Haven: Into the Spider Nest

On March 10th, Year 14, having succeeded in gathering a band of adventurers in Citadel House to return and destroy the giant spider nest, Vedison leads them north to show them where to find it:

• Mark (JaH): Level 6 Halfling Thief
• Vedison (AdS): Level 2 Gnome Magic-user
• Six (CoB): Level 1 Human Fighter (with gnomish prosthetics)
• Phillip MaKinzey (CoS): Level 1 Elf Cleric of the Resurrection and the Life
• Thuli Thacker (SaS): Level 1 Human Cleric of the Lord of Hosts

They travel to the Sleepy Bend Inn, where there are gnomish merchants stopping for the night before pushing on to Iron Fields in the morning. They do some shopping there, with Six insisting that Vedison buy him an iron ingot without explanation.

In the morning, they continue northward a couple of hours in a light snow before turning off the road to seek the nest. It is right where Vedison left it and they hatch a plan to put powerful spells on a couple of arrows and try to kill the spiders in a single powerful strike at the front of the nest.

While they encharge their arrows, Six creeps off on his own to scout around the nest. He quickly becomes alarmed by the number of entrances and exits and the sheer size of it and is rushing back to the others to warn them off their frontal assault when the arrows are launched.

One arrow (the one encharged by Vedison and shot by Mark) makes it deep into the nest with a devastating explosion of fiery death. The other (encharged by Thuli and shot by Vedison) gets caught in some webbing high and left of the entrance. The impact is still forceful enough for the encharge to go off and a burst of flame engulfs that side of the nest, singing Six as he cuts across the front to warn them.

The strike is devastating, but spiders pout out mostly the sides and back to attack them. As Six rushes the ones on the north flank, killing a large one while Phillip runs to his aide, the rest deal with the couple coming out the front before engaging the southern flank. While the slower, large spiders straggle into the fight, the adventurers soon triumph with only a little damage from the spell-wounded spiders.

While Mark and Vedison set about collecting poison glands from the spiders, Six, Phillip, and Thuli go into the nest to look for eggs. They find them. Dozens of small ones, several large ones, and at the center of the nest an egg 15 feet in diameter and nearly 20 feet tall. They spend the afternoon smashing the smaller eggs and gathering logs, sticks, and kindling to build a bonfire centered on the massive egg. They wind up as much web as they think they need to prove they have destroyed the nest and light the fire.

They camp and feed the fire through the night, completely consuming several large tree trunks. Nothing bothers them through the night and in the morning, with the egg covered in fissures from which boiling fluid has been emerging through the night, they decide to crack the egg open and pry out a cooked, half-formed spider queen. They behead it to be sure and take the head with them.

They return to Sleepy Bend and on the 13th continue back to Citadel where they are paid for destroying the nest and sell the head to Skromno. Everyone but Mark levels up.

AdS really came through. I had pretty much accepted that play would be sparse until my own children aged into this campaign, but this feels like a real resurgence, where this party could be consistent, and there are other recruits we were considering.