The rules say that when you land on a square, you either encounter any character there, or you encounter the square (or cards). How does this work with the Maze and Marsh cards, which state "this card remains here, when you land here...", and the Sorceress abilities that say "when you land on a character"? Do these "land on" rules occur before any encountering occurs? If so, how many games end up with the Sorceress owning all the mules?

You " land on " the Marsh card when you decide to encounter it.

If there was a character in the space, and you decide to encounter them instead, you would not enounter the Marsh and would therefore not land on it.

This needs to be clarified, as we interpreted "land on" as happening before "encounter" because that's the way the rules are worded.

1. Movement – The player rolls a die and moves his character that number of spaces around the board.

2. Encounters – Once a character has finished his move, he must encounter either the space or a character in the space where he lands.

You move a space that has the Marsh and a Thief. You decide not to encounter the Thief so the Marsh becomes the encounter for the space you land in. If you decide to encounter the Thief then you do not encounter the Marsh.

This has lad to some sticky issues in the past with multiple card spaces like Hidden Valley. Let's say the Marsh is on the Hidden Valley, but so is the Magic Portal. Can you use the Magic Portal OR get stuck in the Marsh? Do you still draw a card before you choose to use the Magic Portal because it is a Draw 3 card space? It would seem odd if you could simply choose not to encounter the Marsh since it is a negative (miss a turn) and draw another card and/or enter the Magic Portal.

Places have an encounter number of "6". So if there are two Place cards on the space, you will have to encounter them both, at the same time. If the Marsh and, say, the Magic Stream are both on the space, you will gain one Strength as well as losing a turn, IIRC.

If a space instructs a player to draw cards, the cards to be drawn are always Adventure Cards, drawn from the top of the Adventure deck. If there are already any cards of any type on the space (such as Adventure, Purchase, or Spell Cards), then only enough cards to make up the given number may be drawn.

Adventure Cards must be dealt with in the order determined by their encounter number, starting with the lowest number, then the next lowest, and so on. In the case of a tie, the character encounters Adventure Cards in the order they were drawn.

From a past game:

A character was on the Mines space, having successfully passed his Craft check, waiting to move on to the Vampires next turn. I cast Random on that character, and he was transformed into a Toad, and dropped all his Objects, Gold, and Followers on the Mines space. That player decided to turn back to the Portal of Power. After resuming his normal form, that player re-entered the Portal of Power and went back to the Mines space.

1. May the character choose to encounter the space or the cards? That is, may he pick up the cards and gold instead of encountering the Mines space? If so, what happens the next turn?

We ruled that he must encounter the Mines and could only pick up the cards and gold if he received a result of 0 or less on his Craft check (his belonings were lost in the Mines and he could only recover them by making his way through).