I recently was scrolling through spells when I overheard a commercial on the radio mentioning whalebone being used in corsets. And while I have no urge to play a character with one, it got me thinking...

Are there rules specifying the materials a wand needs to be made of? Or could one be made of said bones then placed in a corset?

Also, are there specific rules for how a wand must be used? Could one simply touch the wand (same move equivalent as drawing) then activate the spell from their fingertips?

It seems like these are mainly RP issues, but I wanted to be sure there weren't specific requirements.

I just thought the idea of a character who uses wands by touching the bones in her corset then casting the spells from her fingertips sounded cool.

Generally, there aren't usually specified materials for the making of the wand itself. As far as touching something then casting the spell from your fingertips, that would be something else, though similar in concept.

In my homebrew campaign world, different wands are actually made from different woods, depending on their characteristics. For example, Clerical spell wands are crafted of White Oak. Arcane wands are generally crafted of red oak. However, for 'evil' cleric spells and arcane necromancer spells, the wand would be crafted of blackwood (essentially African Blackwood) and hemlock respectively

According to SRD
"A wand is a thin baton..."
and
"..To activate a wand, a character must hold it in hand (or whatever passes for a hand, for nonhumanoid creatures) and point it in the general direction of the target or area."

Wand materials are all fluff. The cost of the magic item is an abstraction for the rarity of and/or difficulty of acquiring the various oddball materials needed for making the item.

I suppose if you had a corset made of healing wands you could declare that they are all pointing inwards towards you and thus could activate them... But the need to point them means that corset wands have limited utility.

Sounds like it would an interesting armor, intended to buff/heal the wearer.

As Ikul said above, you have to hold a wand in your hand in order to activate it. There would be two ways to do what you imagine, however.

The simpler is to re-flavor the healing belt (Magic Item Compendium) as a healing corset - it may even be arguable it still only takes the waist slot.

The other is the wand chamber from Dungeonscape. A weapon (like armor spikes) can have a wand chamber placed it in. Then you count as holding the wand you place in the chamber when you wield that weapon.

In Magic of Faerun they have a section where certain gems added into a wands creation affect it depending on spell school/descriptors. A fire opal for instance can be placed in a wand of a spell that has the fire descriptor. The advantage is the wand now has +1 to it's DC to save or a +1 to it's CL. I think it's pretty nifty.

If you wanted wands to be made from specific materials I suppose you could. I'd think that would slow down things a lot though.

Yes ... but that's a special-case rule that alters the mechanics of the item. SRD-standard wands have no mechanical restrictions on material composition.

Still good info to know.