I am so behind the eight ball.
The next phase is the quest phase. What each of us does is choose any number of characters to exhaust (tap,) thus committing them to our current quest (the Flies and Spiders 1B card.) After we have decided which characters we wish to commit, we then flip over one encounter card per player, one at a time and add it to the staging area. The staging area is where the Forest Spider and Old Forest Road are.
Once that is done, we'll compare the combined Willpower of our questing characters to the combined Threat of the cards in the staging area. If our Willpower is greater, we'll make progress on our quest. For every point of Willpower greater than the combined Threat, we'll place a progress token on our quest. For every point less, we'll each have to raise our personal threat (the one below our names) by one.
A couple of things to take note of:
1. Exhausted heroes can neither attack nor defend.
2. If your threat ever reaches 50, you're immediately eliminated from the game. (Sorry if I mentioned this already.)
We all commit our characters at the same time. I'll commit both Aragorn and Theodred to the quest. I'll activate Theadred's ability on Aragorn, giving him a resource token. Then, I'll use Aragorn's ability to untap at the cost of one token. He is still considered to be committed to the quest.