The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session began back in town, with the party tying off the immediate aftermath of rescuing a child and returning him safely to his mother. What should have been a simple reward scene immediately turned into a small morality test. The mother had promised 50 gold to each of them, but it was obvious to at least some of the party that she could not really afford to be handing out that kind of money. Reactions varied in exactly the way you would expect from this group. Rae refused the reward outright. Some of the others either took it without really clocking what was happening or were less bothered by the ethics of it. Nucky, of course, turned his version of generosity into part of his own personal legend by giving back ten gold and later making sure everyone knew about it. It was one of those early scenes that did a lot of work for party characterization in a very small amount of time.

From there the group headed back to the Blue Moon, where Par Winnomer was visibly anxious even by his own already anxious standards. He kept pacing, fidgeting, and going back to a piece of paper he did not really want anyone to notice. That, naturally, guaranteed that someone noticed. The party snooped and discovered the truth behind his nerves: the tavern’s numbers were bad. An inventory sheet showed that the business was taking losses and that something in their current model was no longer working. That moved the session from “we got paid” into “one of our favorite places might actually be in trouble.”

The answer, it turned out, was bone wine.

Nucky called for Kamara, and when he spoke with her privately, the real problem came out. Her brew was not as good anymore because the key ingredient, vintage cognac taken from old open crypts, had run dry. The special stock she had relied on was gone, and kobolds had moved into the crypt where she normally sourced it, cutting her off from the supply she needed. That shortage was hurting sales badly. She was trying to develop a long-term replacement recipe, but for the moment she needed the party to get back into that crypt and recover more of the old liquor so the tavern could survive until she solved the larger problem.

Naturally, this immediately became both a business arrangement and a potential con.

Nucky came back claiming the group had secured ten percent of all sales as a finder’s arrangement. Rae, who was not born yesterday and had already watched Nucky operate enough times to know when something smelled off, went to Kamara directly. The conclusion he reached was that Nucky might actually have talked her into forty percent and was only telling the rest of the group ten. Whether that was confirmed in a clean, legalistic sense or not, the whole scene fit the growing pattern of Nucky treating every conversation like a side hustle. The party also agreed to put in a good word for Kamara with Winnomer and framed the whole issue in kinder terms, basically pitching it as “brew block” rather than “your bar is collapsing because the skeleton wine dried up.”

At the same time, Zarnak spoke to one of his contacts about kobolds and learned there had been a lot of kobold activity around Cloakwood. That contact already had a personal hatred of kobolds and made it clear that if the party wanted help killing them later, he was interested. So by the time the group actually set out, they were doing more than a simple errand for a tavern. They were heading toward a kobold-held crypt tied to the local economy, strange monster activity, and a network of people increasingly willing to treat the kobolds as a real problem.

The crypt itself was large and immediately felt wrong.

It belonged to a wealthy trading merchant family, and the upper levels were full of broken crates and clay jars, remnants of buried goods and offerings that had long since been smashed apart. There were noises moving around in the upper reaches, plus a stale but oddly active breeze that suggested the structure connected to deeper spaces. The first real lesson of the dungeon came almost instantly. Rae stepped on what looked like nothing and triggered a brutal razor-wire trap. The wire wrapped around his legs, cut him badly, and hauled him up into the ceiling where he was left hanging, bleeding, and taking ongoing damage. It was not a token little nuisance trap. It was a “this can ruin your day and maybe your leg” kind of trap, and the table clearly treated it as the moment where the campaign taught them that traps in this setting were not decorative.

Four kobolds came running out once the trap went off, and their movement patterns taught the party something important. They were taking odd routes, avoiding certain lines and patches, which meant they knew exactly where the trap network was. One of them threw a clay pot that exploded, adding to the chaos. Zarnak found a lever that affected the trap but did not help nearly as much as hoped, and Rae’s attempt to manage the situation while still stuck in the wire nearly got him killed. The danger was serious enough that the group had to pause and settle exactly how death saves and stabilizing would work under their house rules. That alone gives a good sense of how ugly this first encounter got.

Still, they survived it. The kobolds went down, and the party came away with two important things besides bruises and blood loss: first, the knowledge that the kobolds were deliberately navigating a prepared kill-zone; second, the understanding that returning through this space later would still be dangerous, because remembering or rediscovering where all those traps were would matter just as much on the way out.

After a short rest, they moved on into what felt like the true funerary section of the crypt. The upper area had been all broken merchant storage and transitional decay, but the next stretch was a narrow funerary walkway leading deeper toward the real dead. The structure was unstable enough that they had to move in single file and, in some sections, slow enough that speed itself became dangerous. If they moved too fast, or if too much weight hit the wrong place, the whole thing could collapse. At one point they had to crawl. That alone would have been bad enough, but naturally a giant centipede crawled out behind them while they were trying to cross.

That created one of the more memorable low-level fight images in the arc: battling a giant centipede on a collapsing raised walkway where nobody could afford to move normally. Zarnak did most of the work in that fight, though others contributed, and they eventually killed it without the whole bridge coming down. Once they got to the far side, Zarnak’s weight became a problem again on the last stretch, so the party solved it with rope, timing, and a sort of improvised swing-and-pull maneuver to get him across without overloading the remaining structure. During all of this, there was also the unsettling feeling that someone might be following them. Someone caught a glimpse or had the sense of movement behind them, though the session later played with that in a more humorous out-of-character way than an immediate in-character reveal.

On the far side, the crypt opened onto a sheer drop and a dark doorway, with a body-temperature breeze coming out of it. That detail mattered. Underground air should have felt dead and still, but this air moved, and it moved enough to be felt directly on the face. The area looked relatively safe from traps in the immediate sense, but not safe in the broader sense. The architecture suggested collapsed lower levels and connections to other crypts, which meant this was no longer just one tomb. It was part of an underground network. Kobolds in Fallcrest were already strange enough. Kobolds operating through a linked crypt complex tied to something deeper was a much bigger problem.

The path beyond was not easy. There was hard stone in some areas, but as they moved deeper, debris and rubble took over, and once they were off the smooth flooring, signs of kobold traffic became obvious. There were scales, bits of claws, broken tools, and little fragments of armor all over the place. The party realized this was not a one-off scavenger route. Dozens of kobolds had likely been moving through here over time. The tunnel sloped downward through the wreckage, and it was almost impossible for anyone except truly stealth-trained people to move through it quietly. Zarnak managed to body-crawl his way into a scouting position and reached a chamber filled with sarcophagi, stone pillars, and another doorway with that same unnatural breeze coming through.

Inside the room were signs of failed looting. Crappy knives and broken tools lay around several sarcophagi, as if inept robbers had tried to pry them open and given up when their gear broke. That detail was useful because it suggested there was no active enemy waiting immediately in the chamber. So Zarnak signaled the others forward. The rest of the group had to make their way through the debris field much less gracefully, and their stealth checks reflected that. Some were merely clumsy. Some were disasters. But they got through.

From there, the session’s tone became one of deeper infiltration rather than immediate combat. The party knew the kobolds were operating in this network. They knew there were traps, hidden movement routes, and likely ambush points. They could feel air moving through spaces that should have been sealed. They were no longer just in “the bone wine crypt.” They were in a system of old burials and collapses that connected to something larger, and Kobold Hall itself started to feel less like a place name and more like a genuine underground power center.

By the end of the session, the party had done more than just take a job for tavern stock. They had uncovered the financial reason the Blue Moon was struggling, exposed Nucky’s suspicious side-business instincts again, established the importance of the bone wine supply, entered a wealthy merchant crypt, learned how vicious the kobolds’ trap network could be, fought through a brutal ambush, navigated a dangerous funerary walkway, killed a giant centipede under terrible footing, and reached a deeper network of crypt chambers showing heavy kobold movement. The whole session felt like a shift from local tavern problem to a much broader subterranean mystery, with the party realizing that the kobolds were not just looting a tomb. They were living and moving through an entire underworld beneath the area.

Quick Recap

• The party returned the rescued child to his mother and had an awkward reward scene when it became clear she could barely afford to pay them.
• Rae refused the reward, some of the others accepted it, and Nucky made sure everyone knew he gave back ten gold.
• Back at the Blue Moon, the group discovered the tavern was losing money and Par Winnomer was stressed about it.
• Kamara revealed the secret ingredient behind her brew was vintage liquor from old crypts, and kobolds had cut off her access to it.
• Nucky negotiated a percentage deal over future sales, though Rae suspected Nucky got a much bigger cut than he admitted.
• Zarnak checked in with a contact who confirmed more kobold activity around Cloakwood and offered future help killing them.
• The party entered a huge merchant-family crypt full of broken crates, clay jars, stale air, and signs of movement above.
• Rae triggered a vicious razor-wire trap that cut up his legs, hauled him into the ceiling, and nearly got him killed.
• Four kobolds attacked, and the party learned the kobolds were moving along odd routes because they knew where their own traps were.
• After surviving that first trap room, the group pushed deeper into a narrow funerary walkway that could collapse if they moved too fast.
• A giant centipede attacked while they were crossing, and the party fought it under terrible footing before hauling Zarnak across the final stretch with rope.
• On the far side, they found a dark doorway with a body-temperature breeze coming from deeper below, which felt wrong for a sealed crypt.
• Moving deeper through rubble and collapsed passages, they found heavy evidence of ongoing kobold traffic through the lower crypt network.
• The session ended with the party realizing this was not just one looted tomb but part of a larger underground kobold route tied to deeper chambers and bigger trouble.