Tales of the Unknown, Volume I: The Bard's Tale : In the series' eponymous first game, the evil wizard Mangar has cast a spell of eternal winter on the small country town of Skara Brae to isolate it, and the group must find and defeat him to free the town.
' : To save the realm, the group must find the seven pieces of the Destiny Wand, reforge it, and confront the evil Archmage Lagoth Zanta.
' : The mad god Tarjan, Mangar's master, has returned to Skara Brae and destroyed the city, though as it turns out this was only a small facet of his revenge. In their attempt to stop Tarjan, the group becomes embroiled in a war among gods across several dimensions.
The Mage's Tale : A side-story game set in the Bard's Tale universe, developed by inXile alongside The Bard's Tale IV and released in 2017. Like other games in the series, it is a first-person dungeon crawler, but is built for virtual reality, featuring action-based spellcasting, rather than turn-based combat.
: A proper fourth part of the original series was successfully funded as a Kickstarter project in 2015 by InXile Entertainment, and released in 2018. While continuing the story from the original trilogy, the actual gameplay was altered significantly and is arguably more similar to the 2004 game than to the first three games.
The Bard's Tale Remastered Trilogy : A re-creation of the original trilogy for modern computers, with updated graphics and user interface, bugfixes, and other improvements.
Books
Cluebooks
Official Cluebooks were published by Electronic Arts for the first three Bard's Tale games that expanded on the games' stories and added new characters: The Cluebook for the first game was written by T.L. Thompson as an in-universe document, the journal of a lord who had very nearly succeeded in solving the quest before finding that his party had lost crucial items. The party was implicitly wiped out just short of defeating Mangar but had seen to it that the journal would reach friendly hands. The Cluebook for the second game was written by T.L. Thompson and David K. Similarly as a short story, narrating how a party of adventurers asks a wizard to foretell their future by means of a divination spell, if they should attempt the game's quest to find the Destiny Wand and defeat Lagoth Zanta. The resulting trance vision of the possible future reflects poorly on the character of the group's leader, who is also shown to get assassinated at the end, and it is implied that the group will thus not embark on the quest after all even though they technically succeeded in the vision. The Cluebook for the third game was written by David Luoto in the style of a novella. The protagonist, Arbo, is initially a lazy and useless squire who is "volunteered" by his master to a party of adventurers at Skara Brae. The group proceeds to bring order to the dimensions and best Tarjan, and in the process form Arbo into a resourceful and responsible adult.
Novels
A series of novels based on The Bard's Tale were published by Baen Books during the 1990s. They include:
While they are listed here in the order they were published, some books in the series connect more than others, such as Castle of Deception and The Chaos Gate, Prison of Souls and Escape from Roksamur, and Thunder of the Captains and Wrath of the Princes. As part of the crowdfunding campaign for The Bard's Tale IV, six novels set in the Bard's Tale universe were provided to backers in EPUB format in 2018. Three of them are novelized re-tellings of the first three games' storylines by Nathan Long, who wrote the storyline for part IV; these three novels frame the original trilogy within the larger story and redefined setting from The Bard's Tale IV and the Remastered edition of the original trilogy.
In 1996, Next Generation listed the series collectively as number 62 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time", praising the all-in-one interface using multiple display windows and the unparalleled level of plot detail and development.
