The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session started outside Red Tower with Tobias, the supposedly crazy hermit on the edge of town whose home had been under repeated attack by outliers. Things were a little calmer for him now, enough that he had started repairing and improving the place, and with that calm came better information. Tobias shared a fuller history of the region, especially the Holsinger family and their connection to the Scarlet Citadel. Gerhart Holsinger had once ruled the area alongside his magically gifted wife, remembered at the table through half-joking name confusion but clearly tied to druidic or sorcerous power. The family had occupied an ancient elven hunting lodge, and Gerhart had learned how to exploit the region’s ley lines. He effectively monetized them, attracting magical sages and researchers to study the strange currents of power around the area.

That history came with a warning. The ley lines were not neutral in any simple way. Messing with them had warped Gerhart and progressively corrupted members of the family across generations. Tobias suggested that later descendants, especially the fifth and sixth generations, might still be down in the Scarlet Citadel somewhere, along with immense treasure, terrible monsters, and various other hostile groups using the ruins as a base. The party left that conversation with a much stronger sense that the Scarlet Citadel was not just a dungeon full of random encounters. It was the center of a long, decaying magical inheritance.

From there the session shifted into Red Tower itself, starting at the tavern. Nucky had a performance scheduled, and the whole party leaned into supporting it. The tavern crowd included a lot of fresh adventurers, which made it the perfect place to work the room. Zarnak, doing what Zarnak does best, watched people instead of just the stage. He noticed a man and a woman moving separately through the crowd with practiced intent. The man played drunk and awkward. The woman leaned into flirtation and close contact. Together they were clearly feeding or working marks in the tavern.

Zarnak decided to trap them socially rather than immediately start a fight. He set up a situation to catch them in the act, which made them realize they had been noticed. They tried to slip out, and he followed, making it clear he wanted to talk. Garrick, played by the guest at the table, covered the interaction from a nearby balcony with bow ready in case things turned ugly. The party had a rough contingency too: if Zarnak did not come back within a few minutes, the rest of them would come out after him.

The meeting turned into a useful information exchange rather than a confrontation. The pair, named Zorona and Markelhay, were effectively scavenger-thieves surviving on the fringes of the local adventuring scene. The mayor had shut down official guild or field operations, and they were part of what remained. They still went to the Citadel posing as adventurers, but much of their actual profit came from stealing from other adventurers rather than from clearing the place honestly. It was exactly the kind of petty opportunism a dangerous frontier dungeon town breeds.

Back inside the tavern, Nucky’s performance landed well once the crowd got going. Rae also worked the room and gathered more rumors. The regulars talked about dangerous groves where the trees grew so closely together that light dimmed unnaturally and travelers could become lost for days. The way through involved a daisy-chain style method, where one person moved ahead and called back while the others followed the sound. They also confirmed what the party had already learned the hard way: Conrad, the local merchant, was absolutely the kind of guy who would take advantage of adventurers with junk and nonsense goods. Another rumor floating around the tavern held that the red stone of Red Tower came from the blood of a fallen giant. Whether true or not, it fit the town’s tone.

The party regrouped and decided to follow up on the ley-line angle more seriously. Garrick wanted a book or more direct information on ley lines, and that led the group to the Temple of the Twin Gods. There they met four druids, named Selûne, Belenor, Arminus, and Kishina. The encounter had one of the more memorable bits of table flavor in the session: the four druids spoke in a kind of coordinated relay, each taking part of a sentence so that together they came off like a weirdly synchronized hive mind. The party immediately noticed the effect and joked about it, including whether they all did everything together. The druids were friendly enough, but also unsettling in a very druidic-cult way.

The actual information they provided mattered a lot. Garrick asked whether ley lines could be siphoned for power. The druids made it clear that such a thing was dangerous. Their own relationship to ley lines was not exploitative in the same way as arcane scholars or corrupt nobles. They used the lines ritually and naturally, in harmony with the world, rather than trying to drain them like fuel. That conversation also opened the door to more of Rae’s personal backstory. He explained, or the party clarified, that he was not from this world at all. He had been brought here through magical means, and the behavior of ley lines felt deeply connected to the same sort of crossing that had dragged him into the Nentir Vale in the first place. For Rae, this was not just lore. It was the first real fragment of understanding about how one might traverse worlds or planets, and perhaps how he might one day return home.

Armed with that, plus a book on ley lines from the druids, the party moved back into the wilds. They also followed up on a local rumor tied to a place labeled E3, a spooky archway that children treated like a rite of passage. Brave kids dared each other to spend the night there, though most were too scared to go through with it. Fresh owlbear tracks heading toward that location made the place suddenly more urgent.

When the party reached the site, they found a boy named Gabe there, asleep and unaware of how bad the situation was about to get. Gabe had come up before in conversation as the son of one of the more trustworthy local couples, which raised the stakes immediately. The “archway” itself turned out to be stranger than expected. On the map and at first glance it looked almost like a treant or standing figure, but the actual passage ran between its legs. That visual weirdness was part of why the place had become a local dare site in the first place. Unfortunately, it also meant the party had walked into the perfect place for an owlbear attack.

The owlbear emerged and immediately looked ready to make Gabe into a midnight snack. The party had only seconds to react. They shouted for Gabe to climb and get clear, but fear locked him up. Selganth charged in first to intercept, putting himself directly between the beast and the kid. Zarnak followed with the bold and profoundly dumb heroism that defined much of this session, attempting to grapple the owlbear. He did not lock it down, but he did end up right next to it and got swatted hard for his trouble. Rae used a spectral effect, described like a scorpion, to create space and difficult terrain between the owlbear and the boy. Garrick fired a frost-touched arrow to distract and slow the beast. The whole party was fighting not just to kill the thing, but to keep it from reaching Gabe for even one round.

At some point the table realized the owlbear was building toward some kind of screech or sonic attack that would hurt everyone nearby. This led to one of the most unhinged improvised plans of the campaign. Gabe had been camping. Camping meant supplies. Supplies meant marshmallows. Therefore, the obvious answer to an owlbear scream was to shove marshmallows in its mouth and stop it from making the noise. It was outrageous. It was also not the worst idea anyone had ever had at that table.

Rae grabbed the kid, got him moving, and confiscated the marshmallows in the process, giving Gabe one to keep him somewhat cooperative before telling him to run. Meanwhile, Zarnak was bloodied badly enough that magical healing had to go into him fast just to keep him standing. Nucky maintained a difficult-terrain zone. The marshmallows got impaled on a trident and readied like some deranged campfire weapon. Zarnak’s failed grapple also turned into a gift: he came away from the scuffle with a fistful of owlbear thigh feathers, a detail that felt dumb in the moment and then became extremely important later.

The owlbear did manage to loose its screech. It hurt the group, blasted away arrows, and made it obvious that more owlbears were coming. A roll confirmed the worst. Reinforcements were on the way, and one of them was significantly larger. That forced the party into a desperate pivot. Zarnak rushed to the strange archway with the feathers, hoping the place really was magical and that the owlbear’s connection to it meant the feathers could activate something. As he approached, the arch’s engravings began to glow. A black, withered vine wrapped around it tightened, and a portal opened onto a barren otherworldly plane.

That changed the whole problem. The party now had an escape route, but it was not a safe one. They could sense madness or presence on the other side of the portal, something trapped or waiting there, but staying put meant getting overrun by multiple owlbears. So the group committed.

Nucky went full Chubby Bunny and jammed the marshmallows into the owlbear’s mouth before making a break for the portal. Garrick was the only one with enough speed to truly outrun the incoming owlbears, so he stayed outside and used arrows to harry and slow the pursuing beasts while Gabe fled. Selganth struck again, but by then things were collapsing. The first owlbear was very nearly dead, down to only a handful of hit points, but the incoming wave made finishing it irrelevant. The party had to choose between a trophy kill and survival.

They chose survival, mostly.

Everyone except Garrick dove through the portal. Selganth was left outside long enough, and under enough pressure, that his fate became the emotional center of the back half of the session. The table treated it as a genuine death, though with enough ambiguity and magical weirdness around the portal to leave room for how he might return. Garrick, meanwhile, stayed outside in the material world and became the odd man out. The table even joked through the aftermath that his late arrival and lack of musical support for Nucky justified him being the one who had to deal with the outside consequences.

The last major stretch of the session shifted from wilderness crisis to weird metaphysical transition. Going through the portal did not feel like stepping through a doorway. It felt like being plunged into an icy river in total silence. Everyone lost normal sensation and control. Time slowed. They were drawn through a cold void full of swirling motion and shadowy figures, with no certainty whether they were seeing party members or watching wraithlike things move around them. In the middle of that impossible transit, each of them saw a blue glow somewhere nearby, something they could not physically reach but felt deeply drawn toward. The DM leaned into the moment by asking each player what they desired, feared, or reached for in that state.

Zarnak’s response was anger and focus. The feeling reminded him of childhood trials and the way he had to survive by embracing intimidation and refusing to be pushed down. By channeling that same force of will, he gained a sliver of control over the void and pulled himself closer to the glow. Rae approached the experience differently. For him, the sensation stirred familiarity. He connected it to his prior world-crossing and the strange library-and-mirror experience that had once brought him here. Instead of rage, he used magical understanding and the dawning realization that this void might teach him something about traversing worlds. That gave him his own way to move toward the blue light.

By the end of the session, the party had uncovered more of the history of the region, learned that ley lines and world-crossing are central to both the Holsinger legacy and Rae’s personal mystery, saved Gabe from becoming owlbear food, improvised one of the dumbest anti-scream plans in history with marshmallows, activated the archway with owlbear thigh feathers, and escaped through a portal into a freezing void where thought, memory, and desire seemed to shape movement. Selganth was presumed dead or lost, Garrick remained outside, and the adventure had abruptly pivoted from Red Tower rumors and Scarlet Citadel politics into a surreal side-quest realm hidden behind a haunted archway.

Quick Recap

• Tobias shared more history on the Holsinger family, the Scarlet Citadel, and the corrupting influence of the region’s ley lines.
• In Red Tower, Nucky performed at the tavern while the party worked the crowd for rumors and contacts.
• Zarnak caught two thieves, Zorona and Markelhay, feeding or stealing from adventurers and learned they survive by robbing other dungeon-delvers.
• Rae gathered rumors about dangerous dark woods, Conrad being a scammer, and local stories about Red Tower’s blood-red stone.
• The party visited the Temple of the Twin Gods and met four relay-speaking druids who gave them a ley-line book and insights into natural versus exploitative use of that magic.
• Rae’s background tied directly into the ley-line discussion, revealing that world-crossing magic may explain how he came here and how he might get home.
• Following fresh owlbear tracks, the party reached the spooky archway site where children dared each other to spend the night and found Gabe sleeping there.
• An owlbear attacked, and the party scrambled to protect Gabe while fighting it off with spells, arrows, terrain control, and a failed but heroic grapple.
• The table’s solution to the owlbear’s sonic screech was to steal Gabe’s marshmallows and try to jam them into the owlbear’s mouth.
• Reinforcing owlbears were coming, including a bigger one, so Zarnak used owlbear thigh feathers on the archway and opened a portal to a barren otherworld.
• Most of the party fled through the portal while Garrick stayed outside, and Selganth was left behind badly enough to be treated as dead or lost.
• Passing through the portal felt like being dragged through a freezing void where movement depended on desire, memory, and force of will.
• The session ended with the party separated, Selganth’s fate unresolved, and the adventure shifting into a surreal new realm beyond the arch.