The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session took place deep inside the memory-realm, where the party was already dealing with a space that behaved more like a dream than a normal physical location. The opening focus was on how wrong the environment felt. A sunrod had been lit, but it only worked halfway and could not truly pierce the darkness. The only reliable light came from the blue gem embedded in Rae’s arm. As the group traveled farther in, it felt as though the safe world behind them was stretching away. Reality itself seemed more distant with every step, while the memory-place became more dominant. Dim shapes moved in the distance, just beyond sight, as though something was watching and waiting.

That waiting ended when the gem responded.

Rae felt a magical pressure reaching toward the crystal in his arm and tried to communicate with it, asking why it had chosen him. In response, he was pulled into a memory of the place itself and learned one of the biggest truths of the arc. This realm had been created by powerful arcane practitioners who manipulated memory as a tool against death. They could store a person’s memories in a locket or similar vessel so that, if the body failed, those memories might later be restored to make the person whole again. It was not just necromancy or simple resurrection. It was memory made literal. But the practice had been corrupted. People had tried to steal or manipulate the memories of others, and the whole system had twisted into the unstable “memory world” the party was now trapped in.

The moment Rae came out of that revelation, combat started.

Several shadowy creatures attacked, including a cluster of smaller, cat-like horrors and a larger humanoid presence lurking farther back in the fog. The fight instantly showed how strange this place was. Zarnak’s first attack caused his crossbow to snap in half outright, not from a miss or a critical failure in the normal sense, but because reality itself did not seem stable here. The cat-like creatures charged through the gloom, their eyes glowing through the fog. One breathed a freezing, soul-sapping blast at Rae that left him feeling as though his will had been leeched away. Selganth got bitten and grabbed early in the fight, then later swapped with Zarnak, causing Zarnak to take the brunt of that pressure instead.

Nucky noticed something important in the middle of the fight: the cat-creatures were not the real center of the threat. There was a bigger, more humanoid shadow figure still hanging back, almost like a controller or anchor for the rest of them. At the same time, Rae decided to push the gem further. Based on what he had learned in the memory, he tried to attune to the crystal and work with its nature instead of just carrying it around as a passive artifact. His specific attempt was to place one of his own memories into it, choosing a memory of defeating a monster and trying to make that memory real enough to matter in the current fight.

That turned out to be exactly the kind of thing the enemies did not want him doing.

The shadowy force reacted hard. One of the previously downed or dead forms was restored. The larger shadow figure reasserted control over the battlefield, slamming a hand to the ground and sending a jarring force through the area that knocked almost everyone prone except Zarnak. It became clear that this enemy was tied to the memory-logic of the realm and was trying to stop Rae from engaging with it on the same level.

The party fought back with the sort of chaotic creativity that had become normal for them. Nucky and Nucky came up with one of the strangest and best battlefield distractions of the campaign: performing “I Will Remember You” at the shadowy humanoid. The whole bit was half mockery, half bizarre emotional invocation, and somehow it worked well enough to stun the enemy for two turns. The table clearly loved it, and in-world it functioned as a memory-based disruption that actually shifted the fight.

That was the turning point. Once the humanoid enemy was thrown off balance, the trembling ground eased and the fog started to sink back into the soil. The enemy became easier to see. Selganth drew the remaining threats toward himself. Rae’s bond with the gem solidified further, and he realized that his own memories were now tied into its workings. In practical terms, it gave him something like a backup against death, because the same logic that could preserve others might now preserve him too.

The party then finished the fight decisively. Zarnak charged the shadowy essence-controller. As the enemy weakened, the crystal in Rae’s arm flared brighter, as if harming these corrupted creatures directly strengthened the Light of Memoria. Once the humanoid went down, the cat-creatures lost coherence and dropped with it. The fog receded further, though the realm remained dark. One major rule of the place also became clearer: if the crystal dimmed, it meant one of these shadow-bound corrupted beings was nearby and interfering with it.

After the fight, the group pieced together more of what had happened to the people of this realm. It had not only held arcane elites experimenting with memory magic. It had also held ordinary people, and those regular inhabitants had been warped, trapped, and corrupted by the magic around them. They died locked inside this memory-state and came to hate the medallions, lockets, and related magic that had created their suffering. That explained part of why the enemies reacted so violently to Rae and the gem. The realm itself had become a prison built out of magical privilege and collective damage.

Even Zarnak’s snapped weapon reflected that instability. Later, the broken crossbow simply returned to normal, reinforcing that the place did not follow ordinary material rules.

The party then pushed onward rather than turning back. The environment continued shifting as they moved. Paths opened into roads, roads into blasted clearings, and clearings into cliff-like edges. The realm behaved like dream geography, where a forest path could naturally become something entirely different without anyone noticing how impossible it should feel. At one point the party came to an abrupt, jagged cliff and began to understand that this “edge” represented where the pocket dimension had been severed from the reality it was drawn from. It was like the boundary of a Truman Show world: if you followed it long enough, you might circle the whole fake reality.

The group kept moving and entered a misty outdoor-feeling space where they saw strange lumps on the ground ahead. Visibility was terrible, and the only trustworthy light was still the gem in Rae’s arm. Zarnak, being himself, solved the uncertainty the direct way and shot one of the shapes from a distance. The arrow hit with a wet, body-like impact. When the group approached, they discovered that he had shot the corpse of a woman.

That body turned out to be important.

She wore elaborate clothing and a medallion or locket similar to the one they had encountered before, though with different patterns and details. The group recognized that opening the locket was likely the only way forward, so they did. Doing so triggered another powerful memory. Through that vision, they learned more about Naveena, Mila, Ivan, and the desperate effort to cut the realm off from the Shadow Road. The memory revealed a final catastrophe: shrieking specters, a dying Naveena clutching the Light of Memoria, a daughter named Mila being told to flee, and the realization that sealing the place off would likely require a fatal sacrifice. The memory ended with a hulking wraith attacking, Ivan being overrun by shadows, and the portal darkening into silence and ruin.

When the memory ended, the state of the body changed. The party could now see more clearly that the woman had been grievously wounded. The memory had altered the dream-state around her, as if understanding her final moments made the truth more visible. It also made clear that her spirit was close at hand.

The next part of the session became one of the strangest social recoveries in the campaign. After discovering the female body and realizing a spirit was nearby, the party tried to interact with the ghostly presence. The attempt got weird fast. In one of the most infamous choices of the night, the group effectively tried a “Weekend at Bernie’s” approach with the corpse, lifting or manipulating the body in a clumsy attempt to make contact with the spirit in the distance. This did not go over well at first. A wave of hatred and cold washed over the area, making it very clear the spirit did not appreciate the treatment of her remains.

Nucky jumped in to try to de-escalate. Using friends and a diplomacy-driven approach, he addressed the spirit with words that seemed to come to him through the magic of the place itself: “Naveena. We can help you. Ignore this region. He knows not what he does.” That changed everything. The hostility ebbed. The hatred washed away. What remained was cold, but not actively murderous.

Once the spirit softened, the party got closer and realized they were dealing with the ghost of the woman tied to the body itself. From there, the encounter shifted into a skill challenge centered on empathy, memory, and respectful engagement. The group understood that the spirit was bound to the dimension and to the events revealed in the memory. They began trying to speak to her not as a monster, but as someone whose sacrifice and suffering still mattered.

The key move came when the party started invoking details from the memory itself. They referenced Ivan, the wraith, the sacrifice, and the injustice of what had happened. They were not just improvising generic comfort. They were using the information from the memory to prove they understood her story. That lowered the cold further and brought the spirit into a state where comfort might actually reach her.

By the end of the session, the party had not fully resolved everything, but they had made real progress on several fronts. They survived a fight against shadow-cats and a controlling shadow-humanoid, learned the underlying function and corruption of the memory-realm, deepened Rae’s bond with the gem, discovered that the realm’s edge marked the wound where it had been severed from reality, found the body of an important woman tied to the collapse, relived one of the most painful memories yet, and managed to shift a likely spirit-fight into a tense but hopeful attempt at comfort and restoration. The session closed with the party deep in a pocket world of broken memory, trying to help a wounded spirit remember who she had been and why she had mattered.

Quick Recap

• The party moved deeper into the memory-realm, where normal light failed and only the gem in Rae’s arm illuminated the path.
• Rae experienced a major vision explaining that the realm was created by arcane practitioners who stored memories to preserve life.
• Shadow-creatures attacked, including cat-like monsters and a larger humanoid controller in the fog.
• Zarnak’s crossbow snapped in half during the fight because reality in the realm was unstable.
• One creature drained Rae’s will, Selganth got grabbed, and the battlefield turned chaotic fast.
• Rae tried to place one of his own memories into the gem, which enraged the enemies and intensified the fight.
• Nucky and Nucky used a bizarre ‘I Will Remember You’ performance bit to stun the humanoid shadow for two turns.
• Once the humanoid went down, the cat-creatures collapsed and the gem in Rae’s arm flared brighter.
• The party learned that ordinary people trapped in the realm had been corrupted and now hated the medallion-and-memory magic that trapped them.
• Exploring farther, they reached a jagged cliff and realized it marked where the pocket dimension had been severed from real space.
• Zarnak shot a strange shape in the mist and discovered it was the corpse of a woman with a familiar-style locket.
• Opening the locket triggered a memory involving Naveena, Mila, Ivan, a wraith, and the desperate effort to cut the realm off from the Shadow Road.
• A nearby female spirit reacted badly when the party handled the body poorly, but Nucky managed to calm her with magic and the right words.
• The session ended with the group trying to comfort the spirit by invoking the memory and her sacrifice instead of fighting her.