The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session opened in the aftermath of the party’s fight with the jailer in the Scarlet Citadel, with everyone still deep in the dungeon and trying to decide what counted as “finished” in a place that clearly did not believe in closure. The recap covered the earlier trap-room fight with the psychic horror jailer and Scar, the filthy captive he had kept in the cells for years. The party had managed to manipulate the battlefield, trap enemies with the prison bars, and unleash the owlbear into the jailer’s cell, which ended in a gruesome and memorable death for the jailer. Scar survived and fled the scene, and the group looted the dead man’s gear, including armor, a maul, gloves, and his unpleasant collection of jailer tools. They had also rescued Barrett and the woman held captive with him, learning they were tied to Dugan Luve’s merchant operation. The group brought those captives safely back to Red Tower and collected an 800 gold reward.

That should have been the end of the dungeon push.

Instead, after returning to the circular body room to deal with the dead children and perhaps recover the corpses for proper burial, the situation got worse all over again. The room itself was a horror show even before anything animated: a thirty-foot circular chamber full of chains, meat hooks, decaying bodies, loose body parts, and a central hole dropping into darkness. Some of the corpses were still hanging from chains in different stages of decay. A larger hook hung above the black pit, with severed human hands lashed to it. The whole room stank of death and looked exactly like the kind of place where the jailer spent his happiest hours. As the party looked around, the bodies and fragments started moving again.

This time the enemy lineup was three child zombies and two grotesque skeletons.

The party more or less instantly accepted that there was no clean way to solve this except violence and creativity. Zarnak was first to act and immediately turned the room into an acrobatic playground. He planted a foot on the chain-and-winch setup, climbed up, kicked off the wall, and swung through the chamber in a very swashbuckling arc to land across the room and kill one of the child zombies. The undead children were horrifying on paper, but in practice the fight became deranged almost immediately.

One of the running themes of the battle was using the hooks and chains like improvised battlefield tools. Nucky decided to hook a zombie child on one of the chains and turn it into a literal tetherball baby. The hit worked. The baby got snagged under the ribs and flung around on the line. It turned out the jailer had force-fed one of the child corpses candy, so when the body got smashed up, it burst open in a shower of gore and sweets like some truly cursed piñata. The candy-fall moment landed right in that special D&D zone where something can be both horrible and hysterical at the same time.

The room’s central hole also became a major part of the fight. Rae kicked a skeleton down into it, expecting a disposal solution and instead discovering the dungeon’s giant bat problem. Two huge bats flew up out of the darkness. That established the hole as a hazard-generator rather than a body chute. Nucky responded by hooking one of the bats, and Selganth used the flat of his axe like a baseball bat to literally bat the hooked bat into another bat. It was that sort of encounter. Normal tactics were dead by round two.

As if that were not enough, the zombies and skeletons would not stay down. The undead kept reanimating, forcing the party to stop thinking in terms of “kill and move on” and start treating the room like a machine they had to solve. Zarnak kept collecting more hooks as he moved, then hurled them in a wide attack that dropped zombies and hit bats at the same time. Rae went to a nearby room, grabbed a table, and dragged it back specifically to cover the hole before more bats could come up. The table eventually became one of the central tools of the fight, alternately used as a lid, a barricade, and later something Rae effectively stuffed “in his pocket,” badly enough that his pants ended up damaged by the stunt.

The group got into a rhythm. Kill undead. Something comes back. Kick it in the hole. Cover the hole. Bats emerge anyway. Hook bat. Swing dead child. Try not to get chewed up. At one point a half-dead zombie child being handled for disposal reanimated mid-process, cried, and bit someone. Even by Scarlet Citadel standards, the room had become a nightmare toy box.

Then the cages woke up.

The hanging steel cages above the room, which had seemed like scenery or old torture leftovers, started moving and shaking as if trying to get off their hooks. The party quickly realized these too had been animated, likely by the jailer’s magic, and were now acting like predatory traps. They were effectively steel monsters trying to slam down, trap, and eat the party while everyone was still busy with the zombie-children-and-bat problem.

Rae pushed forward into the adjoining chamber while the others dealt with the moving cages. That next room revealed more of the jailer’s true workspace: a blood-covered toad statue, an array of torture devices both recognizable and improvised, and a captive human being held in a cage. The room was essentially a torture chamber built by someone with too much time, too much cruelty, and no supervision. Rae was still trying to manage the circular room’s hole with the table while also taking in what this next room contained, which meant he was half engineer and half rescue worker at the same time.

The animated cages attacked in earnest. One large cage trapped Rae. A smaller one worked more like a steel bear trap and snapped onto Nucky. The party adapted as usual. Nucky got dragged across the room and tried to thievery his way out of the trap but failed. Zarnak used his own thievery to get Nucky loose, then wrapped chain around the smaller trap and effectively weaponized it against the larger cage. The two murderous cages ended up smashing and snapping at each other in a sequence the table immortalized as the cages “making out to death.” It was absurd, but it also worked well enough to buy the party breathing room.

Once they got the cages under control, the party focused on the living prisoner. Nucky checked his condition while Selganth helped stabilize him. Rae broke the lock on the cage. When they pulled the man free, spikes embedded in his back tore out with him, making it painfully clear how badly he had been abused. The man was barely conscious and on the edge of death. In the middle of all that, Zarnak also peed in the mouth of the blood-covered toad statue, because apparently no room in the Scarlet Citadel is too horrifying to avoid becoming part of the comedy reel.

The rescued man turned out to be Barrett, bodyguard to Dugan Luve. He had been abducted along with the woman in the other cage. Once he understood that the party knew where she was and intended to free her too, he did what he could to help despite his condition. The group got her out as well, and once both were conscious enough to talk, they explained more of what had happened. They were traveling traders who went into dangerous places to sell goods because no one else wanted to. On the way to Red Tower they had been ambushed and dragged into the Citadel. Nucky smoothed over their nerves with magic when they started whispering to each other about whether the party could be trusted, which was fair, because at this point the party was covered in blood, bat parts, and zombie candy.

With both prisoners rescued, the party made the call not to push deeper. They escorted Barrett and the woman back to Red Tower and got paid. The reward was 800 gold, essentially the value of the lost goods and the gratitude attached to getting two important merchants back alive. The group also had trophies to hang up at the tavern and a lot more reputation than they had before.

From there, the session shifted back to town. The party short-rested and started looking at what to do next instead of immediately diving back into the Citadel. One strong thread was Tobias. The group realized Honest Tobias had been right about more and more things, and if anyone was likely to connect the dots on what they were finding, it was him. They headed outside town to visit him.

Tobias was repairing his place again, but this time with a little more optimism. The attacks on his home had slowed, enough that he was trying to make it look better instead of just barely functional. He was genuinely pleased to see the party and wanted to hear what they had found. When they gave him the update, he finally opened up about deeper local history he had not felt safe sharing earlier. That was where the session took a major turn from “gross dungeon room” to “the whole region has a dark magical backstory.”

Tobias explained that the Holsinger family had once ruled the area. Gerhart Holsinger and his wife Edelfrieda the Golden, remembered as either a druid, a sorceress, or a witch depending on who was telling the story, had taken over the abandoned site of an ancient elven hunting lodge. That site eventually became the Scarlet Citadel. Gerhart discovered a confluence of ley lines in the region and was able to profit from them by attracting sages, researchers, and magical scholars who wanted to study the strange power there. Over time, this helped lay the foundation for what became Red Tower.

But Gerhart and the generations after him were corrupted by that same power. Tobias described the ley lines as carrying both beneficial and dark currents, and the Holsingers gradually became warped by meddling with forces they did not understand and by the ordinary corruption that comes from controlling power and access. Rumor held that later generations of the Holsinger line still lingered deep below in the Scarlet Citadel, pursuing dangerous magical research even now. Tobias painted the Citadel not just as a dungeon full of monsters, but as a layered nest of ancient corruption, magical experimentation, hidden treasure, criminal factions, and monsters creeping upward from deeper levels.

By the end of the session, the party had survived one of the most grotesque and ridiculous fights in the campaign so far, rescued Barrett and the merchant woman, returned to Red Tower with money and reputation, and gained their clearest explanation yet for why the Scarlet Citadel is such a mess. The Holsingers, the ley lines, the ancient elven site, and the dangerous factions inside the ruins all clicked together into one larger picture. The campaign had stopped being just “clear rooms in a bad dungeon.” It was now very obviously about an entire region built on corrupted magical roots.

Quick Recap

• The session picked up after the jailer fight, with the party having already rescued Barrett and another captive and collected an 800 gold reward.
• Returning to the circular body room, the party found the corpses animating again into three child zombies and two grotesque skeletons.
• Zarnak used the hanging chains to swing across the room and kill one of the zombie children.
• Nucky hooked a child zombie like a tetherball, and the body burst candy because the jailer had force-fed it sweets.
• Kicking bodies into the central hole caused giant bats to fly out, turning the pit into a recurring hazard.
• Rae dragged in a table to cover the hole, and the group started treating the fight like a gross engineering puzzle.
• The hanging cages then animated and attacked, with one trapping Rae and another snapping onto Nucky like a steel bear trap.
• Zarnak used chains and thievery to free Nucky and weaponized one cage against the other in the ‘cages making out to death’ sequence.
• In the torture chamber beyond, the party rescued Barrett and the second captive, learning they were traders tied to Dugan Luve.
• The group escorted them back to Red Tower, claimed their reward, and gained more reputation in town.
• After regrouping, the party visited Honest Tobias again.
• Tobias finally shared the deeper history of the Holsinger family, Edelfrieda the Golden, the ancient elven hunting lodge, and the ley lines beneath the Scarlet Citadel.
• He warned that later Holsinger descendants may still be deep below, along with treasure, monsters, and criminal factions using the upper levels as hideouts.
• The session ended with the party much better informed about the true scope of the Scarlet Citadel and the corrupt magical history behind it.