Orientation
Leaving a dungeon is generally easier than entering it, mostly because adventuring parties tend to kill or destroy everything on the way in and leave by the same path. Our daring escape was no different. We wander through empty corridors and rooms, dodge the occasional trap with ease, and open doors locked by puzzles without breaking a mental sweat. However, what we had failed to do was destroy all flora and fauna in the outside world before heading in, probably because of the logistics involved, so we still had a challenge awaiting us after exiting the cave system.
Working our way up the valley to where we'd left our horses skeletons—which is odd, as we are pretty sure they had flesh and muscles and organs when we left them a week ago—we hear some rumblings. Before we know it, some large wandering monsters come hurtling towards us, chasing some pitiful cultists who perhaps had poked the monsters with sticks to cause them to be so agitated. Fight or flight, the choice is ours.
The DM asks us to roll initiative each whilst he wipes clean the gaming mat of the last encounter and cheese dip splatters, draws on the general area we are in, gets some representative monster miniatures from the storage boxes and places them in the right place on the mat, and also places our PC miniatures on the mat where he judges we would have been at the time the encounter starts. Wendel rolls the highest initiative, so the DM calls him to act first.
'Okay, so where are we?'
Maybe his initiative modifier is unrealistically high.