The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate
A dungeon crawl game with parallel dimensions and a thief's final strike.
The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate, a fantasy role-playing computer game, was published by Interplay Productions in 1988. As the second sequel to The Bard's Tale, its design came from Rebecca Heineman, Bruce Schlickbernd, and Michael A. Stackpole. Players could experience it on the Amiga, Apple II (64k), Commodore 64, and MS-DOS.
The story begins when the player characters receive a letter from a dying man. He explains that during a celebration of their victory over the evil wizard Mangar, his true master—the Mad God Tarjan—appeared and unleashed monstrous creatures that destroyed the town of Skara Brae. The box cover describes the situation: Skara Brae lies in ruins, its shops empty, its taverns closed, and the bard reduced to whimpering. An evil so vast has sealed the city's fate that even armies of paladins and archmages are outmatched. The solution calls for subtlety, smallness, and sneakiness—what the world needs is a thief, the Thief of Fate.
The game starts in a refugee camp outside the ruined Skara Brae, which replaces the adventurer's guild from earlier games. The wilderness includes a temple for healing, a tavern, and several special locations from which the party launches missions to other worlds. Skara Brae itself is much smaller than before, reduced from a 30x30 tile city to a 16x16 tile ruin, though its layout remains recognizable. In the ruins of the Review Board, an old man—the sole survivor—directs the party to first kill Brilhasti ap Tarj, a servant of Tarjan, in the "Mad God" dungeon beneath Skara Brae. This quest can be skipped if powerful characters were carried over from previous games. The old man then orders the party to retrieve artifacts from several other worlds, teaching them chronomancer spells to travel between these parallel dimensions.
In Arboria, reached from Twilight Copse, the party visits the pleasant elf realm of Ciera Brannia. They must bring back the hero Valarian or his Bow and the Arrows of Life. Valarian is long dead, buried in a sacred grove with the items; the king allows entry only after they kill the villain Tslotha Garnath using the Nightspear from Valarian's Tower. Here, the party meets the warrior Hawkslayer, who claims to remember them from before—a hint that their journey spans both dimensions and time.
From Cold Peak, they enter Gelidia, an icy wasteland with a great ice keep.
Quick Facts
- Title
- The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate
- Developer
- Interplay Productions / Krome Studios (remaster)
- Publisher
- Electronic Arts / inXile Entertainment (remaster)
- Director
- Brian Fargo
- Producer
- David Albert
- Designer
- Rebecca Heineman / Bruce Schlickbernd / Michael A. Stackpole / Brian Fargo
- Programmer
- Rebecca Heineman
- Artist
- Nancy L. Fong / Todd J. Camasta
- Writer
- Michael A. Stackpole
- Composer
- Kurt Heiden
- Released
- 1988: Apple II, C64 / 1990: MS-DOS / 1991: Amiga / 1992: PC-98 / 2019: Windows, Xbox One
- Series
- The Bard's Tale
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
The game begins in a refugee camp outside the ruined city of Skara Brae, which was destroyed by the Mad God Tarjan after the player characters defeated the evil wizard Mangar. The ruins are scaled down to 16x16 map tiles from the original 30x30 layout. In the ruins, an old man directs the party to kill Brilhasti ap Tarj in the Mad God dungeon below Skara Brae, then to retrieve artifacts from several other worlds using chronomancer spells. The party travels to Arboria, Gelidia, Lucencia, Kinestia, Tenebrosia, Tarmitia, and Malefia, encountering dead or dying heroes and deities. In Kinestia, the party meets Urmech, an artificial being created by Ferofist in violation of the God's Pact, who offers to train certain character classes as Geomancers. In Malefia, the party finds the Strifespear on Hawkslayer's corpse and confronts Tarjan. The canonical strategy for defeating Tarjan involves a thief or rogue character using their special combat ability to sneak up from behind.
Reader's Guide
The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate introduced several improvements over its predecessors, including a graphical auto-mapping system for the 84 dungeon levels, an enhanced save game feature, and two new spellcaster character classes: geomancer and chronomancer. The game's storyline was created by Michael A. Stackpole, who later became a successful author of Star Wars and BattleTech novels. The game received a 1988 review in Computer Gaming World that described it as an improvement over its predecessor but still heavily oriented towards mega-combat. A 1993 review stated that the series redeemed itself with the third installment, flawed though it was, and that the best parts are the quests themselves. One chief complaint was that spell points could not be recharged instantly at Roscoe's Energy Emporium as in previous titles; however, spell points could be recharged by stepping on magic regeneration squares in dungeons, though this mention was easily overlooked.
Did You Know?
- The original name of the game was to be Tales of the Unknown - Volume III: The Thief's Tale.
- Michael Cranford, creator of the Bard's Tale series, was not involved in this sequel as he had left Interplay to study philosophy and theology.
- The game's programmer, Rebecca Heineman, later sought to continue creating new Bard's Tale games but was unsuccessful in obtaining the rights from Electronic Arts.
- The game was the first to offer a graphical auto-mapping interface for dungeon levels.
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