The Bard's Tale
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About Bard's Tale

Welcome to Cheek.Org's Bard's Tale pages. The original Bard's Tale: Tales of the Unknown spawned two completed sequels (Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight and Bard's Tale III: The Thief of Fate) and a rumored 99% completed but never released Bard's Tale IV (Castle of Deception?). There was also a Bard's Tale Construction Set and a series of novels based in the Bard's Tale "world". Unlike the other Bard's Tale websites, I won't try to tell you everything there is to know about every one of the games. Instead, I'm going to try to focus on things that I don't think you'll find elsewhere.

What is Bard's Tale? It's a dungeon-style game full of mazes, monsters, and magic. In the first installment, Tales of the Unknown, you command a stalwart band of young adventurers in their attempt to free the city of Skara Brae from the evil sorceror Mangar's spell of endless winter. In the second, The Destiny Knight, your adventurers travel between six cities solving real-time puzzle snares. Failure to solve a snare in time results in the death of your party, and victory for evil Archmage Logath Zanta. Success means another piece of the Destiny Wand, which can turn one of your party into the Destiny Knight. In the final(?) episode, Thief of Fate, your adventurers travel to different dimensions entirely. This time, your foe is the Mad God Tarjan, returned from his seeming death in Tales of the Unknown.

Player characters can be chosen from many races and classes. At a glance, races would include Human, Elf, Half-Elf, Hobbit, Gnome, Dwarf, and Half-Orc. Classes include Warrior, Paladin, Rogue, Hunter, Monk, various magic users, and of course Bard. Each race and class has its own strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities. Rogues can hide in the shadows during battle and get the drop on the enemy, for instance. Magic users cast powerful spells, the only way to defeat some monsters. Bards have a magic of their own in the songs they sing.

In 1998, Interplay released the Ultimate RPG Archive, including the MS-DOS versions of all three completed Bard's Tale games and the Bard's Tale Construction Set. I've purchased it and have completed BT-I. I'm just getting started good on BT-II. I haven't even looked at BT-III or the Construction Set yet, thanks to some harddrive problems. Keep the above in mind when looking through this page. There's obviously a lot I don't know yet, or may be mis-remembering from years gone by. Bob Koon pointed out, for example, that box for The Bard's Tale Construction Set has two versions: one has the 'logo' words printing in black, while the other has them printed in gold foil. I either forgot that or just never knew it.

Everybody knows about the MS-DOS, C-64, Amiga, and Apple II versions of Bard's Tale. Not many people know that Bard's Tale I was also available for the Atari ST. I have a scan of the program disk label available if you're interested. I haven't been able to find the manual and spell book yet, or get the disk to boot on my Atari Falcon030.

Bard's Tale II and III were supposed to be released for the Atari ST, but to my knowledge, they never were.

I don't know if this is of any interest to any of you or not, but Kenneth W. sent me some Bard's Tale sheet music. This is supposed to be the main theme from the PC version of BT1, but I don't read music so I don't know for sure. BT1 Sheet Music