Adventurers
The party had to get onto all fours to crawl down a tight corkscrewing tunnel until after nearly half an hour’s edging forward it dropped away into a corridor. There were faint signs of glowing lights from either direction so, in the absence of a stealthy adventurer with infravision, Mandras donned his magic ring and transformed into a tabby cat to investigate both sources. Either way seemed to lead to a cavern with the desired magical webs, and one appeared to have a particularly large web with a humanoid-ish shape blocking out the arcane twinkling in the middle.
The adventurers opted to try this cavern first and set about transferring some webs from the rocky walls and floor onto their slates in the careful way the elves had shown them. One was some way up the wall, so Mandras knocked back a climbing potion he’d held onto for ages and shimmied up the wall as nimbly as a spider. The adventurers’ presence and light source scared off the actual spiders tending to the webs, but otherwise didn’t appear to cause them any harm, and the two adventurers moved onto the larger web hanging from the wall, with Koko drawing the Sword of Sylaire to temporarily gift him the power of flight, working around the body of a desiccated elf.
Hats gestured a warning that something was coming from the other cavern they’d noticed, and another bipedal spider creature charged into the lanternlight, stumbling over Alric’s scattered caltrops but avoiding the cleric’s flask of fiery oil. It ignored shouted offers of a truce and a deal, and barrelled into Koko and the assorted retainers, biting savagely into the former cleric’s arm before being dispatched.
No sooner had they drawn their blades from its body when two giant spiders emerged from a chute in the ceiling. This time Alric’s aim proved true, coating one in oily flames, and the party were able to kill both beasts before any further damage was done, but Koko had now lost the use of his left hand. Hats stepped forward and, with the practiced air of a dwarf who had now seen and applied this procedure multiple times, lopped the fighter’s arm off and cauterised the wound with the medical application of his golem shield. Fortunately the amputation appeared to have been enacted before the poison had spread to Koko’s body.
Soon afterwards Mandras’ potion lost its efficacy and the thief fell to the ground with a thump. The party opted to try the other cavern in the hope of finding some more accessible webs, and sure enough there were several nearer the ground. It was a larger cavern, with a webbed-over chute in the ceiling and a smaller tunnel leading away that appeared to have been barricaded with bits of detritus from the ground, but from the other side. Alric kept a close eye on it while the rest of the party got to shifting the webs onto their slabs.