When playing with this herald, does gaining a unique item in a trade with another investigator result in sanity loss to the receiving party ? Or is it only when gaining unique items from draws? 

zealot12 said:

Well, the Herald says "gain". Generally speaking, for Personal Stories and Relationship cards, the word "gain" implies you're not receiving it from one of your pals, so I'd go with no penalty for passing an item to somebody else. But honestly I don't know whether this was clarified somewhere

I don't think it is clarified anywhere, but I agree, specifically because of the official ruling on Personal Story cards. "Gain" doesn't involve trading—but "lose" and "discard" do count when you trade! Beware.

Tibs said:

Would you mind giving an example of this? I got the meaning of what you're saying, but I can't figure out a game situation where this matters (Arkham blackout at the moment, sorry)

Zoey Samaras fails her story if she discards her cross. It can't be the case that she can simply trade it away and suddenly be immune to failing her story in that regard (she can still be arrested though).

I can't think of other examples at the moment...

Tibs said:

Brilliant, Tibs, thx! Clearly, you're right

Julia said:

I was curious about this, so I flipped through the wiki. The wording on the cards seems to use "gain" to mean "obtain" and "draw" to mean "not obtained through trade" pretty consistently.  For each of the Relationship cards, the use of "gain blank" is followed by a parenthetical specifying that the item must come from a game effect. And for the personal story cards Mike, Mary, Skids, and Trish all have conditions involving "gain blank", but only in Mike's case can he actually obtain the item from another investigator and his PS is poorly worded anyway. Similar language for obtaining objects on the PS cards of Amanda, Dexter, Marie, and Patrice all read as "draw" so as to forbid trade. I wouldn't say that the use of language on the Relationship and PS cards is indicative of the intent of the Herald here, especially because it makes thematic sense for the Dark Pharaoh to curse ancient relics as they change hands.

Thanks for the feedback.

 We played that the receiver does lose sanity, even though it hadn't much of an impact as one of the investigators was Harvey Walters, and he was our prime collector of relics.

I'm aware that Personal Stories that involve gaining of items count only items that are drawn(otherwise they're far too easy to complete), but in this case I think it does make sense that the Dark Pharaoh having cursed the unique items would  inflict sanity loss on any investigator who received them in a trade.

Although then I think an exception should be made  for  items that change hands frequently in the course of the game . It wouldn't make much sense to keep losing sanity for the same cursed item being passed back and forth.So perhaps just limit the curse  to "new" items being gained in a trade, not previously owned ones.