Fable III is set 50 years after the events of Fable II. The game is set on the fictional continent of Albion, which is entering the age of industry. The King/Queen, the hero/player character of Fable II, has died and left the Kingdom of Albion to their son, Logan (voiced by Michael Fassbender), the player's older brother. Some NPCs allude to how Logan has "changed" in the last four years of his rule, becoming excessively tyrannical. The player begins the game investigating rumours that Logan had a citizen of Albion executed, causing a group of citizens to protest. After the player character intervenes, Logan presents the player with the first of the game's numerous moral choices. The player is tasked with deciding whether the group of protesters are executed, or whether the player's love-interest is executed instead. Following the decision, the player escapes Logan's castle along with their mentor, Sir Walter Beck (Bernard Hill) and their butler, Jasper (John Cleese).
The player then, at the behest of Theresa (Zoe Wanamaker), the enigmatic Seeress of the Spire, starts to gather allies to aid in a revolution against Logan. The allies they gain include Sabine (Ben Kingsley), the leader of the "Dwellers", a nomadic community that lives in the mountains; Major Swift and Ben Finn (Simon Pegg) from the Royal Army in command of a remote fort; Page (Naomie Harris), the leader of the "Bowerstone Resistance"; and Kalin, the leader of Aurora, a desert land across the ocean. When attempting to gain the support of Kalin, the hero learns that a creature called the "Crawler, ruler of the Darkness," the forces of the Darkness which have already devastated Aurora, intends to exterminate all life in the Kingdom of Albion. It is revealed that Logan's reason for treating his people so harshly is to raise money for an army to defend against the Crawler.
The player then leads a coup d'état and becomes the King/Queen, at which point the player is given the choice to keep the promises made to those who aided in the revolution at great expense to the treasury, or betray those promises in order to raise money for the defense of Albion through industrialization and using natural resources. The choices made help decide the hero's fate as a good or evil ruler. The player can also utilize the treasury money for personal purposes, or transfer personal money from the player's own supply to the treasury.
If the player chooses to be a "great" ruler, the treasury will be vastly drained and the only way the player can offset this is by transferring several million gold from their personal funds to the treasury. With 6,500,000 gold in the treasury at the time of the Crawler attack, the player will be able to fully fund an army that can successfully defend the entire kingdom. With no money in the treasury and thus no army to defend Albion, the civilian casualties inflicted by the Crawler's attack amount to 6,500,000. If this happens, the world will be largely absent of civilians upon completion of the main quest. If the player passes lots of time by sleeping, working and increasing the royal treasure income significantly, plebeians will start to return. If the player was a benevolent leader but lost large sums of civilians, many citizens who return will still praise the player. However if the player raises money to fund the army through exploitation or tom-foolery, then they will be hated regardless of whether the kingdom was saved. The player can also take on the extreme evil morph. Also, it is possible to both raise funds for an army and be a benevolent ruler(in this case the player must donate his/her personal gold to the treasury until the debt is paid and the amount of 6,500,000 gold is put together), this results in the player monarch being loved by the entire kingdom and no civilian casualties.
