Blood & Magic

Blood & Magic is a real-time strategy game developed by Tachyon Studios and published by Interplay Productions for MS-DOS in 1996. It carries the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons licence — the first Interplay game to do so — and is set in the Utter East, a corner of the Forgotten Realms no game had visited before, where rival wizards go to war with armies of creatures conjured by blood magic.

Everything begins at the Bloodforge, which turns mana into Basal Golems. A golem left standing gathers the mana that pays for the next one; four of them placed on a foundation become a mystical site devoted to one kind of magic, and a golem standing beside such a site can be transformed into one of its creatures. Fighting, casting spells and building earn experience, which is spent on research to unlock stronger transformations.

The game offers five story campaigns of three missions each, every one playable from either of its two sides and narrated between battles, often in verse — from the revenge tale Howl of Vengeance to the comic Nuts and Bolts — plus a world-conquest mode across all fifteen maps. The original release also let two players face each other over a network, a modem or a direct link. Reviews at the time were mixed and measured it against Warcraft II and Command & Conquer, but an economy in which the same golems are both the income and the raw material for every unit and building still sets it apart from its contemporaries.