Into the Demonweb Forest, Part 7

At long last, the girls arrived at the great tree - the adventure hook I gave them almost four real-time months ago. I used the Caves of Chaos battle map to represent it - the walls of the caves stood in nicely for the overgrown roots of a monstrous tree. I had one more encounter planned as they approached, using another of my own converted spider monsters.

1 narleth webspitter (level 6 elite brute, 500 xp)
1 deathjump spider (level 4 skirmisher, 175 xp)
3 crab spiders (level 4 minion, 130 xp)
Map: The outdoor 1/2 of Caves of Chaos from Fantastic Locations: The Frostfell Rift

The ranger spotted the crab spiders, but not the narleth or the deathjump spider. She shot one in the surprise round, won initiative, and shot the other two. So much for the minions. The deathjump spider leaped out at the paladin and the warlord moved to engage it as well.

I've been looking forward to trying out the narleth for a long time, so it was unfortunate that I opened with a tactical blunder when it jumped out of the trees. It came up from behind and attacked the ranger, but neglected to use its minor action to spit webs on her. I just noticed in my writeup that I have the powers in the wrong order with spit web at the bottom (it should be above the burst effects). That might have contributed to me missing it. The narleth did a pretty good job of beating on the ranger, but she did an even better job of beating on it with lots of fire support (literally) from the wizard's flaming sphere. Since only the ranger was within its reach it never used blade frenzy before getting bloodied, and then when it got bloodied she was the only one affected by its bloodied frenzy.

Analysis:
The fight was pretty challenging, but I think it would have been better if the narleth could have webbed the ranger and then either brutalized her or bypassed her and attacked the wizard. At some point I should go back and rearrange the powers on the narleth stat block.