A TRADITIONAL ENCOUNTER!

The jungle trek continued, and after a day or so they came upon a place where a road crossed the river they were following, the river was clearly heading into a ravine, the party decided to avoid going under the bridge and instead head to the road and cross there.

                                        A Perfectly Normal Bridge!

It turned out to be not quite so normal in the end though! No sooner had they reached the road when they met with a Troll. At first they tried to negotiate with him, but it turned out that his apparent willingness to talk was only buying time for his 3 companions to arrive. The fight was short and due to the expeditious addition of fire to some attacks the monsters were overcome.

Moving on from here and following a goat track near the lip of the deepening ravine they spotted what seemed to be Deer watching them on the other side of the chasm. Imagine the surprise when said deer suddenly unfurled wings and began to swoop down on the adventurers, relentlessly they attacked goring with their antlers and biting at the hapless friends, Frost was rendered unconscious before the party managed to vanquish the strange creatures.

Finally emerging to the edge of a cliff they saw the vale laid out before them with the pyramid/ziggurat in the middle and then they noticed what they first imagined to be gigantic flying spider! which they eventually understood was a flying craft of some sort that had been fashioned to look like a spider. 

A HUGE FLYING SPIDER!

Noticing that the device was flying in a search pattern they made their way carefully into the Vale and on to the Western village, where Flint made good contact with the Dewmen who agreed to assist the party on their journey, despite thinking it to be a great folly! And so the group found themselves on the road to the Ziggurat...