Dragon Magazine said:Implement: As long as it remains prominently visible, a holy symbol can be attached to any spot on your body. An orb can be attached in your chest like a jewel, or attached to a hand like a weapon. A rod, staff, or wand can be attached like a weapon. You take no attack roll penalty for using an attached staff as an implement.
Dragon Magazine said:Implement: An orbn can be embedded and hidden in your chest, or like a weapon. Rods and wands can be embedded and hidden in your arm and still function, leaving your hands free for other tasks. These two implements can instead be embedded like weapons.
So I was talking to a friend today about how I thought that using a component orb was munchkiny, because you could get the orb's enhancement bonus to spells without needing a hand to hold it in, but then I went over the quote again, and it looks like there is nothing specifically there that explicitly says that a chest-attached orb can be used to cast spells. On the one hand, the part about embedded implements actually seems to imply to me that a chest-embedded orb can't be used to cast spells, because arm-embedded rods and wands are specifically described as still being able to 'function', while no such mention is made for chest orbs. On the other, it seems weird that they would include chest orbs if they didn't have any real point (other than, 'you can't pickpocket my orb while I'm not using it').
Any thoughts on this? The arm-embedded rods and wands don't seem to bother me nearly as much, because the character wouldn't be able to use a magic shield or bracers while using that technique.