Back in the mid-90s, the real time strategy game came to prominence. They first popped onto my radar with a demo disk my Dad picked up when I was in the 3rd grade that featured Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994).

I'd never seen anything quite like it. It was so cool. It gave you the option of playing the bad guys (the orcs) and it was so neat to command these little green dudes who said amusing things like "zug zug." The game featured 3 or 4 levels from the full game and I was terrible at it, coming to depend on cheat codes to see anything more than the first couple levels.

I eventually got the full version along with Warcraft 2 (1995) for Christmas in the 4th grade, and it was amazing. The second game has everything the first game had, but more. I became a diehard fan of Blizzard for a while. I was there for Diablo and StarCraft. Warcraft III (2002) was the peak of it all for me. While I was isolated from my friends in AZ, playing Warcraft 3 with them made me almost feel like I was still near them.

Either way that's not what this post is about. RTS games were all the rage in the mid-90s. The other big franchise was Command and Conquer which was a lot more gritty and reflected real life modern military conflicts (though more in line with low-intensity conflict (McRaven, Theory of Special Operations, 1993) if we want to get technical... and why would we).

Command and Conquer looked cool, but I only played a demo available on AOL for maybe an hour or so. It seemed too bloody and visceral for me. Later entries into the series would be famous for Tim Curry spreading communism to outer space but I wouldn't hear about that until long after C&C had faded.

My favorite RTS isn't one of the big two though. It's a fairly obscure game called Blood & Magic released by Interplay in 1996. It features the DnD and Forgotten Realms licenses on the cover, but they have very little to do with the internal gameplay, and were likely a very late addition to the development, with the only reference to the Forgotten Realms being a single line in the tutorial.

The game features five mini campaigns of three levels each and give you the option of playing one side or the other. Each campaign is a little story, and must be completed in order.

The "cinematics" are not really animated, but instead feature some neat fantasy artwork that gets revealed as the narrator speaks with sometimes a character changing their pose in the scene. It looks fairly classy and doesn't call too much attention to what must have been a limited budget.

The gameplay is a little unlike other RTSs. You have a magic Blood Forge which is a glowy square of magic on the game board, and from there you spawn Basal Golems. The golems sit around and gather magic energy for you to spend on making more golems or transforming some of the golems you do have into other monsters. Basically, you make the decision how much of your mana farm needs to be converted into soldiers and what sort.

Each level has a different objective. Sometimes you have to destroy enemy structures, other times you need to kill all their soldiers, and other times it's some kind of story based objective.

As I said earlier, it's not really a DnD game, with no references to the Forgotten Realms it is purportedly based on, and the monsters within being a little bit distinct from their DnD counterparts. Later on, someone wrote a novelization or something that made a far corner of the Forgotten Realms reflect the Blood & Magic world, but it strikes me as a clumsy retcon at best. I think of it as its own thing and you won't find it in any Forgotten Realms games I ever run. Not that I've run Forgotten Realms sometime in the last 20 years.

So why do I like this game so much? Well, I suppose it's 'cause of how long I waited for it. See, I wanted it very much in 1996 when I was in the 5th grade. So instead of taking the bus home from school, I pocketed the dollar my parents gave me and walked home every day for months. I'd never saved so much money in my life. Every day felt like a slog to come home and put another dollar into this porcelain bird my folks gave me.

When Christmas came around, my Mom was concerned that I was too selfish and so she pressured me to use the money to buy my brother a gift. I had wanted to buy Blood & Magic, so I ultimately did... and then gave it to my brother.

Now my brother obviously let me play it whenever I went to his house about once a week. It was cool, but a bit of letdown I couldn't just dive into it.

Well in the 7th grade my brother had gotten tired of it so he just gave it to me. One day while I was home "sick" I played through all five of the campaigns.

These days the game is pretty much forgotten. I've never encountered another fan in the wild, though someone must be dedicated on the Forgotten Realms wiki, and someone uploaded all the music on youtube with a really good midi sampler.

Apparently they put the sourcecode out at some point on a demo disc for some reason. Maybe I'll poke around in it someday, see if there's anything neat hidden in there.

I still think of it often and play it now and again. It's a fun game, though a little slow even by the standards of its time. I love the imagination of it all, how fantastical and faerie tale-esque it feels.

I'm thinking of doing a cosplay of one of the characters, see if any of the ancient grognards recognize me at a con sometime. All I need to do is learn how to make one.