In its last moments, the Role Aids line sought to reimagine the fundamentals of D&D. Arch Magic pushed arcane spellcasting to the outer reaches. The Blood & Steel box set (1993) seeks to renovate combat. That’s Carl Critchlow on the cover (not Biz, shockingly). Interiors are by Julian Jackson. In a novel bit of art direction, we get to see a fighter carve his way through opponent after opponent on each page, until he meets his match against a warlock.

I’m a poor judge of this box set. I kind of hate replacement combat systems — they’re almost always noodly and more complicated than the vanilla system, which I guess really lights some folks’ fire, but I want less complicated fighting, generally. At a glance, all the new fighter stuff is complicated. Skill points. Wound points. My eyes glazed over when I tried to read the 2.5 player option book for fighters, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the methodology here wound up in there in some form after TSR bought the line. There are a bunch of new fighter class variants, too, but the fact that the fighter in the illustrations handily dispatches all of them but the warlock doesn’t really inspire confidence.

The big thing is the combat cards. 180 cards that kind of work similarly to the Lost Worlds one-on-one combat books, with each card displaying a maneuver with bonuses and penalties, both of which are resolved and applied to the combat rolls. I think. I kinda like this, actually, I enjoy the idea of building more move-to-move action into combat (I especially like that the intention here is to only use it when the fighter requests it, which seem like a good way to heighten the drama). But at the end of the day, “simple” usually trumps “cool but complex” for me.