super smart and beautiful, the boys are all emo and everyone is trying to date the local supernatural populace.

The hard core horror gamer in me wants to rebel, saying that this is what is so wrong with the genre today. That last generations monsters are this generations would be dates. But in truth I just can't get worked up about it. The games are fun, there is a bit of tongue in cheek here (ok, maybe more than a bit) and if these games can capture just a fraction of the "Teen Angst" market that sells the books and TV shows, then they will be the ones laughing at us hard core horror types. ;)

So what is this games? Well if you have ever listened to a Smiths song, then that is what you have here. Take those high school kids, mix in a supernatural and let wackiness ensue. It goes for very rules-light presentations and instead focus on the relationships and interactions with the characters. In fact the rules are so light that an enterprising GM could add these games to any current modern supernatural game (or even supers) for another level of play.

Written by RPG demi-god John Wick, Byron Falls focuses more on the human side of the equation. The town of Byron Falls is full of beautiful, highly intelligent girls and women that only have eyes for the supernatural creatures in town. And the town has more than their fair share. Character generation is also very simple. You have Interests, up to five Friends, an Enemy (or not) and your Grade. All characters start out as High School Freshman (Grade 9). The mechanic is a very simple one. If you want to do something and it relevant to your interests or friends then you roll the number of dice that you have points in that area. Evens mean a success. No success and your enemy gets to decide what the outcome of your actions are. Again here it is not whether or not you have enough points in a area to beat someone up, but rather what is most dramatic for the game. The supernatural creatures of BF also have to be agreed on. Do Werewolves and Vampires hate each other? How do witches react around humans? The game is designed with playing humans in mind, and female high schoolers in particular. But over time more supernaturals can be added and even some characters may discover they are supernatural themselves (like becoming a witch on your 16th birthday). The town is fleshed out and situations are given for role-playing.

The game simultaneously poke fun at and respect their source material, which I think is about right. You can see the silly side of this but at the same time understand that to the people in this situation it is all seriousness. It is high school, where all drama in Big Drama and every choice is Life and Death.

If you are fan of the source material then this game will be fun. If you are not a fan then this games can also still be a lot of fun if taken in the right mindset.

"The Flux" expresses a simple but elegant idea: player characters live multiple lives, in multiple worlds, under multiple RPG systems. As someone who owns far too many games I've never played, it's a brilliant narrative device to justify putting away D&D/Vampire/whatever for a while and trying something different.

Past worlds disappear and others take their place, and the "soul" of a character (namely the player) reincarnates into a similar character under the new rules. Those old character sheets, however, still serve a purpose in a brave new world. Old worlds may return, and old lives pick up where they left off ... or not. More intriguingly, player character has a chance to remember an old life well enough to borrow its abilities, but in doing so risks the wrath of the current world.

Unfortunately, the GM may risk the wrath of his players, if (as the author suggests) he surprises them with a brand new world and brand new rules. As cool as the Flux is (as a concept), GMs need to know their players well enough, or need to have cowed them enough, that they'll go along.

For 14 pages of content $5 is a tad overpriced. The contents, however, do get the old brain-meats working.

I loved this story. There’s a limit to where you can go with a story where the hook is that people are going to be performing The King in Yellow. It can only lead to madness. And yet John Wick pushes those limits as far as they can go, creating an eerie little tale I can’t wait to actually run with people. It has much in common with the classic Call of Cthulhu adventure Tatterdemalion. In this case, however, it is less a situation of a party turned sour and an invitation to join the King in Carcosa. Rather we see six personalities unravel, as they learn that all they’ve ever cherished, and that they value, truly means nothing. It’s bleak, it’s nihilistic, it may well be my favourite ever King in Yellow scenario. It’s a hard job to present something that’s true to the grim horror of Robert Chambers’ original stories, but John Wick has done it without making it an A to Z of King in Yellow propmpted madness.

“This is how it ends…”

It seems to me something that could so easily be adapted to Cthulhu Live too, if you wanted to run a LARP adventure with just a handful of people.

Just as this game could be easily adapted for Cthulhu Live use, so too can it be adapted to Call of Cthulhu d20, Trail of Cthulhu, or any of the other Cthulhu campaign settings that have cropped up (with the provisor that the story is set in 1999), bearing in mind the author was able to run the game without any dice or rules If you were prepared to create six new characters and dress up the sandbox slightly differently there’s no reason you couldn’t shift this to any other time.

The Flux is... Well, a bit of a let down... I mean I am a major ADD GM, much to my player’s dismay sometimes. I read the sales pitch, I had drank the Wick lemonade a long time ago to be honest, and thought that this will be a massive insight into how to tie together many games (systems) into a cohesive concept. It’s not, but it’s not a bad idea either though. Maybe I expected too much.

The Flux approach to handling the many systems and settings is to layer a meta-mechanic over top of them all. It is a light weight mechanic that DOES what is promised. With only 16 pages I am not sure it’s worth the price, it didn't feel as thoroughly explored as some of the other Wick writings. I think I would have liked it more with some more examples of how it works out, funnily in the book he says no one would want that, but I did.

I just wanted... needed more. I hope that that this gets more exploration in future products for the Big Book of Little Games

I've been looking forward to this book/chapter/what-have-you since John Wick offered a tease of it on his blog. Most omni-systems leave me cold because game A does something cool that game B cannot really replicate. Attempting to shoehorn all these systems into one generic system just mostly sucks (Savage Worlds may be an exception for me).

The difference with this product is twofold (1) it lets you keep your original rules to each game you want to utilize and (2) it lets you pull a truly great trick on your players. This is a small product (arounnd 20 pages), but well worth its cost.

If you're sitting on twenty plus years of gaming books like I am and worried you'll never play them all, The Flux has seriously offered some help towards shaking the dust off them.

Back in the day, I always wanted to come up with some set of rules or guidelines that would let me move my old D&D group across multiple campaign worlds. I still can’t tell you exactly why the thought of moving them from one world to another was so exciting, but it was. I never got around to it, and in all honesty the entire thing seemed to be more trouble than it was worth – after all, give the PCs ways to move between worlds and they’ll quickly start abusing it. So I shelved the idea and eventually forgot about it.

…until I saw John Wick’s The Flux. This short book, in less than twenty pages, not only rekindled my excitement for a campaign that moves between worlds, but expands the scope of those worlds dramatically, fixes the problems I was encountering, and adds some fun new rules to it all. Let’s take a closer look and see what The Flux is all about.

From a technical standpoint, The Flux presents itself very professionally. It has full, nested bookmarks, and leaves copy-and-pasting enabled. Further, it comes with the necessary formatting to read it on a Mac or as an ePub document. The book is entirely black and white, and save for an alternating page border of a chain and pendant, is devoid of illustrations. And yet, I liked the minimalist approach of its visual design. It really gives a sense that we’re looking at something innocuous, or even deliberately downplayed, which fits with the tone of the book – fluxing is portrayed as a secret only some people are aware of.

But what exactly is a “flux” and what does this book offer?

Described as a “meta-RPG,” The Flux introduces an in-game rationale for changing RPG systems and translating characters between them, as well as offering a few additional rules based around the idea that characters remember their previous incarnations from past games. For example, your character may be a wizard in D&D, but then there’s a flux and the GM pulls out Call of Cthulhu instead, and your character is now a private investigator…who remembers some of the D&D spells he knew before.

Fluxing is nominally described as what happens when the world “dies” and is instantly “reborn.” It’s a cool description for why this phenomenon happens, but I’m not sure how well that works as a concept considering that fluxes seem to happen fairly often (in the author’s examples and from the in-game writing) and because the author talks about cycling through the same select few game systems for fluxes.

But let’s go through the book piece by piece.

There’s a fairly strong piece of opening fiction where a character is describing fluxing to another character before we move on to the rules. The author keeps a very conversational writing style throughout the book, often referring to himself in the first person, which was more entertaining than I thought it’d be. There’s no chapters, but the book is broken down into a number of sections and subsections.

The Flux tells us that when a flux happens the Game Master translates the PCs into their new incarnations – that is, he literally makes the PCs’ stats for the new game system they’ve fluxed to. All PCs also use the new ability score presented here, Memory, which determines how many of their previous incarnations they recall and correspondingly how many changes they can make to their GM-written PCs.

I personally shook my head a little at this section. Character creation is one of the areas where the players have near-absolute, if not total, control over how things turn out. Having the GM write up their new characters while letting them make only a static number of alterations certainly made sense – in a new incarnation, you don’t get to choose who you’ll be – but I know that if I did this my players would likely rebel. Personally speaking, I’d invert this rule; I’d let the PCs write up their own new characters (with some guidelines about how powerful they should be apropos to the game system) and then the GM gets to make a number of changes equal to each PC’s Memory score.

Of course, your Memory isn’t a static number. You can, in fact, fail to remember who you were before a flux, though there is a way to be awakened to your previous selves’ memories. Likewise, your Memory score can be increased by certain things.

The major aspect of Memory, however, is what the next section of the book covers: that you remember your previous lives’ skills and abilities, and can try and use them in your current world – these are known as Recall. Like the private eye with the memories of a mage, you can have a character use those powers even if they don’t necessarily fit with the genre/game system you’re currently using. Of course, you might fail to translate that ability to your current world, and even if you do use it there’s no guarantee it’ll work the same (different world, different rules).

It should be noted that bringing in powers from the old world(s) isn’t something your characters get freely. The more they do this, the more likely they are for the world to notice that something’s happening that shouldn’t be. If the world does notice, then there’s Whiplash, where the world tries to deal with the problems that your character is causing. This usually ends badly for the character. And then there’s a brief note about Slippage; rarely, something more than just memories will make the transition to the new world…

Roughly the last third of the book is meant for Narrators; that is, people who run the game (e.g. Game Masters, etc.). This covers some of the basic questions about fluxing, along with presenting some ideas for how things could work in various fluxed worlds. Finally, we get the resolution to the opening fiction, which I quite enjoyed.

Ultimately, I found myself highly impressed with The Flux. The idea it presents is exciting and offers simple yet novel way of easily transitioning from game to game while keeping continuity for flux characters. The few rules it introduces are simple, yet serve to highlight what makes fluxing an addition to a game, rather than just an excuse to start using a different system. The remaining guidelines are helpful without being restrictive, letting you go your own way where you differ from the author’s presentation (as I did in a few places). Finally, the writing is top-notch, being all the more intriguing for its casual tone.

If you and your players want to transition game systems without having to start everything over, if you love the idea of characters and plotlines that span worlds, if you want to see a little more of one game take place in another, then pick up The Flux. New worlds are just a flux away.

There aren't all that many RPG products that leave you standing there with your mouth open and at the same time wanting to smack yourself in the head. The Flux is one of those few.

Hello, my name is Erik, and I suffer from Gamer's ADD. No, not AD&D, but Gamer's Attention Deficit Disorder. There is just so much cool crap, i want to run from Labyrinth Lord, to Fate, to Dresden, to Swords & Wizardry, to Tunnels and Trolls - I want it all. As a GM, sometimes I get drawn to the new shiny like a moth to flame.

The Flux embraces my illness and makes it a strength. The solution is obvious really, run them all, yet keep them linked. John Wick is a smart man.

This isn't a long, wordy product, but a tool that may be eye opening and inspirational. I'm already toying with it, and I don't even have a campaign started with any system at the moment.

GM advise can be very hit or miss and John Wick's stuff is the same. That being understood, this is one of the best reads I have had for some time. It is witty and clever, some of the advise you can even use. It has been a while since I read a book from cover to cover in one sitting and if I had not had a four year old to deal with, I would have. Excellent book, would recommend it to any referee that is feeling a bit jaded and needs a reboot as an essential read.

Advice for GM's is like any suggestion: You can take it or leave it. So, buying a PDF of GM advice might be a tricky proposition: You won't know if its going to be useful until you've read it and thought about it, and then given yourself a chance to put it into practice.

I'd never read anything by John Wick until I bought a copy of Houses of the Blooded. At the end of that book, there's a fascinating chapter on GMing, one that goes beyond the standard boilerplate RPG designers. Based on that, I figured $5 was a safe bet on Play Dirty. And I wasn't wrong.

The essence of John's guidance is simple: There's more to the RPG experience than you might know from just reading the rulebook. Far more. John offers suggestions on ways to take what might just be an enjoyable evening of gaming into an experience that transcends dice rolls. Wick focuses on players and their characters, and how to manipulate both to create tense, emotional, memorable moments.

Blood & Honor is the antithesis of a game like Eclipse Phase. It lacks hundreds of pages of background and numbers. Instead, there is a simple core mechanic that is built up into a sort of network until everything meshes together flawlessly.

It's great.

I have never seen a game for $5 that presents as much as this one. It has some of the best advice I've ever seen included with a game, for both players and narrators. Professional typesetting with authentic art makes the game more natural to read.

For a unique take on an Eastern adventure, look no further than Blood & Honor.

This is the best guide to GM'ing I have ever read. Ever.

Including advice and ideas, this will renovate your game mastering.

I'm not sure how much I could say without giving too much away (there's already a preview), or managing to look like an idiot, but I'll say this:

This is the most enjoyable read I've had this week. It is enlightening and also funny, with a mixture of good advice and anecdotes. It's worth the $5.

I'd probably rate this 9 out of 10 if that were an option, as it isn't a flawless product, but it's still very innovative and eye-opening. The system streamlines a great deal, while remaining completely compatible with the table-top version, and directly addresses some of the complaints our extensive LARP group have about other LARP systems. In particular, I enjoyed the cut-down character sheets, and the simplicity of the Style economy (It's easier and less character-breaking to hand someone a couple of tokens than it is to roll dice or play rock-scissors-paper). In some ways, the game over simplifies, and in others, John Wick doesn't take into account just how different the mechanics behind his two versions of the game really are (for example, you're allowed to bring your Blessings with you, but Blessings have decidedly table-top mechanics, such as letting you see a character sheet's secrets, when the LARP game requires that every sheet be public. Thus, I had to personally rewrite all the devotions), but all in all, for a mere $5, if you're a fan of Houses of the Blooded, I think you really owe it to yourself to pick up this product. It's Houses of the Blooded the way it was meant to be played: In corsets, in gloves, with a rapier slung at your waist.