Recharging Magical Items

Every wizard or sorceress with any ambition wants to make magical items. Desire and talent don't always translate into time and resources, though, so truly wise mages often make charged magical items. These have the great advantage of needing to be made only once. Thereafter, charges to the item can be restored with much less effort and time.

Not all magical items can be or need to be recharged. One-shot items—mostly potions and scrolls—are consumed or blanked in use and clearly cannot be recharged. Permanent magical items—swords, armor, cloaks, most rings, and miscellaneous magical items—never expend charges and thus do not need to be recharged. The only magical items that can be recharged are those with (ahem) charges—wands, rods, staves, and some rings. Even then, the presence of charges is not a guarantee; particularly powerful devices cannot always be recharged. A listing of the more common rechargeable items can be found in Appendix A.

Magic is seldom logical, so most items are recharged according to their own unique formula. This is the type of thing that builds memory (or bookkeeping) skills in wizards. Some items can be recharged only by wizards, others by priests, and a few require the services of both. Most absorb the energy of a specific spell but, yet again, a few absorb virtually any type of magic. A few particularly heinous items draw their charges from the life force of a being (such as the staff of the elements). Not only do wizards of good inclination view these as morally bad, but such items are not normally considered rechargeable, so the rules for recharging these items do not apply. Furthermore, a wizard wielding a staff of the elements is not going to find many friends among the Elemental Planes!

General Guidelines

There are some rules that apply to all rechargeable items. These rules are the proof to spellcasters that the underlying structure of magic (or miracles) is logical. Others consider these rules a sign that spellcasters have too much time on their hands for theorizing. These are very general rules, but no exceptions have yet been found.

• An item being recharged must have at least one charge remaining. Items that do not have at least one charge cannot be recharged. The magic that binds and stores the charges is lost when the last charge is used.
• An item can be recharged only by a spellcaster able to cast the spell and of the same class as the person who made the item. A priest could not use a priestly detect magic spell to recharge a wizard's wand of magic detection—unless, of course, the priest (or one of that ilk) made the wand in the first place.
• An item can only be recharged with spells of equal or greater power than the greatest ability of the device. This rule has two effects. First, it encourages low-level spellcasters to study and learn. Although 1st level mages can cast burning hands, recharging wands of fire is beyond their scope. True, such wands can be used to create burning hands spell effects, but the same wands can also be used for fireball and wall of fire spells. The greatest of these spells requires a 7th level caster. Second, it often forces mages to make a temporary sacrifice by using a higher level spell for a lesser stored effect.

In addition to these absolute rules, the recharging process often has special requirements that must be met for the attempt to succeed. While there is no limit to what might be required, some are more common than others.

• The spellcaster must be of a specific level, greater than the normal minimum needed to cast the spell. This ensures that the spells used to charge the item are of appropriate power, particularly when the range, damage, and/or intensity vary by level. It also reflects the difficulty of getting the charge to hold in the device.

• The charge may require additional spells before it is complete. For wizards, the most common of these additions is the enchant an item spell, especially in the case of powerful or unusually charged items. This spell must be used whenever the stored charge does not match the spell used to charge it. A wand of illumination can create a sunburst effect not exactly reproduced by any spell. Therefore, enchant an item must be used to transform the other spell (continual light in this case) into a usable charge.

  For priests, there is no single spell that provides this function. Instead, the priest must carefully choose spells that combine to create a logical alternative. There is no priest spell that matches the staff of slinging's catapult power. Instead, it is achieved by combining animate rock and shillelagh when recharging an item.

These two conditions are only the most common requirements encountered. Others can certainly exist if the DM so chooses, ranging anywhere from special material components to tongue-twisting recitations. The demands of magic are not always logical.

Recharging Nonstandard Items

Appendix A provides a list of the more common chargeable magical items found in the DUNGEON MASTER" Guide and the Tome of Magic. The appendix does not list every chargeable magical item that could exist, for DMs and players both have the ability to devise new items for the game.

New magical items are recharged according to the rules already given. In most cases there is little question concerning the spell(s) needed to charge the item or the maximum number of charges. The spell should be the one that best matches the effect of the magical device and is of equal or greater power. If no single spell exists, the DM can specify a combination of spells where each embodies a property of the device's effect. Normally these are the same as the spells needed to provide charges when the device was first created.

As for the maximum number of charges, this is normally fixed when the item is created. However, if the number is unknown, decide what the device most closely resembles—wand, staff, or rod—and apply the charge limit for that item.