Oh, and on the very specific question last raised: I don't think it really matters whether we went up the staircase or down the hole, since the first encounter we had up the stairs was with a couple of rats who kicked our asses. I can only imagine going down the ladder and getting to any kind of a command post would have been even worse for us. For what it's worth, I thought there was a broad metagame GM hint pushing us toward going upstairs, since the ladder up changed into stairs that the tiger and the horse could navigate, while the ladder down would have meant leaving them behind. But that wasn't a huge driver in my thought process, just a little thing.<br/><br/>Realistically we were pretty tapped out on resources, and at this level the difference between full-strength and dead-in-one-more-hit is razor thin. So the tactically correct thing to do would probably have been heading back to camp and going neither up nor down. Maybe accompanied by a bunch of flaming oil thrown down the hole.<br/>