The Professor said:

… and then I came across this little number:

Unique Items

Q: What happens if there is a monster surge on a gate with the Warding of the Yellow Sign (Unique Item)? Since no other gates may receive more monsters than the surging gate, do no monsters appear at all?

A: The monster surge is resolved normally, except the monsters tokens that would normally be placed at the gate with the Warding of the Yellow Sign are not drawn, even though they are included in the total number of tokens drawn as a result of the monster surge.

No, no, no ~ a Unique Item shall NOT be more powerful than an Investigator…

The Professor said:

Well spotted, Prof! As for me, I'll keep on playing Kate as I've always done. Still have to read the whole document, though

(am I the only one here with the commands for text editing written in Spanish?)

The Professor said:

I concur! I will probably house rule Kate a little bit.

Julia said:

Are you referring to the icons above the texbox? Bold, italic and underlined are called "negrita", "cursiva", "subrayado" for me, so I guess you're not the only one. ;-] Is Firefox still being mean with you, btw? =P

eiterorm said:

Firefox seems to work now, thanks for asking :-) Sometimes I see everything a little distorted (imagine to cut the monitor into two parts, following a vertical line, then swap the right side with the left side and then have move the left part down and the right part up), but it happens very rarely, fortunately

And yes, negrita, cursiva, subrayado and all the rest. But "negrita" is still ctrl+b. Oh, well, I'm happy a forum about AH attempts to my Sanity…

Julia said:

It is a forum problem. It thought it was my birthday a couple weeks ago. It's in June…

The Professor said:

That's funny, Professor; I was just coming here to comment on this very inconsistancy. I was all set to resign myself to Kate's newly-FAQ'd monster surge quirkiness when I came across that tidbit about the Warding of the Yellow Sign on my bus ride home (thank you FF for having everything in .pdf format). This does seem to be at odds with the ruling on Kate when she's at a gate that's not the source of the surge:

-Warding of the Yellow Sign on source of surge: Allocate all monsters and then cancel the ones at WotYS location.

-Kate on a different gate: Allocate all monsters as if Kate's gate does not exist.

Note, however, that when Kate is at the source of the surge, she IS more powerful than WotYS: she cancels the entire surge! The FAQ is missing a ruling on what, if anything, WotYS does when it's on a gate other than the one the surge is centered on. If it does the same thing there, then it is more powerful than Kate, which seems wrong. Maybe they're assuming we'll take the card's wording, "No monsters may appear via gates at this location," to mean that it doesn't do anything at all (are surge monsters coming out of all open gates, or just appearing on them? That's getting pretty deep into the Arkham semantics). Would have been nice to have this spelled out.

TC,

After waiting this long for the FAQ, I agree it could have been a bit cleaner and clearer in a few areas. I work with linguists and I was not-so-surprised to see a number of editing issues even in this FAQ ~ words missing, etc.

Anyway, I'm still of two minds on Kate when she's at the location of a Monster Surge. Obviously, this would only happen when she's returned to Arkham and has an Explored Token while sitting on a gate when the Mythos Card reveals a gate opening and thus, a Monster Surge. Should she really cancel the whole thing? I don't know…during a Monster Surge, monsters are entering, ostensibly, from any gate…if Kate were at another gate she would only stop the ones attempting to appear there. Maybe she should only prevent the ones attempting to appear at the primary surge location…I don't know, it's getting late.

Having not read the entire FAQ yet, it appears to have muddied the water significantly in relation to this discussion. The ruling makes 'sense' but seems to go against what (at least my) logic dictates about Winthrop's ability. I think ultimately, that this ruling comes into question very rarely as and because of that fact I don't necessarily see this as a nerf to Kate as much as their way to interpret the rules.

I'll agree with The Professor that no unique item should be more powerful than an investigator. In this case though the only difference (that I can see, and it's late) is that Kate will redirect a surging monster to another gate while Warding simply 'eats' the monster. Since Kate can still move, prevent gates from opening and monsters from spawing in almost every other situation, I don't think she's less powerful. The FAQ does make Kate weaker (only slightly) and Warding better, but I feel it's an almost negligible amount.