The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session opened with the party trying to pull several threads together at once. Kobold Hall had become a growing concern, kidnappings were still happening, and more stories were spreading about strange corruption in the countryside. Teldorthan and other local sources had warned that Cloakwood and the surrounding wilds were changing in ways people could no longer dismiss as tavern exaggeration. Trees leaned wrong, leaves and plants grew warped, and even the monsters sounded altered. The party heard stories of creatures developing bizarre new traits, including owlbears with impossible abilities, and Rae and Nucky concluded that more magical creatures seemed to be suffering the strongest changes.

Barstoman Strongbeard’s contacts added more pressure. Kobold raids and abductions were becoming a real public issue, and everyone expected Kobold Hall itself to be full of traps, dead ends, and ugly surprises. He also warned that water creatures had become more aggressive in the region, especially between the Gray Downs and Fallcrest. Alongside all that, the party got more background on Red Tower itself. The town had once been an elven port, then changed hands several times as dwarves, trolls, and worse moved through the area. By now, the place felt less like a stable town and more like the edge of a long history of violence, ruin, and strange regional corruption. In the party’s own words, it had become ground zero for the crazy creatures.

The party also followed up on practical prep before heading deeper into danger. Teldorthan wanted them to watch for a stolen green dragon skin, which he believed could be turned into another good set of armor if recovered. They visited a temple of Erathis for holy water and advice on dealing with undead. The temple could offer blessings, cures, remove affliction, and even raise dead if the party had enough standing and generosity behind them. One party member who had been especially generous also had a floating +1 blessing already in play, which was finally traced back to the temple. They were reminded that ghouls and similar undead brought disease and afflictions, which made the temple stop feel like smart planning instead of just roleplay.

Then the session took a sharp turn into one of the most charming town sequences in the campaign so far. Nucky sang an ode to Erathis, and instead of a quick blessing, the temple turned the whole thing into a public sendoff. The whole town got invited. Music and festivities broke out. The bars started competing with each other, which played directly into the group’s growing influence in town. Rae helped create a games area and used tricks and planning to make the gathering feel more like a festival. Nature spirits were used to help with decorations, blowing flags and adding movement to the event, and while that drew some mixed reactions, it was useful and clearly done in good faith.

Other party members leaned into social roles too. Selganth worked the crowd. Zarnak helped connect different groups and got people talking to each other. Rae and Nucky noticed a number of shady security hires hanging near the rich and influential attendees, which gave the event a slight undercurrent of opportunism. Rae drew attention away from those areas with parlor tricks, while Nucky directly called out one guard for being too obvious. Rae also quietly prevented several little disasters from happening, steering drunks, spills, and general chaos away from ruining the evening. By the end of the event, the temple formally blessed the group, the whole thing genuinely felt touched by Erathis, and Darina, who had wanted this sort of public moment for a long time, was overwhelmed and grateful.

The practical rewards from that festival were significant. The temple’s participation improved for the next six months. The party gained access to any rituals Darina could perform for the next three to four levels. They also received six vials of holy water. Just as importantly, the event deepened the group’s standing in town and reinforced that their actions were starting to reshape the place around them. It was a major social victory right before the mood shifted underground again.

After all that, the party returned to the catacombs. The trip back involved fighting through some centipedes and centipede swarms to reach the area they had previously been exploring. Once there, the dungeon immediately reminded them what kind of place it was. Zarnak stepped on poisonous titanium caltrops but managed to stay quiet and stealthy despite it. Rae collected a pouch worth of those same caltrops for later use. Looking ahead, the party spotted kobold grave robbers in the crypt, including one of the nastier pot-throwing types. Someone solved that problem the funniest way possible by shooting the pot-thrower’s own explosives. The result was a sticky, burning, gluey death that killed him in a spectacular mess and kicked off the fight.

The group dealt with the visible kobolds, but the room held more than just looters. Near a collapsed area where the dirt looked like it was shifting unnaturally, someone poked the ground and got exactly the bad result you would expect. Two centipede swarms burst up immediately, with a third one behind them. These swarms had a particularly ugly mechanic, a kind of fighting-frenzy aura that got worse when multiple swarms clustered together, which made the area increasingly dangerous the longer they were allowed to stack up. On top of that, a large scuttler centipede leapt out at Selganth and raised the threat from irritating to genuinely dangerous.

Then Nucky did something very Nucky.

Instead of simply attacking, he did the worm in an apparent effort to “diplomacize” the swarm, or as the table more accurately put it, effectively seduce the centipede. Against all reason, that worked well enough to become one of the more memorable moments of the session. While the centipede-seduction energy was happening, the rest of the party kept fighting. Rae eventually killed the large scuttler by splitting it in half, and the swarms were beaten down as well. The whole encounter felt like a perfect distillation of the group’s style: real danger, gross enemies, and one ludicrous bit that somehow works anyway.

With the fight over, the party looted the area thoroughly. They found enough treasure to matter, including 316 gold, a silver dagger, multiple ordinary daggers and armor pieces from the dead kobolds, plus level 2 magic items for the party after leveling up. They were still inside the crypt when the session’s “what next?” conversation began, and the answer quickly turned into “short rest and keep going.” Bone wine even came up again, and it sounded like they could still squeeze a little more of it out of this general era of crypts before the architecture and burial customs changed too much deeper in.

Once they pushed on, they reached the deeper section of the crypt and finally found the source of this particular kobold incursion. The tomb opened into a small workroom where the kobolds had been using the space to build tools, sharpen stakes, fashion trap wire, and prepare the trap kits they had been spreading through the upper passages. Beyond that, there was not a grand lair so much as a very small tunnel dug up from below. The party had reached the end of the crypt and discovered the access point the kobolds were actually using.

That left them with a choice: go down the tunnel into whatever came next, or shut this route down.

They chose violence, engineering, and a little horror movie logic.

Because they had dead kobolds, trap materials, and glue bomb pots all right there, the group decided to stuff the tunnel with the kobold corpses and rig the entire mess to explode into a sticky, burning flesh blockage if anything tried to come through. It was both practical and deeply unhinged. The party even joked about what it would look like if one of them had crawled into the tunnel first and gotten sealed in by mistake. But in tactical terms, it made sense. They had found an incursion route into the crypt and turned it into a lethal blockage using the kobolds’ own dead and their own trap materials.

By the end of the session, the party had done a lot more than just grind through another dungeon room. They gathered critical information about the wider magical corruption in the region, deepened their connection to the temple of Erathis, turned a church visit into a successful town festival, gained blessings, rituals, and holy water, returned underground, killed kobold grave robbers, survived a centipede swarm fight, leveled up, looted the crypt, found one of the kobolds’ actual access points, and sealed it in a way no sane person would ever describe as elegant. The campaign felt bigger afterward. The town mattered more. The crypt mattered more. And the kobold problem had gone from rumor to infrastructure.

Quick Recap

• The party learned more about warped plants, twisted monsters, and growing magical corruption around Cloakwood, Fallcrest, and Red Tower.
• Magical creatures seemed to be suffering the strongest mutations, including rumors of bizarre owlbear abilities.
• Barstoman Strongbeard warned them Kobold Hall would be full of traps and that the region’s water creatures had become more aggressive.
• The group visited a temple of Erathis for holy water, undead guidance, blessings, and future ritual support.
• Nucky’s ode to Erathis turned into a full public festival and sendoff for the party.
• Rae, Zarnak, Selganth, and the others helped make the event a success while managing suspicious security and preventing accidents.
• The temple rewarded the group with six vials of holy water and access to Darina’s rituals for the next few levels.
• The party returned to the catacombs, fought through centipedes again, and made it back to the lower crypts.
• Zarnak stepped on poisonous caltrops, Rae collected some, and the group spotted kobold grave robbers deeper in.
• A pot-throwing kobold died when the party blew up his own explosives in a sticky fiery mess.
• A collapsed patch of dirt released multiple centipede swarms and a large scuttler centipede.
• Nucky somehow tried to ‘diplomacize’ or seduce a centipede while Rae killed the large scuttler and the party cleared the room.
• After leveling up and looting the crypt, the group found the kobolds’ workshop room and the small tunnel they were using to come up from below.
• The session ended with the party stuffing that tunnel with dead kobolds and trapping it with glue bombs to shut down another kobold route in the grossest way possible.