Does a Planar Shepherd's Planar Bubble affect spells cast from wands or scrolls?

Question

The Planar Shepherd prestige class offers an ability at 5th level to temporarily apply the traits of a specific plane (chosen when you first take levels in the class) to the area around you. This explicitly includes the magic traits of that plane, which affect spells cast within them. One example is Fernia, the Sea of Fire, which freely maximizes and empowers fire spells cast there.

Does this effect apply to spell trigger and spell completion items, or only spells cast by a character? Likewise, does this effect apply to spell-like abilities?

Answer 1

The effects apply to all spells

The relevant Planar Trait of Fernia is:

• Spells with the fire descriptor are maximized and enlarged

So all spells with the fire descriptor are maximized and enlarged. There are no further conditions about these spells, including none about how they are being cast.

The rules for scrolls state:

Using a scroll is basically like casting a spell. (...) A spell successfully activated from a scroll works exactly like a spell prepared and cast the normal way.

Scrolls use spell completion to cast the spell, which means spells cast from scrolls are still spells, and will be affected like normal spells.

The rules for wands state:

Wands use the spell trigger activation method, so casting a spell from a wand is usually a standard action that doesn’t provoke attacks of opportunity.

Again, a spell cast with activation trigger from a wand is still a spell, and will be affected.

The rules for spell-like abilities state:

Usually, a spell-like ability works just like the spell of that name. (...) Spell-like abilities cannot be used to counterspell, nor can they be counterspelled. In all other ways, a spell-like ability functions just like a spell

Here it is a bit less clear cut, because different from the two other cases, where we were dealing with spells that were just cast in another way, here the ability that works like a spell, but is not a spell.

I would argue that being enhanced by the plane falls under "all other ways", and the planar trait should affect spell-like abilities like spells. It makes sense narratively that a Balor that casts Fire Storm on Fernia using his spell-like ability would have the effect maximized just as if the spell had been cast as a spell. However, a spell like ability still is not a spell, so I would check with my DM here how they handle it.