The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight

Lore & Background

Gameplay involves exploring wilderness, cities, and 25 dungeon levels. New features include banks and casinos. Central to the game are seven Snares of Death, real-time puzzles with time limits that must be solved to obtain Destiny Wand segments; failure results in party death. Any character can assemble the wand once all seven segments are collected, but only an archmage can reforge it into the Destiny Stone. Combat has depth with range up to 90 feet, and 79 spells are available. The game's interface is similar to the first Bard's Tale, with animated character images and enhanced sounds. The remastered edition includes an automap feature.

Reader's Guide

The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight is significant as a sequel that expanded on its predecessor with a larger world, new gameplay mechanics, and a more complex plot. It introduced features like banks, casinos, and the archmage class, and deepened combat with ranged effects. The game's Snares of Death added challenging real-time puzzles. Despite mixed critical reception—with some reviewers praising improvements but criticizing tedious snares and frustrating Sage interactions—it won the Origins Award, indicating recognition within the gaming community. The game was part of the evolving 1980s fantasy role-playing scene, drawing from Dungeons & Dragons roots alongside Wizardry and Ultima series. Its commercial success followed quickly after release. A remastered edition was published in 2018 by Krome Studios as part of The Bard's Tale Remastered Trilogy, ensuring continued access for modern audiences.

Did You Know?

• The Bard's Tale II won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1986.
• The game features seven Snares of Death, real-time puzzles with a time limit that cannot be exited until solved.
• Characters can be imported from The Bard's Tale, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, or Ultima III: Exodus.
• The archmage class is new and requires at least three levels in four other magic-user classes to create.

The Quest for the Destiny Wand

In 1986, Interplay Productions, under the creative direction of Michael Cranford and the development leadership of Brian Fargo, released The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight. The game places the player's party at the center of a realm-threatening crisis: the evil Archmage Lagoth Zanta must be stopped, and the only path to victory runs through the ancient Destiny Wand. The core objective is to locate all seven scattered fragments of this legendary artifact, then reforge them into a single whole. Once the Wand is restored, an Archmage member of the party can assume the title of the fabled Destiny Knight, gaining the power necessary to confront Lagoth Zanta directly. This structure—gather, reforge, transform, and battle—gave the sequel a clear narrative arc that built upon the first game's victory over Mangar while raising the stakes to a cosmic level. The game cemented the franchise's identity as a first-person dungeon crawler with deep party management, and its premise of a single legendary weapon as the linchpin of salvation became a defining pillar of the series' mythology.

Dropping the Old Name

The Bard's Tale II marked a pivotal branding shift for the franchise. The original 1985 game had been released under the umbrella title Tales of the Unknown, but the 1986 sequel abandoned that series name entirely. This decision proved permanent: every subsequent port of the first game released after 1988 also shed the Tales of the Unknown label, and from that point forward the collection was universally recognized simply as The Bard's Tale series. The naming question has generated persistent fan speculation, particularly the claim that the second and third installments were originally slated to be called The Archmage's Tale and The Thief's Tale. However, both Michael Cranford, the franchise's creator, and Brian Fargo, the developer behind Interplay Productions, have explicitly refuted that assertion. The clean break from the earlier umbrella title in 1986 thus stands as the definitive moment when the franchise claimed its own identity, and the Bard's Tale name has carried the series through decades of games, novels, and remasters without ever reverting to its predecessor branding.

The Cluebook's Dark Divination

Electronic Arts published an official cluebook for the second game in 1987, authored by T.L. Thompson and David K. Rather than a straightforward walkthrough, the book was crafted as a short story with a distinctly ominous tone. In its narrative, a party of adventurers approaches a wizard and requests a divination spell to foretell their possible future should they attempt the quest to recover the Destiny Wand and defeat Lagoth Zanta. The resulting trance vision paints a grim picture: the group's leader is revealed to possess deeply flawed character traits, and the vision culminates in that leader being assassinated. Most strikingly, the story implies that this particular group of adventurers will ultimately decide not to embark on the quest at all, despite the fact that within the vision they technically succeed in their objective. This layered narrative device—showing a future where the heroes win yet choosing not to act—added a moral and psychological complexity to the game's world that went well beyond simple dungeon-crawling, enriching the lore surrounding the Destiny Knight's story.

Enduring Legacy and the Trilogy Label

Because the planned fourth installment was derailed by rights complications when Interplay parted ways with its publisher—eventually becoming the unrelated title Dragon Wars at a very late stage of development—the original three games have long been referred to as the Bard's Tale trilogy. This label persisted for many years until InXile Entertainment successfully crowdfunded a true fourth entry, The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep, through a 2015 Kickstarter campaign, with the game releasing in 2018. That same year, a spinoff project called the Bard's Tale Remastered Trilogy brought the original three games, including The Destiny Knight, to modern hardware with refreshed graphics, an updated user interface, bug fixes, and quality-of-life improvements. The remastered versions were also subtly expanded to retroactively weave them into the broader lore established by Barrows Deep. In 2018, Alex Santa Maria described The Bard's Tale as one of the most classic franchises in PC gaming, a testament to how the 1986 sequel helped anchor a legacy that continues to resonate nearly four decades later.