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The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate
Developer(s)	Interplay Productions
Publisher(s)	Electronic Arts
Designer(s)	Bill Heineman, Bruce Schlickbernd, Michael A. Stackpole
Release date(s)	1988 (C64 & Apple II), 1990, 1991
Genre(s)	RPG
Mode(s)	Single player
Rating(s)	N/A
Platform(s)	Amiga, Apple II, Commodore 64, DOS

The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate is a computer fantasy role-playing game created by Interplay Productions in 1988. (It is the second sequel to The Bard's Tale.) It was designed by "Burger" Bill Heineman, Bruce Schlickbernd, and Michael A. Stackpole.

Contents 1 Story 2 Gameplay 3 Trivia 4 See also 5 External links

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

Your party then has to visit various alternate dimensions and collect artifacts of power with which to eventually destroy the Mad God Tarjan.

This dungeon crawl game featured several improvements over its predecessors:

• a graphical auto-mapping system for the 84 dungeon levels in the game (it was the first game to offer this type of map interface)
• an enhanced save game feature
• two new spellcaster character classes (geomancer and chronomancer)
• an improved story and deeper plot^{[citation needed]}

Michael Cranford, who designed and programmed the first two Bard's Tale games, was not involved in this third game due to returning to university to study philosophy and theology.

The Bard's Tale III programmer "Burger" Bill Heineman has said that the original name of this game was to be Tales of the Unknown - Volume III: The Thief's Tale. Heineman also once sought to continue creating new Bard's Tale games, but was unsuccessful in obtaining the rights from Electronic Arts.

Michael A. Stackpole created the storyline of The Bard's Tale III, and made maps for it. He has since become a successful author, and has penned many novels in the hugely popular Star Wars and BattleTech series.

Skara Brae is the name of a real historical settlement on the west coast of Orkney (off northern Scotland). The town name is also used in the popular Ultima series of computer games.

"Burger" Bill Heineman was diagnosed with gender identity disorder in 2003 and began the transition into Rebecca Ann Heineman, a transgendered woman. She maintains the web site "Burger Becky's Burger Emporium", inspired by the name of "Roscoe's Energy Emporium" from the Bard's Tale games.

Bruce Schlickbernd and Michael Stackpole also collaborated on Interplay's Wasteland, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, and Star Trek: Judgment Rites.

• Bard's Tale
• Bard's Tale II
• Bard's Tale Construction Set

• The Bard's Tale Compendium
• The Bard's Tale III at MobyGames
• The Bard's Tale III at GameBase64 - with links to the files and music for the Commodore 64