The first three of these games form a trilogy covering the exploits of the inhabitants of Exile, a vast series of underground caves populated by those banished by the Empire, rulers of the surface world, culminating in their eventually gaining the ability to return to the surface. Blades of Exile consists of three short "scenarios" set after the main trilogy and an editor that allows players to create their own scenarios, which need not be set in the Exile game world at all.
More recently the first three Exile games have been remade as the (possibly less well-known) Avernum[?] series, which replaced the two-dimensional tile-based graphics system with an isometric one and made numerous changes to the RPG system. Blades of Avernum is currently under production.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump