Does this work? Recharge staff+ ancestral relic

[Seer_of_Heart]

Dragon 338 has an interesting acf about having a staff familiar and some feats that go along with it. One of those feats lets you sacrifice your own spell slots to recharge your staff if you upgrade it to be a magic staff. Could I use ancestral relic to make my staff into a partially charged staff and charge it with that feat? And then afterwards could I upgrade my staff again with the new value from the extra charges?

[Yuki Akuma]

You can't craft partially-charged magic items. When you craft a magic staff, it has 50 charges, period.

[Seer_of_Heart]

Ha dang I figured. If it worked it'd be a pretty fun trick though. I'm gonna stick with slowly upgrading my staff with wishes I guess.

[Yuki Akuma]

Now, you could make it into a magic item with less than 50 charges - by not making it a magic staff, per se, but simply a magic item that happens to be a staff. But that lower number would be its maximum number of charges, anyway.

[Maginomicon]

There are rules in the magic item compendium for partially-charged wands (which have a different market value as a result). It's thus reasonable that a wand can be crafted with fewer than 50 charges. The methodology implies that the method can be applied to anything that uses a limited number of charges, so a staff could be crafted with fewer than 50 charges. This wouldn't change the fact though that Recharge Staff has its own upper limit of 50 charges.

[Seer_of_Heart]

There are rules in the magic item compendium for partially-charged wands (which have a different market value as a result). It's thus reasonable that a wand can be crafted with fewer than 50 charges. The methodology implies that the method can be applied to anything that uses a limited number of charges, so a staff could be crafted with fewer than 50 charges. This wouldn't change the fact though that Recharge Staff has its own upper limit of 50 charges.

What page are these rules on? I should go through the entire MIC one day but I've been pretty busy.

[tyckspoon]

What page are these rules on? I should go through the entire MIC one day but I've been pretty busy.

They aren't actually rules - the MIC doesn't tell you how to make them or give updated pricing schemes for wands to let you create them on a per-charge basis. Closest you get to a 'rule' is working backwards from the rule for selling a partly-depleted item; if a 10-charge wand is only worth 20% of its full market value, you might infer that a wand that only had 10 charges to *start* with should also only cost 1/5th the usual to make or purchase in that condition.. but there's no rule actually telling you to do that or giving permission to craft a wand with less than 50 charges.

The updated random treasure charts in the book do include wands with 10, 20, 30, and 40 charges in addition to the standard 50, so that you can (for example) give your players a 10 charge wand of caster level 1 Magic Missile at a point where that's still a useful item, but it doesn't include GP values for these items - they aren't listed in the chart of Items By Cost.