[Notes for the run of September 30, 1999.]

Anton draws a line in the ground pointing toward the star that we think
will lead us to the Hermit.  About halfway through the night, fog rolls in,
and we can no longer see the star.

In the morning, it's still so foggy that we can't see further than about 20
feet.  Even Claire's IR doesn't see much of the terrain at any distance.
We decide to wait a while to see how long the fog will last.  It gradually
lightens; we can see more or less okay by 11 or so, and the fog has lifted
completely by 2pm.  We decide to travel once the fog is light enough, and
to travel into the night while the star is visible (assuming it is each
night).

We travel a ways, and then Rhori, at the head of the party, says, "Where?"
After some confusion (this being Rhori, after all), we realise he's talking
to Hobbes again.  He says Hobbes has picked up a fresh scent of snake.  We
pause to cast some spells (Bless, magic sight, invisibility) and string our
bows, and then continue forward cautiously.  Anton and Brillig are on foot;
Anton puts a magic torch some distance above him so we'll know where he is.

The horses rear up, spilling Claire and Mia, who land with a thud but take
no serious damage.  We see that several normal-sized snakes have come up
from holes and spooked the horses.  As we watch, the snakes begin to expand
into snakemen.

Paris waits, but Attila attacks immediately, as does Rhori, who goes after
one of the three surrounding the fallen Mia.  Attila misses, Rhori slices
one quite thoroughly.  Calais stays on his horse, but with his limited
riding skill it takes his full action to get it under control.  Brillig
waits; Anton readies his sword.

Paris decides to go ahead and swing, and hits another in the shoulder.  She
notices that the shoulder seems harder to penetrate than it looks; the
scales must offer some protection.  She swings again, getting a critical
hit in the head.  That seems to be sufficient.  Rhori hits his again and
puts it out of action for good.  At the bottom of segment 3, Brillig uses
his saved attack and crits one in the shoulder with the staff.  It
collapses into its coils.  Paris hears a noise off to her right; a sort of
"breathing in" sound.

Calais decides to move his horse away from the snakes and ready an arrow.
The horse is quite willing to move away.  (Calais figured his riding skill
wasn't good enough to move the horse around in melee.)  Brillig goes over
to help Attila, who again misses.  One snakeman hits Attila in the arm with
a sword; another hits Rhori to no effect.  A third hits Claire in the knee.
The remaining two on Mia both hit her; Mia is hurt, and is briefly stunned,
causing her ice armor to fade away.  Claire rolls to her feet, but cannot
then cast a spell.

Paris smacks another one, which tries to block but fails.  She notes that
her horse seems to have had some military training, since she doesn't have
to spend a lot of effort controlling it as long as she's not trying to get
it to fight as well.

Rhori misses this time.  Hobbes leaps in to protect Mia, roaring loudly.
(We presume he's what Paris heard drawing a deep breath.)  He swipes at the
one Anton hit, but misses.  Brillig whacks one on the head, and it falls
over.  Claire spends her remaining half move to look around, but sees
nothing more coming.

Calais tries to shoot the other snakeman on Mia, but misses.  Rhori gets
hit in the leg.  Mia rolls a bit further away and stands, Anton swings and
misses, and Claire shoots but misses.  Hobbes rips his opponent to shreds.
Brillig runs over to Paris's opponent and knocks it unconscious.  Before it
can fall over, Paris crits it in the head.  It remains unconscious.

Calais shoots again and this time hits the one remaining on Mia.  Rhori
makes a soliloquy, "Yes, yes, I'm fine," but then gets hit again.  Hobbes
cuisinarts Calais's target.  Anton connects solidly with the one on Rhori
but it doesn't go down.  He does stun it, though, so Paris rides over and
crits it in the head.

The healers go around and heal various wounds.  Brillig opts to heal Mia's
chest wound.  (He's a monk, not a priest!)  He also heals Attila.  (If one
of the women were to go over to Attila after the battle, we can guess what
Attila would think she had in mind.)

Calais calls out that if any of the heads are intact, we should keep it
from getting messed up, so Paris can get a venom sample.  One of Hobbes's
eviscerated victims has an undamaged head, and Paris gets her sample.

Calais and Hobbes go off to find one of the spooked horses; Rhori chases
down the other.  Neither horse managed to injure itself.

There were 8 cards: one apiece (including Attila).  Attila and Brillig keep
theirs; the rest go to Calais, who secretes them in various locations.

A ways further along, Hobbes reports even more snakemen ahead.  We decide
to skirt around them.  Some ways further, we hear drums behind us.  As we
travel, we continue to hear drums, staying about the same distance away.
Finally, toward dusk we come to a thick hedge.  Anton flies up to look past
the hedge.  He also looks back toward where the drums are, and sees lots of
torches headed our way.

Off to one side, he sees an opening in the hedge, but beyond the opening he
can see more hedges inside, and also a few hills with a single tree on the
top of each hill.

Anton tells us about the maze.  According to the stories he's heard,
there's probably a monster in the center.  We head off toward the indicated
opening, hoping to reach it before the torches reach us.  Someone leads
Mia's horse so she can cast her Bless spell again.

As we reach the opening, we see a horde of snakemen with torches coming up
from behind.  Some of them have staves, and some look like leaders, and
some carry banners that appear to be made of human skins.

We go in, and Anton casts Bar Portal.  The snakemen stop pursuing us,
though whether that's because of the spell or because they don't want to
enter the maze is unclear.  Mia also casts her Luck spell.

We walk into the maze.  Paris has studied cartography, and keeps notes.
[In practice, Marian maintained the map, but I don't know if that means
Claire was doing it or just that Marian was being helpful.]  The outer
hedge walls are quite impenetrable, and the ground is solid stone with a
thin covering of dirt and grass.  Eventually we find an open area.  Paris
and Calais move forward to check it out, and the center portion of the
floor opens up under Paris.  She grabs at Calais, who manages to keep them
both from falling in.  They catch a glimpse of a 4" drop to a stone floor,
and shadowy horned figures ducking back into the darkness.

We get through the open area by keeping to the edges.  Soon after we come
to another room, narrow and long with an opening off one side.  This time
Calais steps cautiously forward, checking for traps.  The floor in the room
seems okay, but when he comes to the opening he notices the grass seems
odd, as though it had been taken up and placed back down.  Beyond the
opening is a two-hex alcove.

Calais carefully lifts the grass and finds a steel wire -- a steel wire?
Wow.  He wonders how one would make such a thing.  It runs into the walls
bounding the opening.  He notes that the walls seem to be stone under the
hedge growth; checking elsewhere we find the other walls are the same.
Calais reports back, and Anton comes forward to check for magic.  He says
the whole place feels like the boundary between Tarot and Torat, but
there's nothing special about the wire or the alcove.  We decide not to
investigate the alcove further, and continue exploring.

We come to another large area, and again the floor starts to give way.
More prepared for it this time, Calais easily avoids falling in.  We see
six more horned, hairy figures below, fading into the darkness.

We continue on in this way.  Large areas have fall-out floors; dead ends
have tripwires at the point where they can be perceived to be dead ends.
Eventually we come to a place where the opening is particularly narrow and
twisty.  Calais enters cautiously, and finds a room where the floor is bare
stone, with a steel symbol inlaid.  On the far wall is mounted a lever.

Nobody recognises the symbol.  The mages determine that the symbol is
likely a focus; the closest spell it reminds any of them of is the
water-school teleport, though it's definitely not of any school of magic we
recognise.  Anton touches the symbol and finds that the metal is enough to
prevent casting arcane spells.  He wants to try the lever right away, but
Paris convinces everyone to finish exploring the maze first, to see if
there's another way out or any other noteworthy feature.  She also wants us
to familiarise ourselves with the paths in case we end up having to run
from something at the other end of the teleport.  We find nothing else of
note, though there are some one-hex pits.  The snakemen are still outside.

We tie a string to the lever to distinguish its appearance, then everyone
clambers into the room, and we pull the lever.  The string disappears.
Attila notices that the stars have changed position.  We work our way out
of the maze, which seems to have the same pattern as before, except when we
get to the exit there are no snakemen.  The pits are closed in this maze,
but when we open one we find more minotaurs waiting below.

We go outside.  As we continue north, we notice a large river behind us.
Claire checks and finds that a telluric current that had been north of us
when we originally entered the maze, is now south of us.  We adjust our
direction based on the star, which is again visible, and continue until the
fog rolls in once more.

The next day, we continue north.  [At this point we come to the section
that got played through at the end of the previous run.]  As we're heading
along, Rhori and Hobbes scouting as usual, Rhori suddenly hears Hobbes
saying "Oh, look at this."  Then Rhori loses contact.  He goes up to where
Hobbes was, and finds his tracks alongside booted footprints, which walk to
the side of a hill and disappear.  Rhori climbs the hill and sees it is one
of about a dozen, each with a single tree at the top.  But he finds no sign
of Hobbes.  Eventually he heads back and tells the rest of the party.

We go with him and look at the hills.  Anton flies up to look at them from
above, and thinks they form some sort of pattern, but he can't quite pin it
down.  He draws it for the rest of us, and some of us recognise it as the
constellation Leo.  The leaves of the trees even match the colors of the
stars.

We try some magical spells, and find we can't tunnel into these hills.  The
area looks like another Tarot/Torat transitional area.

Calais tries to find a secret entrance into the hill, but no luck.  He
applies his knowledge of hiding things in plain sight, and notices that
each hill has a flat rock somewhere on it, about the size of a dinner
plate.  We can't lift it, or push it.  It doesn't appear to be a magical
trigger.

Calais suggests leaving an offering to Leo on one of the rocks.  It takes a
while to find some fresh meat, but eventually Rhori stumbles across a whole
warren of rabbits.  He plops the juiciest one onto the rock, and suddenly
there's a red-haired, bearded man standing by the tree, thanking him.  It's
been a long time since anyone offered him anything.

The man introduces himself as Leo, and after a bit of back-and-forth asks
Rhori if he had a companion.  A moment later, Hobbes is bounding up the
hill.  He licks Rhori's hand, and then their link is back.

Anton addresses Leo, and we proceed to learn that Leo used to be one of the
Tarot.  He says the constellations (well, twelve of them anyway) were once
part of the Tarot, as were the four elements; they were Major Arcana.  But
the minor arcana, those who have choice, ruled that this arrangement was
unbalanced.  Those who had gained Understanding used the Keys to change
things, so now the constellations are not part of the Arcana (their
influence over births and such is now incorporated in the major arcana
known as the Star), and the elements are now dispersed through the minor
arcana.

The other constellations are also hanging out in places like this one.  The
Virgin is over that-a-way.

Leo hasn't heard of the Hermit, though he knows of the Magician.  He
remembers Justice, but doesn't know anything of where he is now.

The "bright ones", who are painted blue, prefer things the way they were,
and they tend to attack anyone else they come across.

The mazes are, of course, inhabited by Taurus.

[People are welcome to come up with more questions for Leo, either to ask
next time or to handle via email.  Whether Pat will answer any such
questions appears to be more problematic...  Speaking of which, Calais
has one:  When we find out the mazes belong to Taurus, I'll ask about the
symbol in the center of the maze.  Assuming Leo tells me it's Taurus's
symbol, I'll ask about the rest of the constellations (presumably actually
just the Zodiac) and their symbols.  If he's willing to say more about the
Zodiac (their domains, personalities, etc.) I'll even consider spending a
card to learn it all, if that's legal.  (How much "training" does it take
for a card to add a knowledge skill?)]