I'm running into the dreaded "initiation bug" where the game crashes during the Initiation ritual. Anyone figured out how to bypass this bug?

Strange, the NRS patch was supposed to help with this.

One thing you can do is slow down the speed of the emulated CPU in DOSBox. CTRL+F11 is the shortcut to do this. (You can see the current speed in the status bar if it's windowed. In full screen, though, I don't think it'll show anything. You can toggle between full screen and window with ALT+Enter.) If you get it slow enough that should nix the bug entirely. If you need to speed the game back up some afterwards, that's CTRL+F12.

Alternately, clicking on things like mad to "slow down" the scene that way is another way to go. Yesufu's arm and the tree are the two things I remember people saying are good things to keep trying to interact with.

I don't think this version has the NRS patch applied to it. I just copied the save from the GOG version to my SHP patched version, and the SHP version worked perfectly.

Thank you. Setting the cycles to a fixed number solved my problems.

I too encountered this bug, and I fixed it with installing the NRS patch (here http://www.qfgs.net/patches/qfg3.zip ) and using CTRL+F11 to reduce to 1% cycles. Thanks Kloreep and gibbeynator!

NRS is actually already applied to the GoG release.

I found an alternate solution to this problem that worked for me. I'm assuming it's when your opponent throws his spear. There was a guide on the internet for fixing this problem and you just need to click on the guy as he throws the spear.

The original solution was to hold down the enter key (it wasn't actually necessary to position it over the NPC), which effectively 'slowed' the game down due to the number of keyboard interrupts this generated. I doubt that it would be sufficient on its own to compensate for modern CPU power, but that along with the Dosbox environment might be.

Honestly, the best solution I found was to go into the DosBox configuration file for Quest for Glory 3 and set cycles to 10000. It slows the game down just enough to pass the trial without adversely affecting the speed of the overall game.

I also tried to set the cycles to a high number, even to max, and it didn't work for me. I had to install the patch (or maybe re-install it if the GOG version already has it), and then it was ok.

Strange. Didn't try to press enter or click on the guy though, maybe it's easier this way.

Ran into the initiation bug when Yesefu throws for the ring. Was able to get past by restoring a save made just before that individual test starts rather than down/up cycle DosBox.