Hey, here's something that I've encountered and thought I'd get cleared up. I'm between sessions and currently have an investigator planning their next few moves. In play is the environment card 'Chill of the Grave', (increasing undead toughness by 1), a zombie is roaming around and an investigator is aiming to spend monster trophies at the appropriate science location. If the investigator already has a Gug (3 toughness) and he kills the zombie, then spends his trophies would this mean -

1) The zombie (1 toughness) now has a toughness of 2, for the duration of the game.

2) The zombie (1 toughness) now has a toughness of 2, only whilst the 'Chill of the Grave' is in play.

3) The zombie only ever has a toughness of 1 for puposes of spending trophies.

The way I see it is the zombie has a toughness of 2 whilst the card is in play and therefore the investigator can spend that and their Gug for a total of 5 toughness and receive the 2 clue tokens. Which the investigator needs to bump the total of clues to 5, in preparation for a gate seal.

Any thoughts?

Option 2 is correct.

Modifiers apply to those monsters as long as the modifiers are out. That means that all undead trophies, either on the board or in an investigator's possession (or otherwise: "A monster appears" encounters and The Terrible Experiment), have +1 toughness. If the investigator does not spend the Zombie trophy before "Chill of the Grave" is replaced, the Zombie trophy will drop back down to 1 toughness.

On the other hand, if an investigator defeated a regular Zombie (1 toughness), and then the Chill of the Grave environment came out, that trophy would have +1 toughness even though it was killed at 1 toughness.

Tibs said:

I hadn't even thought of that! I suppose you really have to be literal when applying rules. Thanks for clearing it up. BTW, I've read many of the posts here and you're always very helpful and clear. Cheers, on behalf of all noobs!

:-)

Thank you very much! I am truly flattered.

I've found that it helps to justify the spending this way: some magical force or other is making undead creatures more powerful. Naturally, your contacts at the River Docks and Dissection Lab et al are going to have an increased interest in obtaining these monsters and will pay up more readily, which is why they're even interested in the zombies and ghosts that were killed even before the effect started to happen.