The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session began with the party picking up after the earlier fight involving the dead ink hag and the increasingly obvious natural corruption spreading around Fallcrest. Ichabod was with them again, and his presence immediately mattered because he actually understood something about what was going wrong. He had been studying the strange manifestations in the groves, and he explained that the area around Fallcrest sat on a major confluence of ley lines. As many as seven lines crossed there, and over the years all sorts of people had tried to exploit that power for their own ends. Ichabod believed the strongest source of the current disturbances lay north and along the river. That gave the party a much bigger frame for what had felt like isolated weirdness. The problem was not just monsters. It was magical infrastructure being abused by somebody right now.

With that in mind, the group followed signs toward the orcs. They found one of the orc camps and learned that the war party had left eight to ten hours earlier. That already seemed off. This was not a casual raiding band. The camp showed signs of preparation, weapon sharpening, and a level of seriousness that did not fit what they expected from orcs supposedly going after kobolds. Orcs normally would not need a full war party to handle kobolds. That mismatch sat in the background for the rest of the session and turned out to matter a lot.

Following the trail brought them into one of the strangest and most memorable encounters of the campaign so far: a heavily altered owlbear. Before they saw it clearly, they heard it. The sound was wrong enough that the party first struggled to place it. It was close to an owlbear, but deeper, stranger, and more broken. When Selganth tried to serve as a decoy the way someone might against a normal bear by making himself look big and loud, the group immediately learned an important rule of monster ecology: owlbears do not care about your wildlife safety pamphlet.

The party found the creature in the act of eating a large orc. That alone confirmed this thing was not ordinary. It was already bloodied with fresh violence, and the bone growths and strange projecting feather-quills on its body made it feel more like some ley-line warped horror than a natural beast. At first they tried to avoid it. Zarnak, with Nucky riding on him, improvised one of the most absurd distraction tools imaginable by attaching a pine cone and a bell to a bolt and firing it past the owlbear. Zarnak’s idea was to mask Selganth’s scent with pine. Nucky’s contribution was to make the distraction noisier. The result was exactly the kind of half-coherent, fully effective nonsense D&D thrives on.

For a moment it worked. Then the owlbear heard the party anyway and gave chase.

What followed was not a straight fight but a running skill challenge, and it sounded like one of the better ones the group has had. Nucky threw down caltrops. Zarnak rigged quick branch-traps and snapping distractions that would slow or discourage the pursuit without turning into full deadfalls. Selganth chopped trees so they would fall into the owlbear’s path. Meanwhile, the runner being chased kept weaving the owlbear into each obstacle while somehow avoiding the worst of the hazards personally. It was the fantasy equivalent of a chaotic obstacle course, and it bought the party exactly what they needed: time and distance.

Their actual goal was not just to escape. It was to lure the owlbear into the orc war party.

That scheme escalated beautifully. Zarnak started hurling orcish insults to enrage the creature further. Selganth joined in despite not really knowing any orc curses, producing what the table immortalized as nonsense orc profanity, something along the lines of “Klingon chicken fuck,” which somehow still contributed to the effect. Nucky then found an orc horn or instrument and sounded a challenge-call that the nearby orcs could hear. The result was perfect chaos. The owlbear thought prey and rival threat were ahead. The orcs heard what sounded like another war band. Everyone moved toward the same collision point for the wrong reasons.

When the owlbear and the war party met, the party simply got out of the way.

The massacre that followed became the defining image of the session. The owlbear tore into the orcs like a monster designed specifically to punish any illusion of battlefield order. The orcs, believing they might be facing a trained beast or an orchestrated assault, stood and fought instead of scattering. That only made it worse. The DM apparently needed one orc to survive for plot reasons, so one of them became a turncoat or outsider who fled while the rest were shredded. Everyone else got obliterated. The comparison the group used later, of the owlbear wearing blood like a one-year-old in a smash cake, captured the exact kind of grotesque table imagery this campaign seems to generate on command.

Once the fight ended, the party did not linger. The surviving orc still mattered. They followed him all the way toward Kobold Hall.

This shifted the session from monster chaos to investigation. The lone surviving orc acted more cautious than aggressive, which reinforced that something was wrong. He was not here to wipe out kobolds. He was scouting and waiting. The party watched him from hiding and eventually captured and interrogated him. Selganth used the owlbear feathers as an intimidation prop, which worked well enough to get answers fast.

Those answers changed the shape of the larger mystery. Orcs had been getting kidnapped too, especially strong warriors, and the orcs themselves did not believe kobolds were responsible. They had found mutilated bodies before, sometimes only the lower half dumped in the wild, with signs of torture before death. The war party had come to Kobold Hall because all signs seemed to point there, but even they were not convinced the kobolds were truly behind it. That made their heavy equipment and serious preparation make sense. They were not going to bully kobolds. They were going to confront whatever nightmare was using kobolds as cover.

After they got what they needed, the party killed the orc and staged the body to look like it had been killed by a kobold trap. It was not a good kobold trap. It was, in fact, hilariously bad. But it worked because kobolds desperately wanted it to work. When the kobolds found the body, one of them instantly claimed credit. The rest celebrated him like he was the greatest trap engineer in history. The whole tribe started building copycat traps, convinced they had stumbled on the key to killing orc warriors. It was ridiculous, but it also let the party observe what the kobolds did next without exposing themselves.

They waited for days, because the kidnappings had been happening on a two-to-three-day rhythm.

Eventually they saw what they were really looking for: a fleeting shadowy humanoid moving near the kobold road at night. Investigating the scene revealed a planted trail of kobold scales, weapon bits, and other evidence designed to make it look as though kobolds had carried out the kidnappings. But the party knew the trail was fake, because they had been watching long enough to know no kobolds had been there. This was the breakthrough. Someone else was doing the abductions and framing the kobolds for both the human and orc disappearances.

The party also found faint tracks from the real culprit. The prints were very light, human-ish, and large. There were only a few signs, but enough to suggest the figure was a very large human or near-human with a slight limp. That was the first real physical profile they had on the kidnapper.

From there they returned to Fallcrest, where the case had worsened. Another child had been taken.

The party started working their local contacts. One of the parents, Zorick, had been the most recent victim’s father. He said he heard faint creaking and scraping the night of the abduction, maybe the sound of someone picking or forcing a window. The child never screamed. That suggested a skilled intruder, not a monster smashing through walls. They also noticed a pattern in the kidnapped families: every parent had visited Red Tower within the last thirty days. That did not explain everything, but it was a real connection. Somehow the trips to Red Tower were part of the selection pattern.

Lord Warden Faren Markelhay, increasingly alarmed by what he was hearing, raised the stakes. If the party could bring back solid evidence, he would reward each of them with a level 3 magic item. They promised to solve the problem before the upcoming festival, giving themselves about a month. The public nature of that promise spread quickly, and the town responded with attention, hope, and pressure.

So the party set a surveillance trap.

They split into teams and watched the quiet edge of town near the river, each pair hidden in improvised blinds. One blind was very good. The other, less so. They waited through the long dead hours before dawn, the time when the town was at its quietest. Then one of them saw him: a silhouette in the distance, watching Fallcrest from a lookout point.

Things nearly went wrong because Nucky had to leave cover to relieve himself, producing a failed stealth moment at exactly the wrong time. Rae improvised by using a phantom scorpion or similar summoned effect to make it sound like an animal was moving nearby instead of a hidden person. Nucky then leaned into it by pretending to be a frightened child reacting to the “scorpion” and jumped back into hiding. Somehow, against all reason, that did not completely spook the watcher away. Instead, it convinced him there might be a child out in the dark.

That drew the kidnapper in.

Rae was the only one who had a decent look as the figure moved closer. When the time came, he threw a sunrod at the intruder to light him up and startle him. The reveal was excellent. The man was enormous, around seven feet tall, dressed in black, carrying a huge weapon, with a misshapen, scarred face and a twisted mouth. He answered by throwing down a smoke bomb or alchemical smokescreen that filled the area with nasty obscuring vapor.

The party charged.

Inside the smoke, Selganth located him first and shouted that he had found him. The kidnapper responded by dropping or swinging his massive weapon hard enough to wreck Selganth’s ankles, then disengaged and fled. Selganth did land a hit, and with his telepathic communication the two exchanged a final line: Selganth basically promised he would find him, and the man answered with a cold “good luck.” It was one of those villain exits that only works if the table hates him immediately, which it sounds like they did.

Even though he got away, the party still came away with something important. They found cloth or leather from him at the surveillance spot, confirming he had used that overlook repeatedly to study the town and likely plan the kidnappings. They took that evidence to Markelhay and claimed the promised reward, securing their level 3 magic items.

By the end of the session, the party had gone from chasing vague rumors to pinning down a real suspect. They uncovered the ley-line angle, turned an owlbear into a living anti-orc war machine, proved the kobolds were being framed, identified the kidnapper as a large limping humanoid, connected the disappearances to Red Tower visits, and finally confronted the man directly in the dark outside Fallcrest. He escaped, but not before the party saw his face and forced the mystery into the open. That made this session feel like the point where the campaign’s early chaos finally turned into a focused hunt.

Quick Recap

• Ichabod explained that major ley-line activity around Fallcrest was likely behind the worsening natural corruption.
• The party tracked an orc war party and quickly realized it was far too heavily armed to be going after kobolds for normal reasons.
• They encountered a mutated, bone-armored, feather-quilled owlbear eating an orc.
• Zarnak and Nucky used a pine cone, bell, and bolt distraction to try to throw the owlbear off.
• A running skill challenge followed, with caltrops, tree-falls, and branch-traps used to slow the owlbear while the party lured it toward the orcs.
• The group successfully set the owlbear loose on the war party, resulting in a total massacre with only one orc surviving.
• The surviving orc was captured and revealed that strong orcs had been kidnapped too, tortured, and mutilated, and that the orcs did not really believe the kobolds were responsible.
• The party killed that orc and staged the body as a kobold trap kill, which the kobolds proudly claimed and copied.
• After several days of surveillance, the group saw a shadowy humanoid planting fake kobold evidence to frame Kobold Hall for the kidnappings.
• They found faint signs that the real kidnapper was a very large humanoid with a slight limp.
• Back in Fallcrest, they learned another child had been taken and discovered that all the kidnapped children’s parents had visited Red Tower in the last month.
• The party set up surveillance near the river, accidentally used Nucky’s bathroom break as bait, and drew the kidnapper in.
• Rae lit the man up with a sunrod, revealing a huge black-clad human with a scarred, twisted face and a massive weapon.
• The man escaped under cover of smoke after injuring Selganth, but the party recovered physical evidence and earned their promised level 3 magic-item rewards.