The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session began in the Scarlet Citadel in one of the nastier rooms the party had seen so far: a circular chamber full of suspended chains, body parts, and the kind of ambient horror that strongly suggested the jailer needed to be beaten to death repeatedly. The moment the party entered, the room came alive. Pieces of corpses animated, chains swayed, and the first wave of enemies showed itself as three child zombies and two skeletons.

The fight immediately went off the rails in the best possible way. Zarnak used the hanging chains almost like a stunt rig, climbing and swinging across the room to reach the far side and kill one of the zombie children. Nucky hooked another of the baby zombies and turned it into what the table immediately recognized as a grotesque tetherball scenario. That particular undead child had apparently been force-fed candy by the jailer, so when it got smashed around it burst like some kind of revolting piñata, spraying sweets and gore together across the floor. It was both awful and somehow hilarious, which is a very D&D sentence.

The room also featured a hole in the middle that quickly turned into its own recurring threat. Rae kicked a skeleton corpse down the hole, only to discover that this was apparently the local bat dispenser. Two huge bats came flying out. Nucky then managed to hook one of the bats, and Selganth used the flat of an axe like a baseball bat to smash one bat into another. It was the sort of fight where every turn sounded fake when repeated later, yet it all happened.

Unfortunately, killing the zombies and skeletons did not keep them dead for long. Some of the undead rose back up, and the party had to start thinking less like adventurers and more like lunatics solving a physics puzzle in a haunted butcher shop. Zarnak wound up with more chains and hooks from all his swinging and repositioning, and at one point he hurled them in a way that dropped the zombies again and hit the bats besides. The party also realized they needed to start controlling the hole rather than just treating it like scenery, because every time a body went in, more bat trouble seemed likely to follow.

That led to one of the stranger tactical sequences of the session. Rae went into a nearby room, grabbed a table, and dragged it back as a kind of improvised lid. At one point he effectively put the table “in his pocket,” which became its own joke, but the practical point was that the table could cover the opening before more bats erupted out. The group tried to use the table and the remains of a half-zombie child as a kind of lid-and-disposal system, moving the cover, shoving the undead into the hole, and covering it again before more flying problems emerged. Even then, one of the zombie babies came back to life while being handled and bit someone mid-procedure. The entire scene felt like the world’s worst carnival game crossed with emergency pest control.

Once the skeletons, zombies, and bat problem were finally under some degree of control, the room got worse.

The cages hanging above the chamber started moving.

At first the party thought they might simply be rattling loose or reacting to the chaos, but it quickly became clear that the cages themselves had been animated. The jailer had apparently enchanted them somehow, and now they were acting like predators, trying to trap and eat people. This turned the battlefield into a new kind of nightmare: mobile steel maw-traps descending from above while the party was still cleaning up the previous mess.

Rae pushed ahead into the next section and found what was essentially a torture chamber. The details were exactly as bad as that sounds. There was a blood-covered toad statue, a variety of conventional and invented torture devices, and a caged human prisoner still alive but in horrible shape. While Rae explored, the animated cages attacked the group behind him. One larger cage trapped him outright, while a smaller one functioned more like a giant bear trap and clamped onto Nucky.

The party responded with the same mixture of actual competence and complete nonsense that had gotten them this far. Nucky slid across the battlefield and tried to thievery his way out of the trap but failed. Zarnak then used thievery to free him, wrapped a chain around the smaller trap, and used it as an improvised weapon against the larger cage. The result was two murderous steel cages slamming into each other in what the table memorably described as the cages “making out to death.” It was ridiculous. It was also effective enough to stop them from continuing to wreck the room and batter the table-lid setup.

With the cage problem under partial control, the party focused on the actual prisoners. Zarnak got to the man in the torture chamber first. Nucky checked his condition while Selganth helped stabilize him. Rae broke the lock on the cage, and when they pulled the man free, spikes or embedded points ripped out of his back, making it clear that he had been kept alive in absolute misery. He was barely hanging on. In a brief but unforgettable aside, Zarnak also peed into the mouth of the bloody toad statue, because apparently even torture rooms are not safe from table energy.

The rescued man turned out to be Barrett, bodyguard to Dugan Luve, one of the traveling merchants tied to Red Tower. He had been abducted alongside his mistress or employer, who was the second prisoner still trapped in another cage. Once Barrett understood that the party knew where she was and intended to help, he did what he could to assist despite his own condition. The party got the other prisoner out as well, and the two of them began doing the very natural thing of whispering to each other, trying to decide whether these strangers covered in blood, bat guano, and baby-zombie candy could actually be trusted.

Nucky, to his credit, used magic again to help smooth that over.

Barrett and the rescued woman explained that they worked for or with Dugan Luve as traveling traders. They made money by bringing goods into dangerous places because no one else wanted to go there. On the road to Red Tower they had been ambushed and dragged into the Citadel. Their rescue mattered both practically and socially. The party chose not to push deeper immediately and instead escorted them back to town.

That return to Red Tower paid off. The rescued merchant rewarded the group with 800 gold, essentially the value of the goods and gratitude involved in getting them back alive. The party also brought back trophies and all the fresh stories that come with surviving a jailer’s kill-room. Nucky had performances and tavern business to attend to, while the group also circled back toward town logistics, supplies, and what to do next.

By the end of the session, the party had turned a grotesque circular death-room into a half-improvised engineering project, fought animated child zombies, skeletons, bats, and sentient killer cages, survived one of the most disturbing candy-related reveals imaginable, uncovered a torture chamber, rescued Barrett and a second captive, and returned to Red Tower with money, trophies, and much more credibility than when they went in. The Scarlet Citadel had become more than just a haunted ruin. It was now very clearly a place where sadism, bad magic, and old cruelty had soaked into the architecture itself.

Quick Recap

• The session began in a circular chamber where body parts animated into three child zombies and two skeletons.
• Zarnak used the hanging chains to swing across the room and kill one of the zombie children.
• Nucky hooked another zombie child like a tetherball, and it burst with candy because the jailer had grotesquely force-fed it sweets.
• Kicking bodies into the central hole caused giant bats to fly out, turning the hole into a recurring hazard.
• Selganth literally batted one bat into another, while the party tried to control the hole with an improvised table lid.
• Some of the zombies and skeletons rose again, forcing the group to keep solving the room instead of just killing enemies once.
• The hanging cages then animated and attacked, with one trapping Rae and another clamping onto Nucky like a giant bear trap.
• Zarnak used chains and thievery to free Nucky and weaponized one cage against the other in the infamous ‘cages making out to death’ moment.
• In the torture chamber beyond, the party found a blood-covered toad statue, horrific devices, and two living captives.
• They rescued Barrett, bodyguard to Dugan Luve, and then freed the second captive as well.
• Barrett and the rescued merchant explained they were ambushed while bringing goods to Red Tower.
• The party escorted them back to town and received an 800 gold reward.
• The session ended with the group back in Red Tower, richer, bloodier, and much more established after surviving one of the Citadel’s worst rooms.