Rats!

Nymm 14, 998 YK
Towering Wood in the Eldeen Reaches

We headed through the north exit first, and found it branched off— there was a collapse in the tunnel one way, and a chamber (also filled with debris from what had been the ceiling) in the other. We probably would have left that right away to check the other two exits from the main room, but I heard some rocks clatter, and after I scanned the room, found a trace of evil. Defender saw movement, and quickly found himself being attacked by horrid bony-plated rats, acid dripping from their mouths! Alayi, Defender and I killed over a dozen of them, while Tomas wandered off to look elsewhere. Alayi and Defender both got splashed by the acid and required some healing. That done, we did a quick survey of the room and found nothing of interest, though there was speculation that these unusual creatures had been left there to guard something. Anyway, we needed to find our wayward young human.

At least we could tell he wasn’t deliberately hiding from us— a chalk arrow pointed us to the east tunnel. We found him standing beside a large freshly-killed spider and a rather large body of water. Defender waded in and declared it would be about up to our waists if we wished to cross it; we opted to check out the third tunnel first.

The west tunnel contained a nasty surprise. Defender and I were walking ahead of the group and managed to find a pit trap— neither of us was able to jump away in time as the floor fell out from beneath us. We fell about 40’— I was surprised I hadn’t at least broken an ankle, nor was Defender badly hurt; glory to the Flame! We took about 15 to 20 minutes to climb out of the pit, since we had no rope. By then, Tomas and Alayi had hopped across the 10’ hole in the floor to investigate what lay beyond— a hall festooned with webs— big webs! Alayi healed me a bit, and Tomas handed me a lit torch— do we continue forward through the webs?