Upon waking up in the following morning, we set about to
perform the task we likely should have
As for us, we moved south, initially with eyes on our task
but upon discovering the trail of something moving south we followed that and
came to a wide clearing of tall grass. In several places, the grass had been
shaped into twisting funnels that were hidden by the surrounding vegetation and
almost impossible to see if you weren’t expecting them, but, having seen one of
the things, I was quickly able to identify several others.
The party was uncertain what these structures were and some
of us had a more cautious approach to the situation than others. That tiefling
decided to walk up to one of these funnel structures and stick their hand into
it. This resulted in a nasty bite as the spider within took offense at the intrusion
and moved to the attack.
That tiefling retreated back to the group while myself and
Miss Freehand intercepted their arachnid attacker. The rest of the group
decided to move on another of the funnels. The spider in front of myself and
Miss Freehand was severely damaged by her before exploding under the barrage of
lightning that I released upon it. Behind us, a second spider was roused and
being dealt with as we moved on to a third.
It was about this time that Dame TJ noted that the spiders
were only attacking when directly provoked and a case was made for simply
avoiding the remaining creatures after we’d dealt with these three. I
acquiesced on the condition that we would continue killing these creatures
should it become apparent that they had been preying upon the local
homesteaders. However, an investigation of the disturbed funnels found that
only more of those dog-creatures had been targeted by these creatures. This
included several corpses that had originated from our battle the previous day.
Stripping what valuables we could, we continued on and found
another homestead to take a rest at some time before the sun reached its crest.
We relayed the information about the dog-creatures and undead to the man and
told him that he should be looking to head to Sylvia’s homestead where the
evacuation was being organized.
He took a little bit of convincing to move on as he had not
seen signs of the dog-creatuers or the undead yet. At this point there may have
been an indiscrete slip of the tongue on my part in the manner of an
insensitive revelation that we may have discovered one of his neighbors being
eaten by a sort of vombie, vampire thing.
Further warnings about the spiders and how they should
affect his travel revealed something else unexpected. Apparently the
homesteaders all know about the spiders and simply give them their space on the
idea that they keep the population of undesirables down by quite a bit and thus
protect the homesteads in at least one direction. Thinking back to the number
of dog-like corpses that we’d found, I could concur that this seemed a somewhat
reasonable thing to do.
Despite this, however, I have to wonder about the wisdom of
this particular strategy. I suppose if the population of spiders is kept
controlled then it presents a good defense and given their reluctance to defend
their neighbors it would seem a relatively easy task to cull their numbers if
they grew too large, but I still begin to fear that a lack of food in the form
of aggressive invaders from beyond the borders would result in these spiders
turning their expert stealth on the livestock and framers of the area. It is
something I shall have to discuss I think with Hellenae later.
No comments:
Post a Comment