The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate

The Mad God ravaged Skara Brae
It lies in ruins unto this day
Death is assured to all who dare
Invade his domain to challenge him there.

Ancient runes long foretold
Of a thief worth thrice his weight in gold
He moves in shadow across the land
With the fate of the world in his nimble hands.

Still give me chills after all these decades.

Played this game many years ago and finished it! It was probably the best RPG I ever played. It was also the first one I ever finished. I was a teen when I played and finished this game. Loved this game as it really sucked me into RPG's and would play and finish many RPG's since playing this one.

favourtie RPG ever.

It's easy to get harmonic gems and crystal gems. You just give them all to one character and then duplicate that character. It's great for getting gold too.

this game can really be annoying and frustrating.the big problem is the only way to restore magic points is you have to use harmonic gems (which are really rare) or you have to just loiter around outside during the day for spell points to regenerate(which can take FOREVER ,especially at higher levels when you have hundreds of spell points.) .And,nope, there is NO Roscoe's Energy Emporium in this game you can use to buy back spell points like there was in the first games ,so basically you have to have your bard playing song #5 and just wait around outside during the day and HOLD DOWN the alt and f12 keys to put dosbox in "turbo mode" and sit there. but even then it still takes way too long to restore magic .(and if it's night,.you need to go all the way back to the ADVENTURERS GUILD and enter it and exit it and then it will be day again.OR JUST WAIT AROUND IN THE ADVENTURER'S GUILD )
there an automap in the game but as soon as you exit a level and come back,it "resets" .another annoyance ,eh? WTF KIND OF AUTOMAP IS THAT?and NOPE, SORRY,I'M NOT GOING TO USE GRAPH PAPER AND MAP EVERYTHING OUT!!i download the cluebook,it has the best versions of the maps.
i also don't like not being able to type in spellnames to cast spells,.it might seem conveinent at first but wait until you have a long list of about 60 or more spells to have to scroll through.its easier to just type in the spells like in the earlier games than have to scroll through a bunch of spell lists.THIS IS VERY ANNOYING
There's 500 types of monsters in the game which you think would be great for an RPG , but only about 60 portraits maybe. so that means the monsters have lots of "evil twins " and "dopplegangers"all using the SAME portraits to try to trick you !!!(i like some of the weird names they use though, ,i think the developers were just bored and sitting around and making up a bunch of screwy names .hahahaha.)
and speaking of mosnters,there's way,way,WAY too many random encounters in this game.THE GAME CAN DRIVE YOU AS MAD OR MADDER THAN THE MAD GOD TARJAN.
dos version has many ,many bugs too but there is a fan patch for this game that supposedly fixes all of the bugs (and it does makes harmonic gems drop more often and youre are able to type in spell names, and there is other improvements) but then when i used the patch NONE OF THE TRAPS WOULD DAMAGE ANY OF MY CHARACTERS, so if the fan patch fixed bugs, it added more.
Maybe if dosbox's "TURBO MODE" actually went faster than it did for this game and i didn't have to sit around and HOLD DOWN the alt+f12 keys to wait to restore magic points ,and the automap wouldn't reset itself every time i exited a level , or the game has a Roscoe
's energy emporium ,and had more monster portraits and less bugs, then the game would be somewhat more enjoyable..dosbox "turbo mode" worked fine in the first bards tale game,but it doesn't seem to speed everything up as much in this game though for whatever reason...so i guess i'm just supposed to just leave the game on while all the magic users restore spell points ? how about i just ABANDON the game and play other ABANDONWARE games instead?
if anybody wants to seriously play this game, get the apple ii or c64 version and emulators.i actually like the apple ii version better.BUT THEN I EVENTUALLY ABANDON THAT TOO.haha