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.

[1] 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 1988 review in Computer Gaming World described Bard's Tale III as an improvement over its predecessor, but "still too heavily oriented towards mega-combat.

Missions involve a wider variety of puzzle types due to a new command that permits you to use objects and artifacts as you would in a text adventure such as Zork.

Apple II gameplay