The Copper Piece Gang

The Scarlet Citadel began as an elven hunting lodge. What it became is harder to describe. Built atop a confluence of ley lines and expanded over generations by the Holsinger family into something between a fortress and a research facility, the Citadel is now a vast layered dungeon where the normal rules of life and death have been quietly suspended for a long time.

Its upper levels contain torture chambers, guard posts, and the kind of administrative cruelty that keeps a large operation running. Deeper in, the alchemy wing houses ooze works and experimental chambers where biological and magical corruption overlap in ways that are difficult to look at directly. Below that, ancient dwarven passages sealed for reasons no one alive fully understood, trap-filled halls, and evidence of experiments that predate the Holsingers themselves.

Role in the Campaign

The Scarlet Citadel was the campaign’s central challenge from roughly session 9 through session 30 — the longest continuous arc of the party’s history. They approached it first with caution, then with growing confidence, then with the grim determination of people who had come too far to stop.

The dungeon gave the campaign some of its most memorable and costly encounters: the acid floor, the ooze works, the alchemical wing explosions, the slime cubes, the gas hallway. Selganth died here. Rae lost his arm here, and what eventually replaced it was shaped by what happened in these halls. The party discovered shadow-tainted spaces and memory-realm passages that opened onto something much older than the Holsingers’ ambitions.

By the time they pushed through the sealed dwarven door and into the citadel’s lowest depths, the party had been changed by the place in ways both obvious and quiet. The Scarlet Citadel was not just a dungeon. It was the crucible that turned a collection of Fallcrest locals into the people capable of everything that came after.