Does the Ashmunrah tomb book contain an error?

Question

When doing The Ancient Tombs Quest in the last tomb just before boss entrance(Ashmunrah - Library Tomb) there is a bookcase that gives us a book containing the in-game information on how to enchant the helmet.

From what I understand the book contains an error and googling it didn't yield any results, or more likely I didn't word it correctly.

So my question is:
Is this an error or Is it a reference that I'm missing?

I assume that people have come across it before. If so could anyone point me to any explanation/discussion on what this symbol is?

Image: https://imgur.com/a/sK4IkYk

Comments

I guess you play on Mac or Linux, right? If so, I had seen a similar issue and it's most likely related to the Windows font used by the game (Verdana AFAIR). Or it may be the haunting problem of the past related to character encoding on computers before Unicode came to save us from misery. If your native language uses any accented characters, you may remember such issues from the past, when opening files/web pages had this problem of mixing up accented characters with random trash.

---

Nope for both of these questions.
I play on Windows and my system language is English

---

Anyway, it's rendering issue related to some books using non-ASCII characters. You can see similar issue with "Diary of Captain Ogden Brewboiler":
Day 13:

https://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=%C2%93chakoya%C2%94

Answer 1

Hi, I will try to answer your question to the best of my ability.

I'm not sure what time the book is from (did you get it recently or maybe sometime ago) but it looks like someone has been tinkering with it ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

At the very beginning, I would like to point out that already in the first sentence we have a typo and that is “Margathla”.
If we try to find anything about this name in Tibia, we will find nothing. The only option I allow to think about is that this is about Morgathla. Reading the text of the book from the screenshot you added I conclude that this is about the book "Morgathla Reveals the Secrets of the Mask (Book). As you may notice the very title here says Morgathla and not “Margathla”.

Let's take a look at the screenshots below.



The first of the screenshots comes from Tibia Libraries and the second from Tibia Fandom.

As you can see the two texts are different from the one you have, an example is the sentence highlighted in red. Although the texts differ the message is basically the same.


Getting to the point - is this an error?
Most likely, this is a simple typo that was created when trying to add a character that the game could not read (imo). The best thing to do is simply report it to CipSoft Support as a bug.
I have also been forwarded with this screenshot (thanks to Cony Island from TibiaSecrets discord) which doesn't have this kind of typo in said book:


I am more puzzled by the fact that the texts of the books (the ones I sent and yours) differ. Why would the game developers change the text of a book, of a so old quest?

Perhaps it's time for more questions about Helmet of the Ancients?

Comments

Thanks for your extensive answer. I've just completed the quest because my achievement hunting endeavour led my there.

So my copy of the book is freshly obtained and  I've posted less than an hour after I've found it so that dates it at around  14:00 25.04.2024 UTC +- 1 hour.

Both the difference in the name at the beginning of the book Ma(o)rgathla and the visial "error" persisted after the SS

I guess that I'll have to try to obtain a new copy on another character -  but if anyone is willing to do it themselves that would be more beneficial since that would corroborate my findings.

Link to the Technical Support Forum thread I've created:
https://www.tibia.com/forum/?action=thread&threadid=4965938

---

I can also confirm that this isn't a one of.

I've done this on one of my secondary characters and the book looks exactly the same as the one in my main post

---

I could be wrong, but there should be some older books in Tibia like this. I could've sworn I've seen this before and seen a response or an explanation to it.

---

I'm also pretty sure that I've seen this symbol before either on reddit or on TibiaSecrets but I wasn't able to find it now

---

I suggest copying-and-pasting this symbol to a website like this one: https://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect
I bet it's not regular apostrophe >>'<< (code U+0027) but a typographically-proper >>’<< U+2019 replaced by Word or something.

---

Update: I can confirm there are two versions of the book in the game and the misrendered character is code 0x92 from Windows code page 1252, i.e., the U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark).

The mysterious being entrusting me with the knowledge left a cryptic coordinates 1037-1028-11 and 1035-1027-06.  I have no idea what they mean, but I guess some mathemagicans knowledgeable with the beast number of 770 will be able to make use of it.

---

I'd love to know how you interpolated those numbers - 1037-1028-11 and 1035-1027-06 out of the Unicode character but it this is correct those could be interpreted as coordinates.

After putting them into an online map (adjusted for the offset of the map - 1920 and 2050) the result is
https://tibiopedia.pl/maps/2957/3078/2/5

---

It's not from these numbers. These are just sector locations of the books. I'm bound to speak no more here :). One book is located here: https://tibiamaps.io/map#33145,32866,6:2 and the other here: https://tibiamaps.io/map#33186,32903,11:2