The Copper Piece Gang

The Sorrowmire is wrong in ways that are hard to point to directly. The air is too humid, the light too dim even at midday, and the road through it follows no logic that a sensible surveyor would recognize. Dead animals along the roadside have stretched limbs and malformed proportions. Things move through the water faster and heavier than fish. The swamp is not merely unpleasant — it is actively disorienting, as though the landscape itself resists being mapped or remembered.

Something has been corrupting the Sorrowmire for a long time. The will-o’-wisps that hunt its paths are the visible sign of it. The guardian that forms from the glowing marsh grass is a deeper symptom. Whatever is at the root of it, the swamp has been changed at a level that ordinary wildlife and ordinary terrain do not explain.

Role in the Campaign

The Sorrowmire was the party’s first real test — and the place where they became a party. The job was straightforward: find Mikos Adelberry, a halfling trader who had gone into the swamp owing money to a lender named Ravos Ashvale and not come back. What the party found instead was a place that wanted to swallow them.

They survived the will-o’-wisps, pulled a party member out of the mud with a grappling hook, fought a swamp guardian made of glowing marsh grass in a battle that left everyone wet and proud to still be standing, and eventually found Mikos — who, predictably, made everything more complicated.

The Sorrowmire was one session, and it was years ago in campaign time. But it set the tone for everything that followed: the Vale is stranger than it looks, the jobs are never quite what they seem, and this particular group of people is stubborn enough to see things through even when the ground is trying to eat them.