The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session opened with the party still very early in its life together, at the point where everyone was only loosely connected through the people and places of Fallcrest rather than through a long shared history. Each character had their own social anchor in town. Some were tied to the docks, some to local work, and some to the Blue Moon Alehouse, which quickly became the center of the session. The Blue Moon was one of the nicer taverns in Fallcrest, run by the anxious Par Winnomer, with Kamara Brown Bottle handling the brewing side. It was also one of the first places where the group started to feel like an actual group instead of several separate characters circling the same plot.

The first real scene at the tavern was not a mission briefing or a solemn mystery. It was chaos.

Nucky was performing while drunk, which predictably pushed the room from lively into unstable. The show got too wild, a riot started to break out, glass shattered, and the whole place tipped into exactly the kind of tavern disaster that only needs one more idiot to become a full-blown brawl. Instead of letting it spiral, the future party ended up acting together before they were even really “the party.” Zarnak was working as hired security or bouncer for the event, which gave him a direct reason to intervene. Others stepped in too, and together they got the crowd under control. That early success mattered because it was the first moment where everyone got to see that the others could handle themselves under pressure.

That led directly to the first job.

A woman named Verdera, whose husband was dead, approached them because her fourteen-year-old son Jotham had gone missing. He had last been seen near the quays and the Moonwash Falls area, supposedly swimming and playing with other kids. She offered fifty gold per person to find him, which sounded like a serious amount for the job and immediately established both the stakes and the desperation of the request. Rae already had some indirect recognition with her through the Moonsong Temple and shared local ties, which helped make the plea feel more personal instead of purely transactional.

The party started at the falls and approached the local kids carefully enough to notice something odd. The children had a signal system. As the adults came near, the message traveled from one kid to the next in a practiced chain, which instantly told the party that these children were used to watching for authority, trouble, or outsiders. Rae handled part of the situation with a light touch by giving out coins and trying to come across as nonthreatening. There was also a lot of horseplay and distraction, including throwing kids into the water and generally keeping things loose enough that someone might talk.

That worked.

One boy, Harvey, reacted when Jotham’s name came up. He admitted he knew him and was afraid he might know where he was, but he did not want to talk in front of the older kids. So the party arranged a second meeting at sundown near the base of the bluffs. Harvey explained that Jotham had gone exploring in the catacombs despite being warned away from them. The catacombs had a local reputation for being haunted, with strange things seen or heard around them. Harvey also named Stevo and Krix as leaders of the Copper Piece Gang and made it clear they would not want him talking. That added a whole extra layer to the mystery. This was no longer just a missing kid. It was tied to local youth gangs, old ruins, and whatever was going on down in the catacombs.

The party went in.

The catacombs had originally been walled off, but they were clearly still accessible, and once inside the group found signs that this was an old and important place. There were statues and carvings tied to some ancient elemental dragon, a large sarcophagus for an early royal figure from Fallcrest’s past, and a general sense that dragons had once been revered by the people buried here. It was not just a random basement. It was part tomb, part shrine, part piece of the city’s deepest history. The party recognized that enough not to start looting indiscriminately.

Then the ambush hit.

Two men jumped them almost immediately, one of them dressed like a pirate, and while that fight was still underway, a third enemy showed up. The first two went down, but the third man did something much more dangerous than simply joining the fight. He moved off, shut a reinforced door, and barred it. That turned the encounter from a simple scuffle into a hostage problem. The party was now trapped on one side of a hardened barrier, with someone on the other side and no good reason to believe Jotham was safe.

The door area was trapped too, because apparently this session had decided subtlety was for cowards.

When Selganth or another party member moved up to deal with the door, a rockfall trap came down hard enough to nearly kill him. That made it clear the kidnappers had prepared the catacombs for defense and retreat. Breaking the lock did not solve the problem either. At one point the party managed to destroy the lock mechanism in a way that made the door no longer pickable without actually opening it, which is exactly the kind of adventuring problem that feels funny later and terrible in the moment. So the group had to shift from “force our way through” to “solve this with the hostage still alive.”

What followed was one of the best desperate low-level plans in the early campaign.

The kidnappers demanded one hundred gold for Jotham. The party had to figure out how to pay without simply handing over the money and letting the kidnappers disappear with the boy. Their answer was weird, tense, and honestly pretty clever. They had Jotham put his hand under the door first. Someone on the party side held onto the kid’s hand so he could not be yanked away. Then they slid the gold under the door. The kidnappers took the money, triggered or threw poison gas into the area, and fled while the group was coughing and scrambling. It was a dirty exit, but it bought the party exactly what they needed: the kidnappers abandoned the hostage.

After choking through the gas and forcing the door, the party found Jotham alive.

Talking to him revealed that he had not been kidnapped as part of the larger countryside horrors people had been whispering about. He had been exploring the catacombs looking for useful valuables, coin, or salvage, and the kidnappers had apparently followed him there and opportunistically used the catacombs to hold him. That mattered because it sharply separated this crime from the broader disappearances in the region. The kidnappers Jotham overheard were trying to profit by imitating something worse. Around the countryside, people were being abducted in much more brutal ways, with body parts left behind and signs of something truly vicious. Jotham’s captors were copycats, leaning on the fear created by the larger crimes in order to get money.

There was also a social angle. Jotham was tied to the Copper Piece Gang but did not seem comfortable with its ethics. He had a family. He did not need to steal to survive in the same way some of the other kids did. Stevo, in particular, did not like him. That gave the group a useful read on the gang: this was not just a gang of charming little scamps. It had real pressure, real hierarchy, and real willingness to use intimidation and coercion.

Once Jotham was safely out, the party brought him back to his mother. That should have been a straightforward happy ending, but it turned into another small moral test. The group realized she was painfully nervous while paying them because she plainly did not have the money she had promised. She had likely expected never to see her son again and had offered whatever it took in desperation. In reality, she probably had only a fraction of what she needed and had gone into debt or scraped together help to make good on her promise.

The party reacted in character.

Rae, reading the situation clearly, refused the reward. Nucky gave back ten gold, which was better than nothing and also exactly the kind of gesture he could later brag about. Others were more practical or less perceptive and initially took the payment more or less at face value. The mother was deeply grateful regardless, especially toward the people who eased the financial blow. It was also suggested that stories about the newer helpers around Fallcrest, including Rae and other emerging local do-gooders, were already beginning to circulate. So even in the middle of a small rescue mission, the group was starting to build a reputation.

By the end of the session, the party had gone from strangers with separate contacts to people who had already weathered a tavern riot together, taken on a missing child case, navigated the politics of local kids and the Copper Piece Gang, explored a dragon-revering royal catacomb, survived an ambush and a rockfall trap, negotiated through a barred door with kidnappers, and rescued Jotham alive. Just as importantly, they learned that the kidnapping panic around Fallcrest had layers. Some crimes were real horrors. Some were opportunists borrowing fear to make money. That distinction gave the campaign a more interesting shape right away. The city had danger, yes, but it also had people exploiting danger, imitating it, and profiting from the confusion.

Quick Recap

• The session started with the party members still mostly separate, each tied to different people and places around Fallcrest.
• Everyone crossed paths at the Blue Moon Alehouse, where Nucky’s drunken performance helped start a near-riot.
• The future party worked together to calm the room, with Zarnak acting as security and the others helping stabilize the chaos.
• Verdera asked them to find her missing fourteen-year-old son, Jotham, and offered fifty gold per person.
• At the falls near the quays, the party noticed the local kids used a signal system to warn each other about approaching adults.
• Harvey admitted he knew Jotham and agreed to meet the party later to talk privately.
• Harvey told them Jotham had gone exploring in the haunted catacombs and mentioned Stevo and Krix of the Copper Piece Gang.
• The party entered the catacombs and found old royal tomb architecture tied to reverence for an ancient elemental dragon.
• Three kidnappers ambushed them inside, and after two fell, the third barred a reinforced door and trapped Jotham on the other side.
• A rockfall trap nearly killed one of the party members when they tried to force the door.
• The group negotiated through the door, slid one hundred gold under it while holding onto Jotham’s hand, then got hit with poison gas as the kidnappers escaped.
• They rescued Jotham alive and learned his kidnappers were copycats exploiting the fear caused by more brutal abductions happening elsewhere in the countryside.
• Jotham also made it clear the Copper Piece Gang had rougher ethics than he was comfortable with, especially under Stevo’s influence.
• Back at home, Jotham’s mother paid them nervously despite clearly not being able to afford it, leading Rae to refuse the money and Nucky to give some of his back.