The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session opened with the party still in crypt-crawling mode, following up on the earlier kobold incursion and trying to turn those underground routes into both profit and progress. The first order of business was cleanup from the previous crypt. The group had found another six months’ worth of bone wine, stumbled into a room where kobolds had clearly been making tools and traps, and then made the extremely normal decision to stuff a tunnel full of dead kobolds and rig the whole mess with glue bomb pots. The idea was simple and disgusting: if anything came through that passage later, it would have to deal with a pile of bodies and a sticky explosive trap. After setting that lovely little surprise, the party backed out and went looking for another route.

The next crypt immediately felt different. Even before entering, the group noticed the cliff face around it looked wrong. The rocks had a shimmering quality to them, and the entrance itself had partially collapsed in a way that suggested more than just age or weather. Once inside, the atmosphere reinforced that feeling. The air was humid. The stone was slick. There was the sound of trickling water, but the place did not feel naturally wet so much as magically altered. It was the kind of crypt where the environment itself felt infected.

Inside, the party found evidence that others had been there at some point, likely digging, excavating, or trying to loot something important. There were boxes, digging tools, and signs that someone had been trying to uncover or construct something around an old statue. A narrow bridge spanned part of the chamber, but it was too weak to trust. When Rae crossed it, the thing sagged badly enough that he had to jump the rest of the way. Below and nearby, the floor was soft, wet, and soupy, with strangely glowing water and bizarre stone formations shaped like petrified mushrooms. The edges of those formations seemed almost transparent or crystalline. The party quickly realized this was part of the same larger problem they had already been noticing in the wild: the land, stone, creatures, and plant life around the region were being twisted into unnatural shapes by some external influence.

Rae entered the water and could feel that it was trying to affect him somehow, though it had not fully taken hold yet. The whole area had that ominous “you are standing in magical contamination” feeling. On top of that, there were signs that someone had been trying to make a staircase or deeper route nearby, which suggested this crypt had become part of some larger excavation or mutation event rather than just a sealed tomb.

Then the buzzing started.

Nucky and another party member heard it first, and it was close enough that they only had seconds to get ready. The source turned out to be one of the nastier monsters the campaign had thrown at them yet: a gigantic hell wasp. Normally these things were only about bat-sized, but this one had been blown up into a nightmare version of itself, with a wingspan of roughly a dozen feet and a massive yellow-dripping stinger. Rae recognized it and immediately understood how bad that was. A normal hell wasp could kill a rabbit with its venom. This one was delivering that same poison in industrial quantities.

The fight was ugly almost immediately. Rae got hit badly enough that the table understood the threat in story terms, not just mechanical ones. Even if he technically still had hit points left, failing his save could have meant instant death from the venom. Selganth pulled off one of the session’s key lifesaving moves by swapping positions with Rae and healing him, buying the party time. The group fought hard to keep the hell wasp contained, but the encounter escalated further when the ground started rumbling and a giant scorpion burst into the battle.

That made the fight feel less like a normal monster encounter and more like they had wandered into a living magical nest.

The scorpion was not just big. It was unnerving. It had two sets of eyes, including a second pair on or near its raised tail or stinger, and it moved with the kind of size and speed that makes everyone at the table suddenly sit forward. At one point it had Nucky in serious danger too, and the fight looked like it might spiral into a full disaster. But then the party did the thing they do best: they got weird and somehow survived.

Instead of trying to kill everything in sight, Nucky used mimicry again. He copied the scorpion’s movement and posture well enough to communicate with it in a way that made the creature hesitate instead of attack. Somehow, that worked. The scorpion basically told the intruders to back off, and the group actually listened. Zarnak tried tossing it a ration as an offering, and while that was not immediately enough to distract it, the whole exchange gave the party a path out of the encounter that did not involve getting stung, crushed, or split open. They backed away, the scorpion took the food, and eventually it withdrew back into its area.

That should have ended the expedition. Instead, the party decided that now they understood the scorpion’s boundaries, they could just go back in more quietly.

And, to be fair, they were right.

The group re-entered the crypt carefully, avoided provoking the scorpion, and finished searching the place. That turned the back half of the session into a treasure-and-salvage run after the earlier panic. They looted what they could from the site, harvested useful materials from the dead hell wasp, and walked out with some genuinely exciting rewards. Selganth collected hell wasp venom. Rae took the stinger, which could apparently be used to grant a weapon fire and poison damage after a short rest or some kind of preparation. They also found money, magic items, and a keg of burning powder or flash powder, which is exactly the kind of thing no sensible adventuring party should carry and exactly the kind of thing this group was thrilled to possess.

By the time the session shifted out of the crypt, the party had effectively turned a magical hazard zone into a profit center. They had survived a mutated hell wasp, negotiated a truce with a giant scorpion by body language and snacks, and come away with magical loot, venom, a monster stinger, a keg of dangerous powder, and more bone wine for the tavern. The whole thing felt like a perfect example of this campaign’s energy: start with a grim and mysterious magical anomaly, almost die to nightmare wildlife, then somehow leave with inventory.

The session also set up the next direction of the campaign more clearly. Once the crypt was cleared, the party talked through what to do next. They did not just want to keep farming tombs forever. They wanted to move the real plot forward. That brought them back to Barstoman Strongbeard, local contacts, and the kobold problem. In that discussion, they were reminded that Lord Warden Faren Markelhay had increased the reward for dealing with the kobold incursions and kidnappings. The city still believed the kobolds were behind much of the trouble, especially because one of the access routes had already been found and blocked. The group took the blocked crypt route back to the authorities, and the city watch effectively blew it shut for good. For that success, everyone earned 500 gold apiece, which gave them both money and legitimacy.

But the conversation with Barstoman Strongbeard added a wrinkle. People around the river and the wharves had started noticing signs of orcs hunting kobolds, which was new and strange. There were signs of kobold camps that looked like they had been slaughtered by orc tactics and weapons, and there were traces of orc movement in places they usually did not operate. That implied the kobolds were in trouble too, or at least caught up in some larger conflict. The group did not have enough evidence yet to solve that mystery, but it gave them another reason to start looking along the river and toward more hidden crypts or routes.

From there, the session ended in planning mode. The party debated whether to keep crypt-bashing, chase the river angle, or work through contacts to find a better route toward the bigger mystery. In practical terms, they seemed to settle on finding another worthwhile crypt while keeping one eye on the broader plot. That decision got framed through a skill-challenge style conversation about how each character would help find “a good crypt,” meaning one that was not already picked clean and maybe had ties to the sort of hidden, valuable, or nefarious burials they actually cared about. That part read like setup for the next session rather than a resolution here, but it nicely capped off the night by showing the party growing more deliberate. They were not just wandering anymore. They were learning how to hunt for the good stuff and how to connect side expeditions to the larger story.

By the end of the session, the party had rigged one crypt route with dead kobolds and glue bombs, explored a second crypt warped by strange magic, survived a mutated hell wasp, talked down a giant scorpion, secured some solid loot and dangerous alchemical salvage, got paid for blocking a kobold access point, and started connecting the kobold problem to wider unrest involving orcs and the river. It was a strong “we are getting in deeper than we thought” session, with equal parts monster panic, weird problem-solving, and profitable grave-robbing.

Quick Recap

• The session opened with the party finishing work in a previous crypt, including stuffing a tunnel with dead kobolds and trapping it with glue bomb pots.
• They found another six months of bone wine before moving on to a new crypt.
• The next crypt looked magically wrong from the outside, with shimmering cliff-face rock and a partially collapsed entrance.
• Inside, the air was humid, the stone was slick, and the water and mushroom-like rock formations glowed and shimmered unnaturally.
• The group found digging tools, boxes, and a statue someone had been excavating, suggesting previous activity in the crypt.
• Rae crossed a weak bridge and discovered that the water and stone in the chamber felt magically altered and dangerous.
• A giant mutated hell wasp attacked, and Rae was nearly killed by its venomous sting.
• Selganth saved Rae by swapping positions and healing him during the fight.
• The battle escalated when a giant scorpion emerged from the ground and joined the chaos.
• Instead of forcing another fight, Nucky mimicked the scorpion’s movements well enough to calm it, and the group backed off while Zarnak offered it food.
• The party re-entered the crypt quietly later, searched it fully, and came out with magic items, money, a keg of burning powder, hell wasp venom, and the wasp’s stinger.
• Outside the crypt, they turned in proof of blocking one kobold access route and earned 500 gold each from Markelhay.
• New information suggested orcs had started hunting kobolds near the river, pointing to a bigger conflict than the town realized.
• The session ended with the group debating whether to keep crypt-crawling or start pushing harder on the broader kobold, river, and kidnapping mystery.