The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session began with the party following up on the fallout from the kobold kidnapping problem and the crypt they had previously blocked off. Lord Warden Faren Markelhay had increased the reward for the cobalt and kidnapping situation, with talk of a partial payout for sealing one entrance, but the larger mystery clearly remained unresolved. The kidnappings had continued even after one supposed kobold route into town had been blocked, which pushed the party harder toward the conclusion they had already started to suspect: the kobolds were still involved somehow, but they were not the whole story.

That realization sent the group looking for another crypt, one that was less obvious and less heavily trafficked than the first. The plan was not subtle. They specifically wanted the kind of burial site that would be more likely to contain valuable magical goods and less likely to already be picked clean. To get there, they tracked down someone involved in the local grave-robbing or criminal underground and pressured him into revealing where such a crypt might be found. Selganth handled the intimidation end of that, ignoring the criminal’s attempts to steer him away and eventually getting what the group needed.

At the same time, the party was thinking more carefully about the kind of crypt they wanted. Rae looked into magical wards and burial customs, trying to identify the sort of older site where richer dead and more meaningful items might have been interred. The result was a narrow ravine crypt that was not just hidden, but hidden behind a criminal hideout. The group realized they would have to get through bandits first if they wanted whatever treasures were left below.

They chose to approach the hideout at midday, when activity might be lower. Even so, three bandits were on watch near the approach, including at least one person tied to the river gang Zarnak had already tangled with before. Zarnak tried bluffing his way through the interaction and failed hard enough to trigger the obvious next move: one of the guards blew a horn and drew a bow, warning the others that trouble had arrived.

Rather than committing to a straight-on fight immediately, the party pulled back just long enough to come up with one of those plans that sounds idiotic until it works. Rae and Nucky staged a fake fight. Nucky got launched or punted forward in the confusion, grabbed the alarm horn, and ran with it. Meanwhile Rae, Selganth, and Nucky used the brief disruption to slip closer to the hideout while Zarnak hung back as support and pressure. Rae literally launched Nucky over his shoulder to get him into melee range before the bandits could react properly. It was fast, stupid, and apparently effective.

The whole skirmish turned into a short, ugly rush. Nucky stole the horn. Selganth charged the trio and taunted them telepathically, basically asking what they planned to blow now that their signal was gone. Zarnak ran up and pounded on the hideout door at one point while the confusion escalated. Somewhere in the middle of all this the table produced the line “the albatross has landed on a seagull twice,” which apparently made enough sense in context to become one of the night’s memorable nonsense quotes. Whatever the exact sequence, the result was simple: the guards were overwhelmed, at least two were killed, and the hideout door was left open.

Once the party got inside, the tone shifted away from open skirmish and into careful burglary.

The hideout had originally been a crypt, but it was being actively converted into a working bandit base. Old funerary jars and stonework were still present, but now there were reworked tables, chairs, lanterns, food, and signs of regular occupation. It was eerie, cold, and too quiet. The place had the feel of criminals trying to settle into a dead place without fully understanding or respecting what it used to be. It also smelled like food and cook fires, which made it clear people had been living and operating there, not just using it as a stash point.

As they explored, the party noticed that the stairs leading deeper were worn smoother than the surrounding stone, which suggested heavy traffic. Rae or one of the scouts moved up quietly and discovered that the bandits had already begun preparing traps on those stairs, though they had not finished setting them yet. Instead of disarming completed traps, the party found themselves looking at trap components laid out for later use. That let them steal the materials outright. By taking the wire, spikes, and related parts, they effectively walked away with enough equipment to build three traps of their own later. It was an unusually practical form of dungeon looting.

Up near the more lived-in section, they found a small coffer of ready cash, about 50 gold and 50 silver, plus food in the middle of preparation. More interestingly, they found tables covered with jars and concoctions that were clearly not food. These looked like caustic agents, weapon-ruining chemicals, or nasty additives that could be mixed into other substances to make them more dangerous. The group quickly grasped that messing with them carelessly could poison the room or ruin someone’s day in a very final way. Nucky examined them closely enough to understand that they were useful, dangerous, and best handled with caution. The party eventually took them, essentially pocketing a set of “crazy ass chemical casks” that could probably be weaponized later.

As they moved deeper, the hideout’s real relationship with the crypt became clearer. The bandits had already looted some of the ossuaries and burial compartments, but not all of them. A few crypt-niches still appeared untouched, at least on the surface. The party immediately decided that this was exactly why they had come. Their ethics about grave robbing got discussed just long enough for everyone to shrug and reclassify it as archaeology.

The first burial niche they checked turned out to be a trap designed by the bandits, not an original tomb defense. Thanks to the materials already found upstairs and the way the setup matched what they had seen, the group recognized that this compartment had been opened before and then re-rigged to hurt anyone else trying to get at what looked like a stash. Arcane inspection also revealed a magical aura inside, which kept them from dismissing it as empty bait. Once they disarmed the outer bandit trap, they confirmed that the niche had indeed been repurposed as a honey pot: something valuable had been left inside to draw attention, and the tampering trap was meant to punish anyone greedy enough to reach for it.

That first stash held one level 1 magic item.

That success, of course, only encouraged them to get greedier.

The really good find came when the group started thinking harder about how the bandits might have altered the burial compartments. Rae used arcane sense while another party member used Dungeoneering and insight to notice something subtle: the stone lining inside one niche did not quite match the surrounding crypt stone. It had been replaced or faced over, meaning the compartment had been modified. Once they realized that, the logic of the trap fell into place. The visible section was bait, but the actual stash had been hidden behind false stone. There was even a second, more sophisticated trap protecting the true cache. After working together to interpret the altered masonry and disable that deeper mechanism, the party broke into the real stash.

Inside were two level 5 magic items.

That was the payoff they had been looking for all along. The “easy” side trip had finally become rewarding in exactly the way they wanted: a manageable enemy base, some money, reusable trap materials, dangerous chemicals, bone wine, and a pair of strong magical finds hidden behind the bandits’ own layered defenses. The party also immediately started thinking like the people they had just robbed. They discussed reusing the emptied stash compartments, resetting traps, and generally leaving the hideout nastier than they found it. At that point the crypt had become less of a dungeon crawl and more of a live burglary scene.

By the end of the session, the party had followed the kidnapping mystery far enough to realize they needed another angle, located a more profitable crypt through criminal contacts, bluffed and fought their way past the bandit front guarding it, infiltrated a crypt-turned-hideout, stolen trap materials and cash, recovered dangerous alchemical supplies, and uncovered magical treasure hidden behind multiple levels of bait-and-switch trapping. The whole session felt like a pivot from “reacting to the main plot” into “taking a profitable detour while becoming more competent criminals themselves.

Quick Recap

• The session began with the kobold reward increasing again because kidnappings were still happening even after one crypt route had been blocked.
• The party decided to look for another, less obvious crypt that might contain better treasure.
• They leaned on a criminal contact to reveal the location of a hidden ravine crypt behind a bandit hideout.
• The group approached the hideout at midday and ran into three bandit guards, including someone tied to the river gang.
• Zarnak’s bluff failed, a guard sounded the alarm, and the party responded with a chaotic fake-fight plan.
• Rae launched Nucky forward to steal the horn and create an opening while the others rushed the guards.
• The bandits were quickly overwhelmed, the hideout door was left open, and the party pushed inside.
• Inside, they found a crypt being converted into a working hideout with food, lanterns, furniture, and signs of regular traffic.
• The group noticed unfinished stair traps and stole enough trap parts to build three traps of their own later.
• They found about 50 gold, 50 silver, and a set of dangerous caustic chemical concoctions worth keeping for future mischief.
• Several burial niches had already been looted, but one trapped stash held a level 1 magic item.
• Careful Dungeoneering and Arcana work revealed a second, hidden compartment behind mismatched stone in another niche.
• After disarming the deeper trap, the party uncovered the real cache and found two level 5 magic items.
• The session ended with the group richer, better equipped, and already thinking about how to turn the crypt’s own traps against anyone who came after them.