Here's last time, into the pit!
Actually our heroes were already in a pit. They'd killed a bunch of spiders and freed a hapless dude from being wrapped up in webs, but were then confronted with a huge man-spider. Figuring that this wasn't a fight they'd win (they were all pretty tapped out as far as health and spells), they turn their attention to escaping. Aisling activates the "daylight" power of her driftglobe, and it fills the room with sunlight! The spider-creature hisses and recoils, and the adventurers take that as a pretty good cue.
They flee up the ropes. Zook fires a bolt from his crossbow, but then drops the crossbow trying to climb. Aisling takes an arrow from the thing's longbow, but everyone manages to get up to the surface without further injury. The man - Padraig - collapses and Dara gives him some root to chew to draw the poison.
Padraig says that he was down by a river to the northeast, fishing, and saw a strange circle of earth - and then the circle flipped open and a giant spider grabbed him and yanked him into the tunnels. It bit him and his muscles seized up, and then the spiders wrapped him up in webbing. But instead of killing him, the man-spider thing forced him to chant. He recites the chant it gave him, but he has no idea what it means, and the adventurers don't either (in fact, they don't even recognize the language).
They help Padraig back to the Plucked Rose, and hear music and merriment as they approach (Clara: "We're about to change the mood in this place"). The step in and the music stops, and the adventurers are given food and drink as they explain what happened. At the end, Burl stands up and asks what they need - the answer, for now, is "sleep." But in the morning, they're going back. Padraig says there are others still alive down there.
And indeed, in the morning, the adventurers, Burl, and about a dozen other farmers and helpers trek out to the pit. They bring oxen and a wagon, and plenty of rope, so as to quickly haul people up. This time, they decide they'll burn out the webbing before anyone lands at the bottom of the pit. Zook tosses down oil and then throws a firebolt, burning up the webs in the central pit, and the adventurers, Burl, and three other men rappel down. They build fires to give everyone a kind of base camp, and Zook casts a spell to summon a familiar - a spectral spider. He sends it down the tunnels to check for people, since it can run on webs without getting stuck, and finds two people still alive, wrapped in silk.
It takes some doing to get down to them and cut them free without getting tangled, but the heroes manage. The clear the first couple of tunnels...and then one of the farmers collapses with an arrow in his chest! The heroes spot the man-spider lurking just inside one of the tunnels (outside of the driftglobe's sunlight), and nocking another arrow!
Aisling quickly casts a healing word, saving the farmer's life, and yells for the others to get down. Dara casts a moonbeam in front of the tunnel entrance, singing the monster, while Zook throws scorching rays over Burl's head at it ("Let it blaze all right!" yells Burl). Aisling casts a cloud of daggers behind it, forcing it into the room (and thus the light), and it skitters around the wall to another tunnel. It fires arrows at the adventurers, but doesn't manage to do any serious damage and between the moonbeam (which Dara moves to follow it), Zook's magic missiles, and Aisling's dagger-cloud, the monster is driven back into the dark.
The heroes watch the tunnel as they rescue other people, clearing tunnels until the only one left is the one with the man-spider (they do find more living people, wrapped up and chanting), but they also find a tunnel with nothing but dead people). Zook sends his familiar-spider down the last tunnel, and it briefly has time to see the creature firing an arrow before it dies (rather, vanishes back to its own plane of existence). Zook and Aisling talk about whether to just burn the webbing down the tunnel - they aren't sure if there are live people, though the familiar didn't see any - and don't notice an incoming attack before it's too later. Arrows hit Aisling, and Zook responds with fire.
Aisling heals herself and then goes down the tunnel, trying to get an angle on this thing. She picks the wrong side of the tunnel to hug, however, and the monster jumps out and slashes at her with a sword. But Zook is ready - he flings the last of his magic missiles and they curve around Aisling and slam into the monster, and the Clara wall-runs around the bard and kicks the thing in the head! It falls dead, and they drag it out into the central pit.
They spend some time hauling the bodies of the dead up the pit so that they can be properly buried, and the farmers recognize some by their clothes (their bodies are pretty badly desiccated). They also haul the monster up the pit to examine it, and Dara is horrified to realize that its features are elven - the pointed ears, the slight but strong build. The skin tone is wrong, though. She's used to elves being...well, normal skin colors. This thing is a sickly grey. She does take its longsword and longbow, though - Zook notes that its bow is a mixture of wood and bone, stained black. Also its shirt is made of a material that none of them recognize.
In the end, they all find it strange that they keep running into monsters that no one's ever heard of. Burl points out that they're adventurers, they're supposed to see weird shit, but they all feel this is another level. They decapitate the spider-monster and preserve the head in alcohol to take with them to Cian. Maybe someone there knows something.
Zook also transcribes the chant as best he can, just in case he can find a way to translate it.
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