Video Game / Fable III

It's good to be king...

"This is my Albion. Its cities will bow to my law or they will burn. Its mountains will bend to my will or they will fall. This is my Albion. Its people will do as I say or they will die. Its future will be as I decree or it will end. I have seen what must be done, and nothing will stand in my way. We will be greater and we will be stronger, no matter what sacrifices we must make. This is my Albion, and I will see it destroyed before I surrender it."

— Logan

The third game in the Fable series. Your character is the younger sibling of the tyrannical Logan, King of Albion.^note Both are the children of the main character of Fable II, the previous king/queen. When Logan spots you and your childhood friend (either Elise or Elliot, depending on whether your character is male or female) spying on one of his meetings, he forces you to make a Sadistic Choice over whether to kill your friend or a group of protestors. Your Mentor, Sir Walter Beck, rushes you out of the castle so as to start a rebellion for you to replace him as monarch.

After getting the Guild Seal which allows the Hero to use magic, and gathering support throughout the land, the Hero takes the throne. However, this isn't the end.

So now you're king, and you have a job to do. What are you going to do? Keep your promises or become no different from your brother? Or perhaps spam house ownership to save the kingdom and be a good king?

The choice is yours...

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This game contains examples of:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The Bowerstone Sewers are surprisingly roomy, and apparently so clean your dog can sniff out a wedding ring somebody dropped down there! Partially justified because Bowerstone is based off an old-style European city.
• Action Girl: Page, the female leader of La Résistance in Bowerstone. Also any female player character.
• Announcer Chatter: In Reaver's Mansion between Reaver and his assistant when they throw you into a deadly game.
• Apocalyptic Log: Aurora. The citizens posted messages about how the eternal night destroyed their town as most of the populace including women and children were slaughtered. Yes, it's as depressing as it sounds.
• Apologetic Attacker: Walter while possessed by The Crawler. He encourages the player, "Don't hold back!" when you attack him. Yes, it's as depressing as it sounds.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: "It's amazing what you find digging in your back yard. Giant bones, portals to other dimensions, broken bottles..."
  • "The management accepts no responsibility for mutilations, fatalities, or slight grazes."
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: About half-way through the game the player gets crowned king or queen of Albion, and it is a truly glorious moment.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Most people in a position of power are usually much stronger fighters than their subordinates, although in the case of the hero's allies, they have the advantage of having Gameplay Ally Immortality.
• Berserk Button: If you have the Ravenscar Keep DLC it turns out you do not mess with the hero's dog, even if you have him/her strapped to an electric chair and severely weakened. S/he won't remain tied down.
• BFS: The "swords" that the Dwellers are seen using are basically supersized cleavers.
• Big Beautiful Woman: There are posters around Bowerstone for a very attractive plus-sized dancing girl named "Big Bess."
• Bittersweet Ending: The game ends with the Hero forced to kill his/her lifelong mentor and friend Walter, who'd been possessed by The Crawler. Also, depending on how full the kingdom's treasury was, the vast majority of Albion could be dead, and depending on how many promises you've had to break, you may have alienated some of your old friends and allies.
• The Bluebeard: Some of the weapons require you to marry people and then kill those people to unlock the weapon's special properties.
• Book Ends:
  • The game has the beginning of your first fight and the end of you last one with Walter, and he even recites the same basic line about stories he told you of your father/mother when you were a child.
    Prince/ss: "Teach me how to be a hero."
  • There's also book ends for the first part of the game.
    Logan: You have the power over life and death. Now choose.
  • Your first mission involves meeting your lover in the garden and the last is burying Walter there.
  • The beginning of Fable III is about you overthrowing a monarch, at the end of Traitor's Keep, its about another trying to overthrow you, seeing you as a tyrant...the themes come full circle.
  • You begin your path to becoming the ruler of Albion by fighting Walter, and you cement your rule by saving all of Albion from destruction the same way, but with a far more tragic result the second time around.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: The 5-Star Dog Potion, which is only obtainable by purchase on Xbox Live and instantly maxes out your dog's fighting and treasure-finding abilities.
  • Note that the first run copies of the 360 version got it for free, and it's completely free on the PC version.
• Broken Aesop: The game is presumably trying to make a point about the tradeoffs inherent in spending limited government money and resources on defense over social programs or vice versa. However, since the game economy is utterly broken and it's possible to very easily make a functionally unlimited amount of money by investing in real estate, plus use an alt account so you can trade money and other goodies back and forth between games, it's easy to fund everything yourself. The moral comes out looking more like "You can have your cake and eat it too as long as you put all your trust in philanthropic real estate barons."
• Broken Bridge:
  • Demon Doors, which contain unlockable content and can only be opened if you fulfill the demon's request.
  • In Millfields there is a sidequest to fund a new bridge which will let you get to Driftwood, location of one of the four golden keys.
  • The Sanctuary Treasury has one. There is a key on a high shelf which can only be reached when your player's gold is at maximum, and unlocks a treasure chest hidden behind the gold pile, which can only be reached when the player's gold is almost at 0.
• Call-Back: The Gnomes, one of the collection sidequests for III, are given life (and attitude) by one of the insulting Gargoyles from II.
• The Chains of Commanding: Played with in minor ways in the first two games, but utterly bitchslaps you here. By the time you become king/queen, you are aware that a demonic entity is going to destroy the world in one year's time, and you need a war fund of 6.5 million gold to fight it off. You're forced to choose. Do you keep all your promises, be a good ruler, but risk not having enough money to save everyone? Or do you take the evil options to save money, but end up being just as bad - or WORSE - than your brother, who you just overthrew? There's a reason every time you're making royal decisions, you're slumped on the throne, both annoyed and despairing. Though it becomes a less difficult decision if one invests in real estate, in which case making money becomes a trivial non-issue, though this probably wasn't intended.
• Chest Monster: Chesty from Fable II returns, challenging you to a game of chess. He eventually gets bored, and has the lifesize gamepieces attack you directly.
• The Chessmaster:
  • Theresa is not only behind your development as a Hero, but provoked Logan into becoming a tyrant by telling him the Eldritch Abomination that nearly killed him is coming to Albion, even though she says she knew from the beginning that he wouldn't be able to handle it.

• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: As King or Queen you are NOT required to dress like one. You can totally attend the royal court dressed in a chicken suit if you want. You'll even get an achievement for it.
• Children Are Innocent: Invoked by a Demon Door, which says it's tired of all the cynicism and darkness in the world and wants to just see something happy, which turns out to be you interacting happily with your child, or for some children even just seeing the child at all.]]
• Chocolate Baby: It's quite possible by the game's code for randomly-generated offspring to be a different race from the always-white PC, even if the other parent is also white.
• Combo Platter Powers: Spell Weaving. Basically, it lets you combine two spells into a single, powerful attack. And is awesome.
• Comedic Sociopath: Depending on your tolerance for such things, the gnomes are either this or simply annoying, possibly to the point of being The Scrappy.
  "If I had a friend like you, I could tell them secrets... Like that I'm going to set you on fire!"
  "You know what I like most about people? They die."
  "I'd like to get to know someone like you... And then drown them."
  "My favourite things are music and sunshine and looove. And pain."
• Continuity Nod: One of the first quests is called "Chicken Chaser", which was infamously the default title for your hero in the first game, and a title you could adopt in the second. Fable III also has a museum in a basement in Bowerstone Old Town that features artifacts from the first two games.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Reaver. He's making the best out of the industrial age. When his workers start to complain about the horrible conditions, he offers to make it up to them by getting them all gifts. Free bullets, fired from his pistol, into their backs!
• Crapsack World: Aurora during Eternal Darkness. And how. And if your character makes the wrong choices when you become the ruler of Albion, the kingdom quickly becomes one of these too, either because you ruined the kingdom, or because the Crawler killed everyone.
• Dead Artists Are Better: Invoked with Thomas Kaidkin. A man wants him killed in order to make a fortune selling his paintings.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The hero's brother Logan, a hated king who has them chased out of the castle. By the time the player is ready to fight him, they've already encountered the true big bad: a dark being called the Crawler, and Logan tells them everything he's done has been to prepare for the Crawler's arrival.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The only penalty for death in this game is the loss of your progress to getting the next Guild Seal. Those you already have are safe, and every mission reward consists of whole Guild seals which cannot be lost. You also respawn as easily as you died, so really, you can win every mission with no tactical thought, and your rewards will not be taxable by death.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: There's a quest where the player enters a magical world created by some mages who want to role-play an adventure. At one point the player is supposed to fight some monsters, but the mage in charge of creating the monsters forgot. So the mages put in "the fire-breathing demonic um... chickens. Of Doom!"
• Downer Ending: If you choose to make life better, and drain the vault, better be ready after you win to see a lot of corpses littering the land. The land is beautiful, friendly... and dead. On the other hand, be a tyrant and have everyone alive - and hating your living guts because they now live in a Crapsack World that you created.
• Drag Queen: One of the achievements requires your hero to dress in the clothing of the opposite gender.
  • If you play a female character, you're forced into this in a quest that has you impersonate a bandit. The costume they give you is always the male variant, goatee included.
  • An early quest that involves finding a lost play involves the player character dressing up in male and female costumes no matter what gender the player character is, making this achievement a guarantee if you do this quest.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Nowhere is this more apparent than in the second half of Fable III. You have become the friggin' King (or Queen) and individuals still ask you to do petty jobs. Of course, if you plan on doing all those things that deplete the country's treasury, you're going to have to find ways to make an enormous amount of money to put back into the treasury, and one way to make money to buy enough real estate for a solid income is to do those pie-making/blacksmithing/lute-playing minigames at max skill level.
  • Worse yet, in one storyline required quest, you must halt a robbery. The fellow in charge of said robbery scoffs at you, even though you're the freakin' King/Queen of the entire country and had to carve a bloody swathe through two to three small armies, and staged a coup against the resident tyrant, practically single-handed. Said fellow is universally agreed to be Too Dumb to Live by every player who encounters him.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: A more literal example than normal, as you need a ton of money to save everyone and hold up every election promise you made. If you want to save your kingdom and be loved by your people, you're going to have to work for it. That's right, Your Majesty, I want one hundred pies done by nightfall!
• Elite Mooks:
  • Balverines are a very tough, complete with tactics and dodging, and they're faster. They also replace many of the enemies at night as the game progresses.
  • The mercenaries also get this, with the bigger mercs that shoot fireballs.
  • Hollow Men have the warriors, that are usually more resistant than other holes and can use Shock.
  • Downplayed with Elite Soldiers, they are this compared to the average guard, although by the point of the game where the hero faces them, this one is already so powerful and has such good weapons that you hardly notice the difference.
• Enemy Chatter:
  • The Crawler takes it a step further, not only insulting and threatening the player, but reminding the hero of all his/her failures and inadequacies in a very booming, mocking voice, non-stop, every time you face his horde. To quote Walter:
    Walter: "Shut up, shut UP, SHUT UP!!!!!"
  • Bandits and mercenaries usually comment on what you're doing specifically - it's often hilarious. "Magic's not fair!"
  • This gets exaggerated by a group of mercenaries who have a lengthy philosophical discussion about the intangible benefits of robbing a stagecoach, including enjoyment and excitement, as opposed to the tangible benefits of payment, loot, etc.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": You are Prince/Princess, Hero or King/Queen.
• Even the Girls Want Her/Even the Guys Want Him: Even people who have an Incompatible Orientation will make comments along the lines of "You are the most magnificent of women/men."
• Evil Is Easy: If you decide to be a good king (or queen), you will not only need the initial 6 and a half million, but several extras to fulfill the promises. On the other hand, if you are bad, you will earn a lot of money with the immoral businesses of Reaver.
• Evil Is Hammy: Reaver is a Large Ham at all times, and of course pure evil. Of course, he's played by Stephen Fry, so no surprise there.
• Evil Laugh:
  • Lampshaded by Lesley.
    Lesley: Time for an evil laugh? Yeah, I think. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
  • And now for something far less funny.
    The Crawler: Ahh huhahahahahahaha...
• Evil Versus Evil: Logan's tyranny was not because he was evil, but he was committing evil acts to prevent a greater evil - the destruction of Albion by The Crawler. Though the sadistic choice he offers the player at the beginning is pretty damn evil. He claims he was trying to educate you on the challenges of leadership, but there are other, less pointlessly cruel ways to do such things. The player character can also be this, if they choose the evil options.
• The Evil Prince: The player character can choose to be this if they want.
• Expy: Ransom Locke is an Expy of Sherlock Holmes, complete with deerstalker cap.
• Fanservice Extra: Very subtle in the form of the castle maids. They'll often, when idling, get down on their knees to clean while their skirts, which are shorter at the back, pops up to show off their bum. From a distance, the skirt will remain folded down but pop up when you get closer, making it clear that this is intentional. Should also be noted they're the only characters whose ass can actually be seen due to the clothes being too baggy.
• Fartillery: Your farts are a lot louder and longer than the past installments, and they're capable of rendering NPCs unconscious.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: How Logan runs Albion. If the state of things when the player deposes him are anything to go by, Logan would probably have run Albion into the ground and left it totally unprepared for the Crawler. Meaning that not only were his repressive actions heinous, they were also entirely pointless.
• Foreshadowing:
  • What does Walter say to you when you step into the training room with him at the beginning of the game?
  Walter: But this isn't about practice. Today, I want you to fight me as if your life depended on it. (...) Don't think of me as Walter. Think of me as an enemy. Strike!
  • In the Reliquary, if you inspect one of the bookshelves, it says, "A series of books detailing the horrid, prophetic nightmares of the mad monk Silvestre Magus. The final volume is simply called 'Darkness Descends on Albion'."
• Full-Circle Revolution: It's possible for the Hero to be just as bad or even worse than Logan. Tratior's Keep takes it all the way, with someone attempting a coup against the player.
• Gaslamp Fantasy: By the third game, Albion became an industrialized society while retaining the magical aspects.
• Gasshole: The player character is able to fart and belch quite prodigiously, on command.
• Gentle Giant: Boulder. He's massive, muscular, and rarely talks, but is kind to everyone. Especially your dog.
• Giant Mook:
  • The bands of highwaymen usually have a member who's about ten feet tall and built like a small mountain. And can shoot fire at you. And can perform a Shockwave Stomp fire attack.
  • Most of the enemies in this game have a "giant" among them once you get far enough, including the Hobbes. They usually have magic (and tend to ignore additional effects of some spells like Shock's stunning capability), don't flinch or stagger when normally attacked (barring using flourishes on them), and may have the ability to summon more enemies.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: If you're playing as a female character during the tabletop game quest you find a princess who you can kiss even if you're a girl as well. The three gamer mages in charge of the game take notice. One of them definitely approves.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: The first half of the game is all about the player rounding up allies for when they take on Logan.
• The Good King: The player character's father/mother (the hero of Fable II). The player character can choose to become this themselves as well.
• Graceful Loser: Reaver takes you going against his suggestions in stride...because his company handles the matter either way, so he stands to gain whatever your decisions.
• Graffiti of the Resistance: After the party at Reaver's mansion where his guests are unmasked as balverines, the loading screen may show a "Reaver is Industry" propaganda poster with "industry" crossed out and replaced with "deviant".
• Groin Attack:
  • One of the flourish/counter attack animations if you're fighting Dark Minions with a hammer? You swing the hammer and slam it into their groin so hard that they break apart. Hell yes. Really, the Hero of Brightwall has a vendetta against testicles.
  • Also a flourish/counter with pistols against bandits. Left, right (as in both arms), down, up. Complete with clutching at the...uh... inguinal region. One can also, using pistols or rifles, fine aim to shoot the swords and guns off an enemy, thus disarming them.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Millfields is one of the most dangerous and aggravating areas of the game because it's utterly crawling with troops of bandits. This is very odd considering that it's the most upscale area of the game, where many of Albion's nobles and wealthiest citizens live; it should be one of the most heavily guarded places in the kingdom. There are guards there, but there are so few their presence is totally ineffective. The bandits attack other NPCs just the same as they do to the player, and if there happens to be a guard nearby, he will try to fight them off - but unless the player helps out, he will usually die quickly due to being outnumbered. On top of that, most guards are weak in combat.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • At the end, a lot of people are shocked when the countdown goes from Day 121 to the final attack and they have not had the chance to transfer the funds into the treasury, resulting in a high death toll. Instead of going forward into a war-torn Bowerstone, simply pan the camera around and go the other way, which takes you back to Day 121 to carry on as before.
  • The initial enemy of the Traitor's Keep. The player has no way of knowing that the guy is immortal for the duration of his speech, so the player can try to kill him without success, even when there are 6 guards helping.
• Haunted House: Sunset House. At first it's just a pile of rubble (during the day) or a spectral image (during the night), and you can only enter it once you solve a puzzle. When you get inside, you're greeted by a skeleton hanging from the ceiling inside of a smoking, dilapidated ruin. A note from the previous owner explains what happened; the house is cursed and possessed by a demon which he burned the house to destroy. When you go to sleep in the bed up the stairs, the demon, which calls itself "Chesty", challenges you to a game of chess. Once defeated, the demon gives you ownership of the house as thanks for the amusement. Solving a puzzle in the dining room allows you to jump through the mirror into a nice, clean, intact version of the house's interior, which you can exit. The demon is still there, though, and the house remain eerie and desolate whichever side you're on. That and the area immediately surrounding the house is infested with Hollow Men and Hobbes is probably why it can't be used as a family home, can't be rented out, and only sells for 18,000 gold despite being the largest and most posh home in the game.
• Heroic Fantasy. Also shades of other fantasy genres like High Fantasy and Dark Fantasy.
• Homage: Understone is one big homage to the Fallout games.
• Hope Spot: The Crawler is a huge fan of these. When the Hero and Walter enter into its lair on the path to Aurora, the demon appears and begins taunting them, especially playing on Walter's claustrophobia to torment him. In a panic, Walter throws his torch at the demon and it collapses, shrieking as it disintegrates in the flames. At last, you're safe... until you hop down a ledge and Walter gets snatched away by dark tendrils just before he can join you. You find him later on and rescue him following a lengthy battle against numerous powerful Dark Minions, and together you finally get out of the cave and into the noonday sun! You're badly beaten and exhausted, and you have to leave Walter on the steps of the demon's prison, but at least you're alive and obviously the Crawler can't follow since the demon is "darkness incarnate" and therefore can't go out in the sun, right? ...suddenly the sky turns black and the Crawler is in your head once more, tormenting you for leaving Walter behind. You go blind and pass out on the steps of Aurora City. The Hero and Walter would both have died if not for the intervention of Kalin and Ben Finn.
• Hub Under Attack: The Sanctuary becomes flooded with black goo during the first encounter with the Crawler, preventing the player from using the map. This also happens when the Crawler invades the Sanctuary toward the end.

• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy:
  • If a citizen who's fallen in love with you (but has not married you) comes across you and your spouse, they may congratulate you on your happy marriage. While their status bar fully indicates that they are still in love with you.
  • When you reunite with Elliot/Elise, the "good" option is to invoke this since they have already moved on to a new lover and asking them to come back to you would be selfish.
• Ice-Cream Koan: The advice the gnome collection gives consists entirely of these.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: Lesley will only trust you if you kill a man for him, echoing the similar quest in Fable II, where the player was asked to prove their evilness by eating a live baby chick in order to enter the Dark Sanctum in that game.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Fable III has an auto targeting system that leads to this for the player character. For example, you can be facing away from a Mook and hit said Mook by pointing your gun over shoulder without even looking. Reaver is shown to have similar abilities.
• Improbable Weapon User: Before the Hollow Men battle in Mourningwood, you can find the soldiers engaged in various activities, including one playing a lute. When they break into the base, does he grab his sword? Nope. He grabs his lute by the neck and starts bashing zombies in the head with it while spouting some truly horrific music-related one-liners.
• Inter-Class Romance: The Queen/King of Albion wants to marry a homeless dressed-in-rags beggar in a lavish ceremony on the front steps of the castle with all the nobles in attendance? Sure, why not!
• Interface Screw: If you pause the game during the first encounter with the Crawler or during its assault the Sanctuary will be covered in black goo, preventing you from using the map.
• Karma Houdini: Reaver! The horrible industry boss who works people to death, puts a 3 second limit on breaks, shoots a protester three times in the very beginning, and traps you and Page in a fight to the death against various mooks for the amusement of his noble guests. Not only do you never get the chance to pay him back for all the terrible things he's done, he becomes your "evil" advisor as queen/king, prompting you to extort people just for the money and Evulz rather than to help them stand against the Eldritch Abomination.
• Killer Rabbit:
  • It's no ordinary chicken. It's a demonic firebreathing chicken! of DOOM!
  • One tombstone in the mercenary camp claims the deceased was killed by a hamster.

• Lampshade Hanging: "Why do you guys want to put chickens in everything?!" The whole quest is one. From the chickens, to the nerds telling you where to go (like a certain glowing trail), and even the final scene if you play the princess.
• Large Ham:
  • Whoever voices the Crawler certainly seems to enjoy playing an Eldritch Abomination.
    The Crawler Are you blind yet? ARE YOU BLIND YET?!

• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • In a side quest where you act out a roleplaying game narrated by gamers:
    Wizard 1: Our hero resolved to talk to the townsfolk, to learn more information about the missing princess.
    Wizard 2: You're kidding, right? If the hero starts talking to all the villagers, we'll be here forever!
    Wizard 1: Well, some people like to hear what the villagers have to say, and immerse themselves in the story world.
    Wizard 2: This is like the time you told me everybody reads item descriptions. No one reads item descriptions.
  • Also done by the Hero during the "Darkness Incarnate" quest, after a door is sealed behind you.
    Sir Walter: Um. Do you ever get the feeling somebody's playing games with us?
    Hero: All the time.
• Loony Fan: One sidequest is a girl obsessed with Reaver paying you to break into his mansion and steal her some of his underpants.
• Love at First Sight: If you're a good King/Queen and fulfill all of your promises and always take the good course of action, subjects in certain areas will automatically consider you a friend at the very least, with a few citizens actually being in love with you. However, the Love at First Sight bit kicks in to an extreme degree in Aurora if you rebuild the city without turning the citizens into indentured workers, and also you build the Outpost; the citizens will universally be either fully in love with you (if you are of the correct gender) to the point of agreeing to marriage after a single positive expression, or consider you their best friend (if you are not the gender they're attracted to), all without you doing a single thing for them personally. Meaning that you can marry every single person of compatible orientation in Aurora within ten seconds of meeting them. It's either heartwarming or creepy depending on how you look at it.
• Marry the Nanny: If you have a child with another player, the child will be assigned a nanny as a stand-in for the other player. Assuming that the nanny is of a compatible orientation, you can then woo them and marry them.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Walter is the player's mentor and dies when the player is forced to kill him after he's possessed by the Crawler. Also an example that happens to someone else's mentor: Captain Swift's execution by Logan is particularly hard on his protege, Ben Finn.
• Mini-Boss: Commander Hollow Man and Leader merecenary. They have powers and often lead groups of regular enemies. There is usually only 1 per group, but in some quests the player may encounter two in a single group.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: For the first half of the game, Fable III is very much this in relation to Fable II, but once you become King/Queen it changes up a little.
• Mood Whiplash: Fable III is basically the same lighthearted Monty Python-esque game we all know, with the serious moments and emotional manipulation that we've come to expect. Then you meet The Crawler and suddenly the entire game takes a hard left into Darker and Edgier. Even the way your character is seated on the throne when you become the ruler indicates this wasn't what you were expecting.
• Most Gamers Are Male. Lampshaded during the faux Dungeons & Dragons adventure.
  Wizard: Yeah, and the princess is really hot.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Jasper will continue to serve the Hero no matter how many villagers they kill, how many unjust decisions they makes as a tyrannical ruler...and no matter how ridiculously they dress. This isn't to say that he holds back any commentary.

  Jasper: You're dressed... as a chicken. What do you... what do you intend to do, dressed as a chicken?

• Necessarily Evil: If you don't have a crapton of gold, you must be this if you want money to save your people. It turns out, Logan was in the same boat.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night: Downplayed. Enemies will appear both during the day and at night, but at night it is more dangerous because enemies as dangerous as Balverinos appear and the number of hollow men will increase.
• Nightmarish Factory: Reaver's factory in Bowerstone Industrial. If you're a kind ruler, you can turn it into a school (which Reaver takes credit for, naturally).
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: You meet an annoying artist named Thomas Kaidkin. But then you kill him.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: Hollow Men. Lampshaded.
  Barry Hatch: We can't call them zombies - the Hollow Men Anti-Defamation League is getting stronger all the time.
• Object-Tracking Shot: While following the chicken at the start might not fit (and he's pretty much a character) the single feather that drifts up to the lead character's room certainly counts.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: During the Kidnapped quest, you're asked by the proprietor of a shelter (either Linda or Laszlo, depending on the Hero's gender) to rescue her/his fiancé/e. If you chose to have Logan execute the protesters, then that fiancé/e turns out to be your childhood friend and would-be love interest, Elliot/Elise. If you tell Elliot/Elise to dump Linda/Laszlo so the two of you can be together, Linda/Laszlo's final words to you at the end of the quest turn into this.
  Linda/Laszlo: (with absolute sincerity) You saved the love of my life. I'm forever in your debt. Thank you for everything.
• Old, Dark House: The Sunset House plays this to a tee. To begin with, it's located in a very remote, isolated area (accessed by a lonely, easily unnoticed path from a region that is infested with angry spirits and zombies). On top of that, all you will find at first is a pile of debris from a destroyed house; but when you visit it at night, you see the intact house as a transparent, glowy white apparition sitting ominously at the top of the hill. By solving a puzzle in the gazebo off to the west side of the area, the house is magically restored from it's ghostly state and you can now enter it. But even when restored, the house still looks eerie as heck sitting atop that hill, and even after the related quest is completed, the area around it is always infested with Hollow Men and unique, creepy looking Hobbes. However, if all of that wasn't creepy enough, what you find inside makes all of it even worse.
• Old Shame: An in-universe example, with Phillip Morrley's lost play, "The Ham Sandwich", hated by its creator, and with good reason
• Outlaw Town: The Mercenary's Camp, which is... a camp town full of mercenaries.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: There's a particular quest where the player must dress up as a mercenary, and pose as their comrade "Jimmy" in order to sneak into their camp. It makes sense, sort of, if the PC is male, but if female, somehow the mercenaries remain oblivious to the fact that "Jimmy" suddenly has breasts. (All outfits in the game, regardless of which sex they're meant for, have both male and female models to fit the PC's body.) You get detected eventually, except it's not for any of the obvious stuff. It's because your eyes are the wrong colour.
• Playable Menu: The pause menu is an extradimensional space (complete with butler). The player character moves around inside to manage inventory, check quests, and examine the map.
• Precursors: The continent of Aurora has ruins of a magnificent civilization, but the only population now is a small port town. It very likely that The Crawler was responsible for its collapse.
• Prop Recycling:
  • The magic music box from Fable II appears prominently as the proof Sabine needs that the main character is a Hero.
  • Every weapon used by an NPC other than Walter is from Fable II.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Walter is a down-to-earth, outgoing, passionate red to Jasper's (usually) polite, posh, dry blue. They dress respectively in red and blue, too; their visual contrast this way is obvious in the Road to Rule, where their images flank the first gate as the player's first two allies.
• The Reveal:
  • Logan hadn't gone mad with power, but mad with fear of the Crawler, and his tyrannical actions were to generate enough money for the treasury to raise an army to fight the Crawler. A treasury you will either empty to keep your promises to the people who helped you gain the throne and end up ruling a kingdom of corpses, or break them to ensure Albion and everyone in it can be saved. Or take the third option mentioned above.
  • Traitor's Keep: It is revealed that General Turner died months ago and it was Milton who orchestrated the entire plot against the king or queen, using the time with him or her to study his or her mannerisms to transform into the doppleganger of the hero to "replace" him or her, and overthrow the monarchy.
• Railroading - On the whole this is largely subverted as the game series frequently allowed choice even if in a small fashion to play a part in the story. Even if the promises you make are a case of But Thou Must!, the actual upholding of them is not. There are, however, some examples where it was outright played straight.
  • In spite of the fact that the base story provides you the choice to execute your morally questionable if Well-Intentioned Extremist brother, Logan, you cannot execute Reaver who in spite of being demonstrably The Caligula, is tauted as the chief enterpriser of Bowerstone. Your stand-in chamberlain effectively tells you to get over your issues with him, even though he was both complicit and gleefully so to your brothers worst actions.
  • The Traitor's keep DLC allows you a lot of options to be The Good King with how you handle the escaped prisoners from a wrongfully imprisoned Walt Disney expy to a woman clear psychological issues. Despite this, even if you played through the game choosing the most idyllic path, the main villain proclaims you a tyrant simply for being a Hero and and a monarch. When slain he says that the people will inevitably rise up against you. This all in spite of the fact that he did far harsher things, and even kicked your dog.
• Rewatch Bonus: invoked Play the game again, and listen to Logan's speech at the page quote knowing that he's desperately trying to protect Albion from The Crawler, and it becomes sadder and more poignant, especially the last line, (because the Crawler will destroy Albion because it won't let anyone surrender).
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: In a side quest, some amateur wizards teleport you into a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventure module, where RPG tropes are lampshaded and parodied.
• Sadistic Choice: Starts out with one in which you have to choose between your lifelong friend/lover and a group of peasants to be executed. There's no third option, either. If you wait too long to decide, all of them will be executed. You'll also have to make some hard decisions after your rise to power, whether to spend the money to keep your promises, or exploit the land and earn money to fund the defense against the shadow monsters.
  • The first sadistic choice is (only slightly) devalued when you realise there is no moral implication in making it. (Shown by the blank decision buttons, rather than them being surrounded by a soft light or fire.) And devalued further because the peasants never appear again if left alive, although your love interest will...and you have to decide whether to tell him/her to abandon their new fiancée when you end up saving them both later on in the game.
  • You are forced into another sadistic choice halfway through the game, that being you either screw over your friends in order to prepare for the Eldritch Abomination on its way to destroy Albion or keep your promises and let said abomination destroy your kindgom's citizens. Though this one can be completely blown out of the water through investment and some hard work.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: As usual for the Fable series, it's very easy to pay your way past the guards. A mere 250 gold literally lets you get away with murder. Can be a little absurd when you slaughter the entire town, plus the guards, and break all the windows and only have to pay 10000 gold, which isn't actually that much.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Villain Nigel Ferret talks like this, even when trying to bargain for his own life. His henchmen don't get it.
• Servile Snarker:
  • Jasper, your butler, who is voiced by John Cleese.
  • Hobson is even more snarky. If you decide to lower taxes, it depletes the treasury, to which Hobson sarcastically says, "How very...noble of you...yes, noble," enunciating the word in such a way as to make it a synonym for "stupid".
• Shifting Sand Land: The desert continent of Aurora, which is actually called the Shifting Sands, made up of jagged rocky peaks, wide open flatlands, and valleys of rolling dunes.
• Shop Fodder: Trade items like coffee barrels and rare gems have no use other than to be bought and sold. The Hero has a limitless inventory and can keep an eye out for traders offering advantageous rates.
• Shout-Out: In a certain graveyard, your dog can dig up a wooden sword in a grave. The headstone on the grave reads: "It's dangerous to go alone take this."
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Walter, being psychologically hounded by the Crawler, throws his torch at the thing, causing it to cry out in pain and disappear. The fact that it easily recovers and kidnaps Walter a few moments later should be ignored.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: Logan gives this to the Hero at the beginning of the game, after he either executes Elliot/Elise, the protestors, or all of them.
  Hero: I will never forgive you for this!
  Logan: Good. Then you'll never forget it.
• Slouch of Villainy: Logan demonstrates◊.
  • Connor, too, during the Stolen Statue quest when you first approach him. He's even on a "throne" of sorts, though his "subjects" are the balverines.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The Good/Evil choices in the ruling part of Fable 3 in regards to preparing for The Crawler. Do you turn a orphanage into a brothel for the extra money therefore lessening the overall casualty rate or spend thousands turning it into a sanctuary to help the needy?
• Storm of Blades: In the form of one of the combo spells, Whirlwind and Blades. Whirlwind normally just throws things around and blades summons a set number of swords to attack an area or single foe. Combine the two, however, and anything sucked up by whirlwind will have a circle of magical swords appear around them which proceed to turn them into flying pincushions. It's possible to call dozens of swords in a single cast this way.
• Stylistic Suck: Phillipth Morreley's lost play "The Ham Sandwich" tries to combine tragedy and comedy together... as in, it tells jokes, and then immediately says something incredibly depressing.
• Super Gender-Bender: If the Hero is female, Milton will swap genders when he assumes the hero's form as well as gaining power.
• Superhero Trophy Shelf: The room in the Reliquary where all your money goes also has racks for trophies you pick up on your adventures.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: In The Reliquary, just before the largest battle you'll have fought thus far against numerous Hollow Men (including elites), you'll see a chest. It contains not one, but three Slow Time potions, which serves as a large hint to the player that This Is Probably Gonna Suck.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute:
  • Mercenaries for bandits.
  • Also, the possessed garden gnomes for the gargoyles. Aside from appearance, the only difference between them is that the existence of the gnomes, as well as the reason you gotta shoot 'em all, is actually explained. Otherwise, they're the same in every aspect - small immobile stone creatures who appear in odd places and shout insults at you until you locate and shoot them.
• Sweet Polly Oliver: One early mission requires you to infiltrate a mercenary camp disguised as a male merc, regardless of your character's gender.

• Take a Third Option:
  • Once you become King/Queen, there are, in addition to the good and evil options, options to remain neutral, which usually results in maintaining the status quo or doing something which is neither profitable for yourself or the people affected by the decision, but at least disadvantages nobody.
  • However these neutral options are only applicable for decisions regarding Logan's old policies that he had enacted during his reign, where you can choose to be better than him, the same, or even worse. You still only have two choices to make when it comes to keeping or breaking your promises to your allies.
  • Despite the game trying to imply that you have to be evil in order to keep enough money to save everyone from the Crawler, it's still fairly easy to generate enough money doing jobs and from real estate that continuing to be a pure good Hero during the monarch stage isn't as difficult as it's made out to be.
• Take That!: During the quest "The Game", which takes place inside a model D&D-esque setting, there is a switch that none of the gamers thought was their responsibility to rig, so it does nothing when pulled. One of the gamers suggests making a cloud of butterflies appear. His friend comments "Worst. Game. Ever."
• Take That Me: There's a quest where you enter a Dungeons & Dragons style game. You kill the villain in this game by hitting him once with a bane-sword. One of the Dungeon Masters says "What kind of rubbish game lets you kill the villain in one blow?" Fable II did.
• Take Your Time: Once you're crowned King or Queen, you have a full year before the Crawler arrives in Albion. But the clock for that only moves forward when you do the "Weight of the World" quest and ignores the game's day-night cycle, so you have as much time as you want to complete quests. At the same time, while the clock does only count down when you do the storyline quest, it's pretty arbitrary about how many days it decides to pass at one time. Doing the first set of tasks costs you 25 days, while the last costs over 100. Woe be to the player who still thought they had half a year left to prepare.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Mercenaries will charge the ruler of Albion. Even if the king/queen couldn't cast a spell to make flaming swords appear to kill them with one stab, it's still less than intelligent to attack a person commanding armies and the only thing standing between them and utter genocide.
  • As to be expected, sometimes in order to complete quests, you are required to do something so utterly stupid that it would have qualified you for a Darwin Award had it actually killed you. For instance, the Sunset House quest begins when you walk into the house, see a skeleton hanging by a chain from the ceiling, and find a note warning the reader that if they are, in fact, reading this note, then the house came back from being burnt to the ground and that it's possessed by a purely evil and malicious entity. The note implores, "Whatever you do, do not sleep here. You've been warned." Well then. Clearly the only sane course of action here is to render yourself defenseless by taking a nap on the bed that's surrounded by flames and giant, creepy dolls while an eerie music box plays in the background. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• Trailers Always Lie: The trailers of Fable III say nothing about The Crawler, just explaining the first half of the plot, deposing your brother. Also an aversion of Trailers Always Spoil.
• Trash Talk: The Gnomes do this constantly.
• Uncle Sam Wants You: The "Albion Needs YOU" posters.
• Unexpected Genre Change: Oh sure, there are scary moments in all three games. But in the third game, when you visit Aurora, the game's tone shifts abruptly from goofball fantasy with dark spots straight into full-blown horror. And very well done at that.
• The Unreveal: The Sunset House Demon Door has a huge secret that he will only tell the ruler of Albion. By the time in the game you satisfy that requirement, he will have forgotten it completely, but, especially given the treasure inside, you'll know what it is already anyway.
• Virtual Ghost: Montague Humes, the creator of Understone, has been dead for some time. His interaction with the player is due to pre-recorded messages/automated traps that are still running, not unlike a certain other mad genius from a popular video game franchise.
• Visual Pun: The Collector's Edition comes with a deck of playing cards, with the face card illustrations being various characters from the game. Reaver is a Queen.
• Warning Mistaken for Threat: The tyrannical King Logan gives a speech to himself in the War Room about how Albion must follow his will or be destroyed. Later in the game, you learn that Albion is being threatened by The Crawler, and that his tyrannical laws were meant to bolster the nation's economy and military so it could defend itself, which gives the speech a whole new meaning..
  Logan: This is my Albion. Its cities will bow to my law or they will burn. Its mountains will bend to my will or they will fall. This is my Albion. Its people will do as I say or they will die. Its future will be as I decree or it will end. I have seen what must be done, and nothing will stand in my way. We will be greater and we will be stronger, no matter what sacrifices we must make. This is my Albion, and I will see it destroyed before I surrender it.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Logan turns out to be one of these: the ultimate motivation for all his "evil" acts was the protection of Albion from the Crawler. Not that this excuses the sadistic choice he offers the player at the beginning though.
• Why Won't You Die?: Humorously lampshaded by Major Swift and Ben Finn.
  Swift: Lieutenant Simmons! I specifically instructed you to remain buried!
  Finn: Oh, doesn't anyone follow orders anymore?!
• Wicked Cultured: Although Reaver was somewhat of a rugged pirate in the second game, he is now an established buisinessman who regularly organizes parties for the nobles and members of the upperclass at his mansion.
• Yaoi Fangirl: The dead author of the in-game book "The Pangs of Sunset", a book that ships Reaver and Garth from the second game. She's mentioned to have also written a Slash Fic between Lucien (bad guy from Fable II) and Jack of Blades (bad guy from Fable). She ships Theresa and Hammer, too. If you look closely, the cover of said book is mysteriously stained with blood. Maybe one of the readers got too "excited". Or maybe the author suffered some very pointed criticism from a subject of her little stories.
• Zerg Rush: Hollow men, individually a Hollow is usually weaker than a mercenary, but what they do not have as an individual threat they make up for by appearing in much larger groups.

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