The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight is a fantasy role-playing video game created by Interplay Productions in 1986. It is the first sequel to The Bard's Tale. It is the last game of the series that was designed and programmed by Michael Cranford; another programmer created The Bard's Tale III.

The game features Dungeons and Dragons-style characters and follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, The Bard's Tale, also created by Michael Cranford. The Bard's Tale II takes place on a larger scale with an explorable wilderness, six cities, and multiple dungeons which give this game its dungeon crawl character. The game has new features such as casinos and banks, and introduces a new magic user called an archmage, among other changes from the first game in the series.

Although it received mixed reviews upon release, it won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1986.

Changes from The Bard's Tale

Although the "same interface and graphic display as the original game" (The Bard's Tale) are used in The Bard's Tale II, there are some noticeable changes. The world is a larger scale than The Bard's Tale. For example, instead of one town (Skara Brae), there are now six: Colosse, Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Tangramayne, and Thessalonica. There are a total of "25 dungeon levels and an outdoor wilderness area to explore." Michael R. Bagnall summarizes some of the other changes:

A new combat system now features ranged combat, so you'll need long-range weapons or magic to hit foes up to 90 feet away. This offers tactical challenges not present in the original game. There are also lots of new spells and Bard songs, plus a variety of fresh monsters and a special character class, the ArchMage.

In addition, there are now "Death Snare Puzzle Rooms" that have real-time time limits in the seven dungeons. "Some puzzles involve typing in passwords learned in other areas of a maze, while others require you to follow specific patterns while traversing a dungeon. Few can be solved by pure logic alone."

Players can also now summon multiple creatures to join the party. Additional new features include banks (where players can store money which will be available even if the party is defeated and the game is restarted), and casinos where players can try their luck at a blackjack-like game (not implemented in the PC version).

Character creation

Characters can be imported from The Bard's Tale, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (on Apple II versions),Ultima III: Exodus, or created from scratch and trained in Tangramayne's "starter maze".

Players can create a party of up to seven active characters; additional characters can be created and stored at the Adventurer's Guild in each city. They can be created as a human, elf, dwarf, hobbit, half-elf, half-orc, or gnome. Character classes available at the start are the warrior, paladin, rogue, bard, hunter, monk, conjurer, and magician. The sorcerer, wizard, and archmage classes are not available at the start. Character attributes (strength, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, and luck) are generated randomly during character creation (with values from 1–18) and affect gameplay.

Features

The Bard's Tale II has a number of features that were seen in The Bard's Tale. There are "unmarked buildings" that contain little except a possible monster encounter or the entryway to a dungeon or castle. Each city within the game has an Adventurers' Guild where characters can be created, parties saved, and other actions performed.

At Garth's Equipment Shoppe players can buy, sell, or identify items. Parties can withdraw saved money from an account at Bedder's Bank for the Bold and spend it gambling at a casino, playing a game similar to blackjack. A stint at a casino can be followed by a celebration (or players can drown their sorrow over a loss) at a tavern where various drinks are available and the bartender provides advice—for a price. When ready, a party can venture into a dungeon to explore, fight monsters, and gain the experience needed to advance levels and become powerful enough to complete their quest. After a return to town, parties may need to make a trip to a temple where characters can be healed, restoring hit points, levels, life force, youth, flesh (for characters turned to stone), or life itself. Roscoe's Energy Emporium is another useful stop, where spell casters can pay an exorbitant fee to have spell units restored. And when ready, characters can visit the Review Board to advance levels and change character classes (for magic users).