This writeup refers to the Legend computer game by Mindscape, which I believe was also known as The Four Crystals of Trazere, or Empire. The name most widely used, I believe, is Legend.
The basic premise was that Evil had overtaken the land of Trazere and sent hordes of bloodthirsty monsters charging across the place in search of loot. To stop them, four heroic adventurers were summoned to uncover why and destroy it. They then charged around what was conservatively described as 40 hours' game time of charging around isometric dungeons killing monsters and solving puzzles. Notice I said conservatively described as 40 hours. The amount of playing hours this game offered was way above that, IMO. Or maybe I just sucked at it.
These heroes came from one of each of the four cardinal compass points, conveniently, and were as follows:
The Berserker, a bare-chested barbarian walloper from the North with a big axe. He could fly into a rage similar to the barbarian rage in Dungeons & Dragons except with no fatigue afterwards, and smear everything in his (or indeed her) path.
The Troubadour, a wandering minstrel type from the West who could sing magically-imbued "bardish melodies" which pumped your team. He was also a passable fighter himself.
The Assassin, a martial artist from the East who could hide in the shadows and backstab for quad damage.
The Runemaster, a wizardly type from the South, who used a really quite inventive spell system, as is described here:
Although WyldWind did a pretty good job as it is in describing the spell system, there were, in fact, 16 runes, twelve of which comprised effects: Damage, Healing, Antimage (not shield), Dispel, Paralysis, Speed, Thrall, Make Weapon (which gave you a high-powered magical weapon. Some enemies could only be damaged by this,) Teleport, Regeneration (continuous healing), Disrupt, and Vivify (resurrection). Then there were four separate "direction" runes, which worked by moving the "cursor," so to speak, on the room grid to the desired area of effect:
Forward - This shifted to one square in the direction the Runemaster was facing.
Missile - Click and shoot.
Surround - This split the "cursor" into eight, so to speak, one in each direction around where it was. Hence, missile-surround-paralysis would paralyse everything around the target but not the target itself.
Continuous - A sparkly cloud would inhabit the target square and repeat its effect(s) every few seconds.
So, you could, if you truly wanted to pwn everything in sight, mix something along the lines of antimage surround dispel paralyse continuous disrupt missile dispel paralyse continuous disrupt surround dispel paralyse continuous disrupt missile dispel paralyse continuous disrupt which left nothing but the Runemaster standing, assuming that the room wasn't shaped in such a way that he'd be hit by his own missiles.
The other point of note about this rather inventive game was the roaming hordes of evil that would spawn every midnight. These came in eight different flavours, signified by their banners, depending on how tough they were and of what they were composed:
Eagle - A rather humdrum bunch of orcs and kobolds.
Snake - More of the same, but also with more magic-users.
Evil Eye - Ratmen. Yep, humanoid rats.
Lightning flash - Soldiers and similar. The cloaked and plate-mailed knights were pretty nasty.
Claw - Humanoid goat-things and hairless worgs. This was quite a tough banner.
Crescent moon - This banner was heavy on magic-using monsters. It involved snakelike slithery creatures, among other things.
Horned helm - A REALLY tough banner, it had small dragons and lots of the knights from the lightning flash banner.
Skull - The toughest banner. It was a horde of skeletons with large malformed demon things that could only be hurt by the Mystic Weapon rune.
The banners, or, as I named them, "hot air balloons" since on the map they resembled squashed red blimps rather, also held a way to lose the game without being killed. If every location on the map was taken over by evil, you would lose.
Legend spawned a sequel, named Worlds of Legend which was in turn subtitled Son of the Empire. This was basically more of the same, but with a distinct Oriental feel to it (place names like Iyoto, Wei-Sung, Guidato and Yinn instead of Treihadwyl, Zorendorf, Hightower and Martindale.) I believe that they may well have planned to have another three Legend games, since the link between the first one and Worlds of Legend was the Assassin character. I for one would have liked to see the Runemaster's home land, which I presume could have had an Arabic feel to it.
Therefore, in conclusion, if you can get your hands on a copy of Legend one way or another, do so. Not only was the game, as WyldWynd has said above, quite inspired, but it was also bloody enormous! Highly recommended, even if it is 13 years old.