The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate

The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate is a computer fantasy role-playing video game created by Interplay Productions in 1988. It is the second sequel to The Bard's Tale. It was designed by Rebecca Heineman, Bruce Schlickbernd, and Michael A. Stackpole. The game was released for the Amiga, Apple II (64k), Commodore 64, and MS-DOS.

The player characters receive a letter from a dying man who informs them that, during a celebration of your defeat of the evil wizard Mangar, his true master—the Mad God Tarjan—arrived and unleashed foul creatures that 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.

The game begins in a refugee camp outside the ruined Skara Brae, which replaces the now-destroyed adventurer's guild from the previous games. Besides the city ruins, the wilderness features a temple for healing, a tavern, and a number of special locations from where the party will embark on missions to other worlds over the course of their quest.

Skara Brae was scaled down considerably. The ruins are 16x16 map tiles instead of the city's 30x30 layout from The Bard's Tale I, though its layout remains recognizable. In the ruins of the Review Board, an old man—the sole survivor—directs the party to first kill one Brilhasti ap Tarj, a servant of the mad god Tarjan, in the "Mad God" dungeon below Skara Brae, a startup quest for the characters to attain power, which can be ignored if powerful characters were carried over from previous games. Next, the old man orders the party to retrieve artifacts from several other worlds and also teaches the group the chronomancer spells to be used at certain points in the wilderness to travel to these parallel dimensions and back:

With Tarjan defeated, it is revealed that the player party took the places of the deities Tarjan killed, becoming a set of new stars in the sky.

This dungeon crawl game has several improvements over its predecessors:

Michael Cranford, the creator of the Bard's Tale series, was not involved in this sequel, as he had decided to leave Interplay to study philosophy and theology.