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.

Did You Know?

• The game was originally to be titled 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.
• The canonical strategy to defeat Tarjan requires a thief or rogue class character to sneak up from behind.
• The game features 84 dungeon levels and a graphical auto-mapping system, a first for the series.

Narrative Escalation and Cosmic Stakes

The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate represents a dramatic leap in scope from its predecessors. Where the first game tasked adventurers with defeating the evil wizard Mangar and his spell of eternal winter on Skara Brae, and the second sent them to gather the seven pieces of the Destiny Wand to confront Archmage Lagoth Zanta, the third installment raises the stakes to a cosmic level. The mad god Tarjan—who is revealed to be Mangar's master—returns to Skara Brae and destroys the city entirely. However, this destruction is merely a small facet of his broader revenge. In their attempt to stop Tarjan, the player's group becomes embroiled in a war among gods spanning several dimensions. This escalation from a local threat to a multiversal divine conflict marks the game as the narrative apex of the original trilogy, transforming a dungeon-crawling quest into an epic of interdimensional warfare.

The Arbo Novella and Supplementary Storytelling

One of the most distinctive pieces of supplementary material for the third game is its official cluebook, published by Electronic Arts in 1988 (ISBN 1-55543-236-0). Unlike the first two cluebooks—which were written as in-universe documents such as a lord's journal or a divination vision—David Luoto's entry for Thief of Fate takes the form of a novella. The story centers on Arbo, initially a lazy and seemingly useless squire who is "volunteered" by his master to join a party of adventurers at Skara Brae. As the group works to bring order to the dimensions and ultimately best Tarjan, Arbo undergoes a transformation, being shaped into a resourceful and responsible adult. This character-growth narrative gives the cluebook a literary quality distinct from the other two, offering fans a more structured, prose-driven experience of the game's multiversal conflict.

Trilogy Culmination and Lasting Legacy

Released in 1988, Thief of Fate served as the final entry in what has become permanently known as the "Bard's Tale trilogy." After these three games, Interplay began work on a fourth installment, but the project was derailed at a very late stage of development due to rights issues when the company parted ways with its publisher, ultimately becoming the unrelated title Dragon Wars. The series then fell silent for many years, cementing the three-game structure in the public imagination. In 2018, developer Alex Santa Maria described The Bard's Tale as "one of the most classic franchises in PC gaming." That same year, InXile Entertainment's Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep was released, and as a spinoff project, the Remastered Trilogy re-created all three original games for modern hardware with updated graphics, a refreshed user interface, bugfixes, and quality-of-life improvements. The remasters were also slightly expanded to retroactively connect their plots and settings to the broader lore established in Bard's Tale IV.

Franchise Identity and the Naming Question

The naming history of the series adds an interesting layer to understanding Thief of Fate's place within it. The franchise's initial title was Tales of the Unknown, a broader umbrella that the second game, The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight, abandoned. All ports of the original game released after 1988 also dropped the Tales of the Unknown branding, and from that point forward the series was simply known as The Bard's Tale. Notably, both creator Michael Cranford and developer Brian Fargo have explicitly refuted the popular assertion that the originally projected titles for the second and third installments were The Archmage's Tale and The Thief's Tale. This clarification is relevant to Thief of Fate because the subtitle "Thief of Fate" is sometimes mistakenly linked to a supposed earlier naming convention, when in fact the game carried its final title under the established Bard's Tale brand. The franchise's naming evolution thus reflects a deliberate consolidation of identity around the Bard's Tale name rather than a series of abandoned working titles that were later discarded.