The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate

Lore & Background

The game begins in a refugee camp outside the ruined city of Skara Brae, which was destroyed by the Mad God Tarjan. The player characters receive a letter from a dying man informing them of the destruction. The ruins of Skara Brae are scaled down to 16x16 map tiles from the original 30x30 layout.

An old man, the sole survivor in the ruins of the Review Board, directs the party to kill Brilhasti ap Tarj in the Mad God dungeon below Skara Brae, then retrieve artifacts from several other worlds using chronomancer spells. The party travels to dimensions including Arboria, Gelidia, Lucencia, Kinestia, Tenebrosia, Tarmitia, and Malefia. In each world, they retrieve specific items, often finding that the heroes they seek are already dead.

In Kinestia, the party meets Urmech, an artificial being who offers to train certain classes to become 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 class character using their special combat ability to sneak up from behind.

Reader's Guide

The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate is significant as the first game in the series to feature a graphical auto-mapping system for its 84 dungeon levels, an enhanced save game feature, and two new spellcaster classes: geomancer and chronomancer. Michael Cranford, the creator of the Bard's Tale series, was not involved in this sequel, having left Interplay to study philosophy and theology. Programmer Rebecca Heineman has stated that the original name was to be Tales of the Unknown - Volume III: The Thief's Tale, and she later sought but failed to obtain the rights from Electronic Arts to continue the series. Michael A. Stackpole created the storyline and maps, later becoming a successful author of Star Wars and BattleTech novels.

Reception was mixed: a 1988 review in Computer Gaming World described it as an improvement over its predecessor but still heavily oriented toward mega-combat. In 1993, the magazine stated that the series redeemed itself with this flawed third installment, noting that the best parts are the quests themselves. A common complaint was the perceived lack of a method to recharge spell points, though the game actually includes magic regeneration squares in dungeons, a detail easily overlooked in the manual.