Allies

[mqstout]

Loyalty tests only come up for a few (rarer) cards in the game and the cooperative scenario's villain events. A loyalty test is like any other. You roll loyalty number of dice and look for successes (the card requesting the loyalty test will tell you). One card is the event card named "Betrayal" ( http://flyingfrogwiki.com/ffpwiki/index....-_Sabotage )

Sidekicks are basically a "limit one" subset of allies. You can have 3 allies, but only one of them can be a sidekick. (Unless you're Jacques, in which case you can't have any sidekick at all. The official rules for sidekick: "A powerful type of Ally that is limited to 1 per Hero."

If an ally has wounds, it ADDS to your character's wound limit.

Otherwise, allies are just like items/gear. You just get them in different ways and various cards interact with them in different ways. But what's printing on them are the same. (See the gear "cigar" for one that grants an extra wound.) The wounds don't go on the item, but are all collected together. Any +X wounds from cards add to your character's base total before he's knocked out.

Some examples:
Gear: Cheaper for some heroes. More expensive vs the mob.
Allies: Not made more expensive than mob, but mob has a bunch of "kidnap" events that take them away and give them points. And any immobile heroes can be knocked off. One artifact adventure lets you resurrect a dead (in the discard pile) ally when you complete it.

Also, you're not the only one. Immobile and sidekick weren't gracefully explained when moving from the basic game to the full game. I believe they're only really explained as side bars or glossary terms. Just like Sneak tests [see Li Mei] almost never happen in the basic game, but happen regularly in the full game.