Preserving What Was Lost and Spells

L5R CCG Rules board, 1 July 2010

A topic from AEG's L5R CCG Rules forum, copied for Oracle of the Void from a copy of the forum saved in October 2015, so pages it didn't save are missing. Players' names are left out; the rules officials are named. Rulings are as they stood on these dates; later rulings, the rulebooks and the Rules Archive may differ.

A player, 1 July 2010

Preserving What Was Lost says:

Text Battle/Open: Attach a target Item in your discard pile to your target Personality, paying 3 less Gold if you are a Unicron player.

The question is are Spells considered "Items"?

My friend is playing a deck that depends on Spell based kill actions (Touch of Death and the like) and is wanting to use PWwL as a way to recurr the spells that have been used. The only ruling that I was able to find that touches on this is under the heading Cards Types and states:

Attachments: Followers, Items and Spells are all attachment cards. Attachments have a Gold Cost stat.

Further down the list is a definition of Items which says:

Items, with a dark blue background, are attachments that represent special objects in a Personality’s possession.

Unlike the separate Force of Followers, Items have a Force modifier stat in the upper left hand icon that directly raises or lowers their Personality’s Force. Items likewise have a Chi modifier stat. (There is more to this section, but for space purposes, I trimmed it down. Under this heading it also says to See Also: Weapons and Armor.)

What my friend is saying is that the Spell is an object in possesion of the personality and that, therefor, makes the Spell an item. I disagree, but could not illustrate the point to his satisfaction. May I have a ruling on this please?

Zen Faulkes (rules official), 1 July 2010

(A)re Spells considered "Items"?

No. That's why there are different sections for them in the rules wiki section on card types.