Only those who know the bards tale3/4/2023 ![]() After dragging their fallen friends to the temple to be revived, they divvy up their earnings from the ordeal. Within seconds, a single encounter with a few lowly fiends has almost completely broken them. Upon hitting the streets of Skara Brae, they quickly discover that they should've never left the tavern. Dressed in rags and reeking of cheap ale, they pool their life savings just to buy a few swords. ![]() You would have to find a way to bring them back to life which required the casting of a powerful spell or spending a lot of money in a temple.Much like any other dungeon-crawler, the heroes start off as pitiful losers. ![]() You could not “Save and reload” over and over until you won a battle. That meant that anytime you ventured out into the streets or dungeons of Skara Brae, your actions were permanent. You could only save your game when your party had returned to the safety of the Adventurer’s Guild. The second reason Bard’s Tale posed a challenge was that there was no going back. It wouldn’t be until a few years later that games regularly came out with (and heavily advertised) a feature where the game automatically tracked where your charzcters had been. Take a look at the photos below:īTW: The reasoning for not including auto-mapping as a game feature back in the late 80’s was very simple: they hadn’t invented the technology yet. The notes and highlights I made 20 years ago lend themselves to that as well. Today, those photocopied pages are a worn and battered set of papers that have the authentic feel of an aged journal. It required me to think, and only gave hints, not outright solutions. As a player, I liked that back when I was 13 years old. Maps were included of every level, but often the advice given would only hint at what needed to happen rather than outright giving you the solutions. Unlike the full-featured game guides of today, the supplemental guide for Bard’s Tale was presented in the form of a journal that you had presumably inherited from an unfortunate party of adventurers who’d previously failed in their assault on Mangar’s domain. But trust me in that I’ve consciously made up for it over the years in the considerable contributions I’ve given this game’s lasting legacy not to mention all the various copies I’ve gotten off eBay!) (Yes, yes, I know that’s heavily frowned upon. The sewers alone were a complete nightmare.įortunately at the time, I had a friend who happened to own the game’s cluebook, which he allowed me to photocopy. You could not simply walk into the catacombs or Harkyn’s Castle and blindly make your way through. And there was no question that you needed these maps. This was no small feat considering that the dungeons you had to trudge through were incredibly complex with frequent traps which would spin or teleport you around without any indication that it was doing so. First, there was no auto-mapping feature, which meant that you would have to map the dungeons by hand in order to survive. The meat of why this particular game remains immortal in my memory is that it genuinely challenged the player in ways that modern RPG’s dare not do today. Luckily you have a Bard with you to sing your glories, if you survive. You are the leader of this ragtag group of freedom fighters. And who was left to resist? Only a handful of unproven young Warriors, junior Magic Users, a couple of Bards barely old enough to drink, and some out of work Rogues. The future of Skara Brae hung in the balance. Then, one night the town militiamen all disappeared. Mangar froze the surrounding lands with a spell of Eternal Winter, totally isolating Skara Brae from any possible help. Evil creatures oozed into Skara Brae and joined his shadow domain. Long ago, when magic still prevailed, the evil wizard Mangar the Dark threatened a small but harmonious country town called Skara Brae. Here’s what the box cover said, (per Wikipedia): ![]() You must gather a party of six heroes and solve the mysteries of the town’s ancient catacombs and towers in order to reach Mangar and defeat him. Instead, the premise of The Bard’s Tale is very simple: The evil wizard Mangar has trapped the innocent town of Skara Brae in a spell of eternal winter. The plot is rather simple and comes nowhere near the complexity of modern games like Final Fantasy or Dragon Age. While I admit that a large part of that is nostalgia, there’s actually some objective reasoning to my argument.įirst, let me explain the story. I’ve played a lot of Role Playing Games (RPG’s) over the years, but my all-time favorite remains to be The Bard’s Tale, the very first RPG I ever really played.
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