Forgotten Kingdoms Forums

Character: Laitaine
Item: a crystal ocarina
Desc:
It can be picked up, held.
It cannot be worn with any other armour.
It is medium in size and would fit any body type.
An ocarina is a vessel flute is globular or pear-shaped with a mouthpiece
On one side and holes cut in its body. The holes are opened and closed
With the fingers.
OOC: Type magicsong to use the cittern and rechargeocarina to recharge it.
There are ten small sapphires set in this instrument.
All of them glow.

When I try to use the ocarina I get the echo 'nothing happens'. Rechargeocarina gives 'You have not mastered that spell enough to do that', although I presume that it's fully charged by the fact that all ten sapphires are glowing.

I believe this might be a renamed item from the advanced bardic school (just a guess based on the colouring and the erroneous 'cittern' that's been left in the description, but that's just wild speculation), obtained via one of Besh's adventurer board quests. I'm not sure if the problem relates to:
A - It being a rename
B - My character not being a bard
C - Some actual bug in the base item
D - Me being an idiot.

I guess it really only needs to be looked at if it's a bug in the base item, as that's the only version other players are ever likely to encounter. If it's any of the other reasons, it's still a pretty musical instrument that my character appreciates.

This is i7973 "A crystal ocarina". It only works for bards (confirmed by testing) and the spell required to recharge it is 'restore mana'.

I'll leave this here as I don't know the history of the item or how it's supposed to work.

Edit: note it also has another error in its description: "An ocarina is a vessel flute is globular or pear-shaped" (doesn't seem to make sense as written).

Its a very old item that predates the current spell/manna system too.

The object looks sound, but it's a question of it that spell is still worthwhile?

Restore Mana is still coded, but it is not on any spell lists at all, including the Bard list, so bards can not learn it and hence will never be able to recharge the ocarina (nobody can, presently). It would actually be very handy for bards, give them a good deal more staying power, if the duration would outlast meditation time or if the slots came back already charged.

However, the ocarina's implementation of the spell does not work. It doesn't add slots as it should, perhaps because the effectivecasterlevel(restore mana,$i) check in the restore mana spell code doesn't find the right target. (This holds even if the Bard using it has been SSET with restore mana, so it would hold even in a world where bards could know the spell.) If we want to get it working, we should move the code from the restore mana spell into the object code itself, replacing effectivecasterlevel(restore mana,$i) with something that the object code can grab - or a fixed boon.

As to the specific query - just to underscore what Tamryn said - you get the "nothing happens" echo because your PC is not a bard. It is a bard-only item. We could change that for your copy of it, if the intent was to give you a magic instrument with these properties.

I believe there are some potions available in-game with this particular spell.