Category:The Bard's Tale

The Bard's Tale is a series of turn-based role-playing games heavily based on Wizardry. More than that: the original version of the first three Bard's Tale games allow to import characters from Wizardry I.

Original series[edit]

The games share an almost identical character creation, interface, and combat mode with Wizardry. Notable differences are: (1) the introduction of the bard class, with a "bard song" ability; (2) the surface is an actual city to be explored, instead of a simple menu screen (it becomes an extensive world in later titles); (3) there is more than one dungeon.

Other titles[edit]

• Maze Master is the precursor of the series, developed by the same author in 1983; it clearly shows the influence of Wizardry. For more information, see here.
• Centauri Alliance is also known as "Bard's Tale in Space". It is a science-fiction role-playing game, but characters can be imported from the fantasy titles.
• The Bard's Tale Construction Set is a program to create dungeons; it also includes a playable scenario titled Star Light Festival.
• The Bard's Tale (2004) features a completely different gameplay from the rest of the series.
• The Mage's Tale is a game developed for virtual reality headset.
• The Bard's Tale IV started development after a 25-years-long pause in the series.

Related games:

• Legend of Faerghail is a German tribute to Bard's Tale that can also import characters (Amiga version only).
• Deathlord is an Ultima clone that can import characters from the Bard's Tale trilogy.

Character transfer utilitues[edit]

A peculiarity of the original Bard's Tale series was the ability to import characters from unrelated series. On different operating systems (C64, Apple II, MS-DOS, Amiga) the same title could have a different character transfer utility (CTU) or none at all. Anyway, disk-reading errors are extremely frequent, except for the DOS ports.

The full original trilogy of Bard's Tale was released for four different home computers, listed in the following table. Other systems received just one or two titles in the trilogy (Apple IIgs, Apple Macintosh, NES, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum).