Into the Demonweb Forest, Part 3

After defeating the pack of deathjump spiders, the girls headed deeper into the forest, always heading for the tallest tree, which they had seen jutting up out of the old growth before they entered, even though it was miles away. I flipped the battle mat over to the other side, with a slightly different layout of path through difficult undergrowth, and placed a pencil across the path in front of the party to represent a large web. The ranger spotted two giant spiders sitting in the web.

The wizard immediately ran to the front of the party and blasted both spiders and the web with burning hands. Again, all the spiders in the area started moving toward the group and we rolled initiative.

This encounter was the first to use some of my homebrew spiders from a couple weeks back:
2 giant webby spiders (level 5 controller, 400 xp)
1 deathjump spider (level 4 skirmisher, 175 xp)
3 crab spiders (level 4 minion, 130 xp)

The girls have gotten to the point where they can smell minion monsters a mile away, and they made short work of the crab spiders. The giant webby spiders sprayed webs all over the place, but once the minions were destroyed the webs didn't pose much danger by themselves. The warlord and the paladin ganged up on the deathjump spider while the ranger and wizard went hunting the webby spiders.

Analysis:
The giant webby spiders might require some work, or I might need to try them again with more allies. I think this fight would have been a lot more interesting if I had replaced one webby spider with two more deathjump spiders and another crab spider, which would have been about the same xp value. Heck, they're still slogging through the spider-filled forest, maybe I can throw that variant in and see what happens...