Bard's Tale III: Encyclopedia - Bard's Tale III

Bard's Tale III

The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate is a computer fantasy role-playing game created by Interplay Productions in 1988. (It is the second sequel to The Bard's Tale.) It was designed by Michael A. Stackpole and programmed by "Burger" Bill Heineman.

Bard's Tale III - Story

You receive a letter from a dying man who informs you that, during a celebration of your defeat of the evil wizard Mangar, his true master — the Mad God Tarjan — arrived and unleashed foul creatures which destroyed the town of Skara Brae.

The box cover states it thus:

Skara Brae is in ruins. Roscoe's Energy Emporium stands vacant. The Equipment Shoppe went under so quickly Garth was crushed. Your Bard hasn't stopped whimpering since he realized all the taverns were closed.... Someone—or some thing—has sealed the city's fate with an evil so vast, so unspeakable, that a host of Paladins and an army of Archmages are out-matched. Hard times call for subtlety. Smaller is better. Sneakier is better. What the world needs now is a thief. The Thief of Fate.

Your party then has to visit various alternate dimensions and collect artifacts of power with which to eventually destroy the Mad God Tarjan.

Bard's Tale III - Gameplay

This dungeon crawl game featured several improvements over its predecessors:

• a graphical auto-mapping system for the 84 dungeon levels in the game
• an enhanced save game feature
• two new spellcaster character classes (geomancer and chronomancer)
• an improved story and deeper plot

Bard's Tale III - Trivia

Michael Cranford, who designed and programmed the first two Bard's Tale games, was not involved in this third game due to returning to university to study philosophy and theology.

The Bard's Tale III programmer "Burger" Bill Heineman has said that the original name of this game was to be Tales of the Unknown - Volume III: The Thief's Tale. Heineman also once sought to continue creating new Bard's Tale games, but was unsuccessful in obtaining the rights from Electronic Arts.

Michael A. Stackpole created the storyline of The Bard's Tale III, and made maps for it. He has since become a successful author, and has penned many novels in the hugely popular Star Wars and BattleTech series.

Skara Brae is the name of a real historical settlement on the west coast of Orkney (off northern Scotland). The town name is also used in the popular Ultima series of computer games.

See also

• Bard's Tale (1985)
• Bard's Tale II
• Bard's Tale Construction Set

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Bard's Tale III", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki