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The two most recent expansions for Eldritch Horror have introduced the "advance the active mystery" effect that makes it possible to make progress on the mysteries via other channels. How this works with the normal mysteries, drawn from the Ancient One's mystery deck, is clear enough.

But does this also apply to an AO's final mystery, on the AO card's backside.

During last night's game we had successfully completed all the necessary 'normal' mysteries and were dealing with Syzygy's final mystery when an encounter card instructed us to "advance the active mystery".

The two possible interpretations were:

  1. Advance the final mystery as it is the one we are actively trying to solve
  2. The final mystery is a special case and can not be viewed as an active mystery, that title referring only to the "normal" mysteries.

Ultimately, we resolved this by applying the rule "when not sure about a rule, interpret it in the manner least beneficial to the investigators". I.e. we went with #2.

Given that Syzygy always requires you to resolve the final mystery, this is very likely to come up again. It would thus by very nice to know if there is an official ruling on this.

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Further digging turned up this thread where official rule clarifications from the maker of the game have been gathered.

Turns out it this has been addressed.

How do the effects "advance/solve the active Mystery" interact with the Final Mystery?

Quote :

The Final Mystery is not the active Mystery. As such, “advance the active Mystery” and “solve the active Mystery” effects will not affect the Final Mystery.

So, it seems I was correct in how I played it.

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I have not seen any actual 'official' ruling on this kind of a thing, but a mystery is a mystery. I see no reason why a ruling about 'advancing the active mystery' would not allow you to deal with the final mystery in this way. Given that the mysteries for Syzygy are a bit harder then the other Old Ones, I would rule on the former. I do not have his sheet with me right now, so I can't comment on it specifically, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

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Edit: looks like Kris found an official reference that shows the final mystery clarified to not be a normal active mystery.

I use the difference between epic monsters and non-epic monsters as a guiding example. Usually when you have a is-a relationship between two things, especially when the object A in the A is a B relationship outright contains the name of B within it, I tend to strongly favor applying all rules governing B toward governing A as well except where explicitly stated. That is, all rules governing monsters should be used for Epic monsters except where explicitly stated otherwise. Shub-Niggurath's mystery where you have to accumulate toughness of non-epic monsters is an example of this.

Following this line, the final mystery is a mystery and governed by all the rules and effects pertaining to mysteries except where noted. Any other approach would require a tedious amount of clarification to further include final mysteries in any mention of a mystery.

So, until or unless they clarify that the final mystery is not to be considered in this effect, you should consider it a mystery like normal ones.

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