ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I just had an extremely easy 'Valley of the Moon' quest. I used track, which showed that the 3 fearscape portals all summoned monsters (2 batches of wretchlings and a quasit), but they never moved toward me! (The previous time I did this quest, with a different character, it worked as expected). They disappeared after the timer expired.

I'm running a level 50 wildfire archmage on ToME 1.5.5 under Linux.

I did the quest a good dozen of time since 1.2 and had it work exactly once. All the other times i saw 2-3 monsters and the rest got stuck near their spawn