Kickstarting a Bard's Tale

Let's get this out of the way first - there's a Kickstarter campaign to fund development of The Bard's Tale IV. I don't want to bury the lede here. Here's a preview of what the development team wants to make. More below the jump!

The Bard's Tale series was one of a few fantasy-based PC games that emerged in the 1980s. The first game was actually titled Tales of the Unknown: Volume 1, The Bard's Tale. But Bard's Tale stuck while the Tales of the Unknown went largely forgotten. The games were similar to another popular series called Wizardry - you created a party of characters and progressed through dungeons and other environments in a first-person perspective. Battles were determined in turn-based combat. It was about as close as you could get to a D&D experience on the computer in those days and it was glorious.

The only Bard's Tale game I owned was Bard's Tale III. I remember that it allowed you to import characters, not just from previous Bard's Tale games (which would have done me no good) but also from the Ultima and Wizardry series. Fantasy games were big back then. I pulled in some characters from Wizardry III and immediately started with a ludicrously overpowered party.

There was a game called The Bard's Tale that came out in 2004 that had a main character voiced by Cary Elwes, who frequently would get into arguments with the game's narrator. It was amusing, but not actually part of the Bard's Tale canon. This new entry looks to continue the story created in the original trilogy.