|
Recharging
Magical artifacts come with a limited number of charges.
They can be recharged by a wizard with sufficient skill but have a maximum number of charges they can hold. And this upper limit is decreased with every recharge.
While you can recharge multiple levels at a time with sufficient power, the effect is the same as if you had recharged each level separately. 'Maybe.' This really needs testing, but the indications of the messages are for the above anyway.
If you fail the recharge, the artifact will explode.
If you overcharge the artifact, it will explode. The excess powder will vanish along with the artifact. The explosions vary in damage depending on the artefacts, from mostly harmless to positively lethal.
When an artifact is overcharged the thaumic leakage and damage sustained will increase according to the amount of powder which is not absorbed into the artifact. The amount of the increase being related to the value of the item.
The Recharging Room in the Sto Lat guild prevents thaum stacking and damage from the explosions, but it is expensive to use.
Guild level rounded up to nearest royal.
Before you can recharge an item you must identify it using the spell Fabrication Classification Identification.
This need only be done once per type of artifact. Once you can recognise one Wand of Healing, you can recognise any.
FCI will also let you know how many charges the artifact currently contains.
A Wand of Artifact probing will also let you know the charges in an artifact, whether it lets you recognise all identical artifacts I do not know.
One other spell that any serious recharger will need is Crondor's Fabulous Detection.
CFD attempts to probe a magical artifact to discover whether it can stand up to recharging.
Note that it only tests whether the artifact itself can handle a recharge, it does not indicate whether the particular wizard casting the spell can safely recharge that item.
It is also notoriously random (although skills help) and if you are recharging something highly valuable or dangerous like a balsa wand, then you may want to cast it as many as 15 times and work from the average. 10 casts would be a recommended minimum.
The colour indicates the likelihood of failure. In order of safest to shaking hands with old skull face they are:
purple, green, red, blue, orange, pink, yellow, cyan, indigo and vermilion.
In most cases any result lower than orange indicates a dangerous chance of explosion. For an artifact likely to be lethal, any result lower than green may be living dangerously.
There are three ways to supply power for a recharge.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dust from Sandlefon's low alta.
This is free, but in short supply and it is 100 times less potent than purple mineral powder.
Black shells imbued with the power of Rubayak's Power Storage.
You can buy the shells from the Ankh-Morpork underdocks and some component shops, or maybe just search them up.
Imbuing the shells requires an enormous expenditure of time and effort and there is no way to know how much power the shell is holding,
It does work, if you are patient enough, but with the chances of blowing up the artefact through overcharging and the sheer amount of time it takes. It really isn't worth the bother.
Purple Mineral Powder may be obtained for free in Bes Pelargic by searching the streams of Blue Moon Park.
This does not work in winter because the streams freeze over and requires 100 bonus in crafts.mining.ore.panning
Purple mineral nuggets may be purchased in Creel Springs Guild, BP Guild, IIL and the Ankh-Morpork Alchemists Guild.
They cost A$68 each and supply a small yield of purple mineral powder when pulverised with a hammer.
The yield of any one nugget can not be determined pryer to pulverising and will supply anything from 12-38 pinches of powder.
Initial research for the table above was conducted by Mythica Demonwright and Bremen Demonwright many years ago. I have made a number of corrections and updates. |