Okay, I finally got to play a real game against a friend with the two decks from the Eldritch Edition Premium Starter set. One deck was Syndicate/Miskatonic and the other was Hastur/Yog. It was fairly one-sided since the bad guys's Terror icons made it pretty rough for me (see below). However, given this is my first real session, I ran into the following questions.

1) If neither character has the icon for the Story phase, is it skipped without any effect?

2) If both players have Terror icons, say the Active player has a printed Terror icon while the Opposing player has a Terror icon provided by an event/effect, neither character goes insane, yes?

As the humans, I pretty much always had to play two characters to a story to remove a monster on a story. One character was sacrificed for the hit to Insanity, and the second character to wound the monster killing it. The only time this didn't happen is when I played a card that provided a Terror icon to my human character.

3) If both the Active and Opposing characters have one Combat icon each, do both of the character kill each other? I think I read that ties cancel each other, but it seems weird that Combat would not have "damage" of some sort.

Buatha said:

1) Yep.

2) Yep. Note, that several 'human' characters have Willpower which will prevent them from going insane.

3) As with all struggles, if there is a tie, nothing happens. The exception is if one side has more 'fast' characters, those will break a tie.

jhaelen said:

Still you need the actual icon to win the struggle. So, if the tie is 0-0 icons, no amount of fast will help you win the struggle.

Okay, I had a second play-through with a friend that went much better, however we have two new questions.

1) Embracing the Abyss: What does "exactly" mean? If the story has four icons, does it simply mean you can remove three of the four success tokens or does the story have to have "exactly" three and only three success tokens?

2) Miskatonic Administrator/Construction Crew: "before a card effect resolves..." means that the Disrupt can't be used in a Terror struggle, right?

Buatha said:

-- Hastur --
Embracing the Abyss
-------------------
Type : Event
Cost : 3
Subtype :
Game Text: Action: discard exactly 3 success tokens from a story.
Flavor text: The children skipped and chanted this rhyme: "Veronica, Victoria, Vincent, Vance "Knew that destiny was chance "Vanya, Victor, Violet, Vaughn "Once were here but now are gone."
Illustrator: Sedone Thongvilay
Collector's Info: UT C80

It means that you'll have to remove exactly 3 succestokens, or the effect fails and you remove none at all. It doesn't matter whose Succes tokens they are, you can remove 1 of your opponent and two of yourself, or any combination possible, but there have to be 3.

Buatha said:

No, you can't. Even if you could, the effects of the Terror struggle has to go somewhere, so if you have multiple characters at the story eligible to go insane, they have to take the fall.

This looked like a good place to put two questions related to the Investigation Story Struggle so here they are.

1)If a player wins the Story card with the needed 5 success tokens via the Investigation Struggle, does the Story Effect always take place or is it still optional for the winner to activate it? The Eldritch rulebook makes it sound like the story effect has to take place in this instance .

2)When the Story is won and replaced in the Investigative phase, are skill points still compared for a success token on the new Story brought into play?

Boremac said:

1) The winner chooses if he wants to activate it. You don't have to. You can try to win a story to prevent an effect.

2) When a story is won, characters committed to it are uncommitted. The new story won't have committed characters, and won't resolve anymore.