"As you enter the Department of Alchemy, a professor looks up in horror. He grabs an ancient artifact from a locked drawer in his desk and holds it up before your face, chanting and making symbolic motions with the item. If you are Cursed, discard the Curse. If you are not Cursed, then you are Blessed."

Okay... Why is it that weird wording ? Why not just saying "You're blessed" ?

I believe the only difference between that wording and the "You're blessed" wording, is when the investigator is already blessed. I believe, and may be wrong, that's because when you get a duplicate special card, you discard the previous one and keep the new one. Am I right ?

So the only difference is that a blessed guy will have to roll for his blessing next upkeep. With a "You're blessed", he wouldn't have to do it. I'm right or did I miss something else ?

Probably a late-production boo-boo, similarly to how sometimes it says delayed and sometimes it says stay here next turn . They probably decided that a blessing cancels a curse outright a bit late in development, or perhaps they were just being needlessly explicit (such as "a gate and monster appear!").

So, you think that it should treated as a "you're blessed" ?

What do you mean by "a gate and a monster appear" ? If a gate appear, a monster (or 2 if 5 players and more) appears ? Whatever the way the gate appears ?

"You touch Founder's Rock. Make a Luck (-1) check. If you pass, there is an electrifying shock that opens your mind to the elder things of eons past. Lose 1 Stamina, but gain 2 Clue tokens and draw 1 Spell. If you fail, you find a strange carving. As you finger the grooves, a gate opens here and you are drawn through it.". Should I put a monster in play too ?

I always thought you should. Whenever a gate opens, two things happen:

1. a doom token is added
2. a monster emerges from the gate

I don't think that encounter is an exception; I think the wording has been redundant on all the others.

As for the first question: I've always find that encounter to be redundant, and badly worded. But... if the wording is accurate, there can be consequences: Mary's personal story for example. If a cursed character has to discard his Curse without being Blessed, you don't put a clue on Mary's PS. I know, it's lawyery, and I disagree with this interpretation, anyway

Julia said:

I thought also that if blessed, you get a new "Bless card" so no roll nest upkeep. Am I right ?

Hugues said:

You absolutely are

Julia said:

And by any chance, do you have the reference ? I can't find where i read it.

Hugues said:

Yeah, I also remember it was clarified somewhere, but I don't remember where.

Anyway, it is implicit in the way Blessings / similar stuff works: you don't have to roll during Upkeep in the turn following the one you acquired it. Hence, if you're Blessed during turn n, during turn n+1 you don't have to roll, regardless of whether you were already Blessed or not

Wasn't it clarified in the original base AH rules?

Might've been. Sadly, I've no reference on hand. But there is no other reason why a "new" blessing shouldn't get a first-upkeep roll unless it's brand-new (i.e., replaced the previous).

The distinction is pedantic until you use the Nodens Guardian.

I keep the same topic to keep my questions grouped together...

That Rumor says that there is some activity in "Southside Streets". In fact, you need to be in Ma's Boarding House to pass the rumor. Any idea why the activity and the place where you can pass the rumor aren't the same ? Has the activity to be in a street ?

Must be some sort of mistake.

Hugues said:

Yeah, there is certanly a mistake. I play that the activity is in the streets, as per any other rumor of the game

Here's what I said on BGG:

Yeah, but all of the other rumors are resolved in the streets.

Chances are, during playtesting, the designers realized that putting resolutions in location spaces would cause this very confusion, so went to change all the resolution spaces to streets. They changed the "activity at" on the Southside Strangler card, but forgot to update the pass condition text.

I always thought it was a translation mistake from english to italian

So you all play it with the activity on the streets? So far I thought the mistake was the opposite. I liked having an encounter at Ma's after passing the rumor. Makes sense not to have this one exception, though.

Tox said:

I thought that was a mistake from english to french too. Then I had a look to the english version and still the same.

So Tibs, you think that the pass event should take place in the streets, instead of at Ma's Boarding House ?

I think so, but I'm not going to wage war against the so-called "card purists" who prefer to resolve the rumor as explicitly stated on the card.

(...I'm resisting the urge to burst into a flurry of Scalia jokes here, but should it come to that, y'all can blame the law class I'm taking this semester)