Stuck in an unwinnable situation?, Lost Fine Spear, now I can't pay the Bride Price! Options

[duck]

Hi all,
Thanks for reading, any advice would be appreciated.

I bought a fine spear at the bazaar in Tarna early in the game, but I not longer have it in my inventory, and can't get a new one from the merchant.

Now, I've won the Simbani initiation, gotten the drum, and all I need to set the final game events in motion is to pay Laibon the Bride Price of 5 Zebra Skins, 1 Fine Robe, and 1 Fine Spear. Unfotunately, somewhere along the way I must have dropped the fine spear (probably accidentally when i was dropping honey to catch the Honeybird). Now I have no fine spear and the merchant in the Bazaar no longer offers them for sale! He only offers throwing daggers now (I also already bought the fine dagger earlier).

The irony is you don't need throwing daggers to win the game, yet you can by an infinite amount from him and keep coming back. The fine spear, which you DO need to complete the game, is only buyable once. After you do, it is no longer available. Which wouldn't be a problem except that QFG3 ALLOWS you to drop items you need and never get them back. If it's somewhere in the Savannah, it's lost for the ages because I can never return to that site to pick it up.

So..I'm pretty sure I'm stuck now, 3/4 of the game through, after having spent all those tedious hours in the Village building up stats etc, solving game puzzles, countless trips back and forth from Tarna..all to find out I'm royally screwed this late in the game.

Please tell me there's a way to get another Fine Spear apart from starting over from scratch. I'm afraid this might be a a question of editing a saved game in a hex editor and re-adding it to my inventory. The problem with that is that I've opened the save in hex editor and there is are no tutorials online regarding INVENTORY editing for QFG3, only stats.

This is a great game, and with the patches and running in DosBox I've had almost no tech glitches playing. But I'm astonished that the game developers would allow a scenario like this to occur, this late in the game, rendering it unwinnable. It seems doubly silly considering I can see the darned fine spears for sale propped up against the merchant's table in the bazaar, I just can't buy one! Major programming oversight if you ask me. (I'm guessing the same is true of the fine robe, the zebra skins, or any other "key" items in the game. If you drop em, you're up a creek).

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

[Elsa Von Spielbu...]

Sorry I've no idea