The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session began in the Scarlet Citadel’s ooze-and-alchemy wing, with the party recapping what they had found in the rooms just beyond the bizarre chamber of slime essences. One side room had a crumbled wall opening into a smoke-filled corridor, along with rubble that turned out to be evidence of a past explosion. Krovuur found burnt fuse material and signs that someone had blown part of the area open with explosives. The party also discovered several valuable barrels of distillants, each worth a substantial amount if they could ever manage to haul them back to the surface. Right away, the room felt less like a normal dungeon chamber and more like a dangerous industrial workspace built by someone doing very questionable magical chemistry.

As the group investigated farther, they found notes on a table near a huge alchemical furnace and machine assembly. The notes referenced things like temporal transfer refractors, harmonic plate assemblies, and other half-scientific, half-arcane terms that sounded important even if no one fully understood them. That machine dominated the room. It reached toward the vaulted ceiling, glowed with heat, and gave off a sharp bitter smell. It was clearly the centerpiece of the level’s experiments.

That was also where the party met the woman running the place. She was an unstable alchemical researcher with a bandolier of grenade-like devices and a total lack of patience for interruptions. Rae tried talking to her first and offered help, but she immediately made it clear that she saw him as an arcane meddler rather than a useful assistant. She kept working through a sequence of notes, knobs, and dials, trying to coax the machine into functioning correctly.

At the same time, Rae noticed that an invisible magical creature was hovering nearby, staying close to the researcher without openly revealing itself. He wisely chose not to react to it right away. Meanwhile, Krovuur explored crates in the room and found more of the grenade shells, packed in sawdust. They were empty but clearly important to the researcher’s work. The whole scene made it obvious that this level was not abandoned. It was active, and someone very dangerous had been trying to perfect a process involving harmonics, alchemical distillants, explosive devices, and unstable ooze experimentation.

Nucky, being Nucky, decided he understood harmonics well enough to help. He used charm magic to smooth the researcher’s attitude and got close enough to participate. That let him and Rae start feeding her instructions and notes while she operated the machine. For a moment, it looked like the party might actually turn this into a productive collaboration instead of a disaster.

That optimism lasted about as long as you would expect.

Something in the furnace process failed. The machine sputtered, coughed, and then belched out a massive poisonous cloud that filled the room. The reaction did heavy poison damage and began suffocating the people who stayed too close. It was one of those classic party moments where helping the unstable mad scientist immediately makes everything much worse. The group had to flee and regroup while the room remained lethally contaminated for a long time afterward. They also wasted one of the valuable distillant barrels in the failed experiment, which made the researcher furious.

Even after that, the party did not fully turn her into an enemy. They apologized, regrouped, and tried to keep the relationship from collapsing, partly because she clearly controlled a lot of what was happening on this level. The group learned that her boss was someone named Kagisza, though she refused to let them speak directly to that higher authority. She also demanded that the party replace the grenade shells they had taken, which added another problem to the list.

After a short rest to recover from the gas incident, the researcher led them into the next workroom. This area held three huge metal vats, hoses dripping slime, chemical tools, strange flying imp-like helpers, and more signs that the whole place existed to create or refine dangerous ooze creatures. The researcher, identified here as Danasca, was half brilliant technician and half unhinged eccentric. She talked in bursts of technical jargon, some of it meaningful, some of it sounding like wild nonsense that even she did not fully recognize as nonsense. The party gradually pieced together that she had been experimenting with gelatinous cubes and related constructs, trying to manipulate them through fluids, dimensional extracts, and harmonic processes.

That was the exact moment when the vats started going wrong.

One of the vats began to burp, spit, and surge harder than normal, and then the process broke open. Instead of producing one stable result, the vats erupted into multiple smaller proto-cubes, six of them in all, two from each vat. They were not quite full gelatinous cubes and not quite harmless ooze blobs either. They were unstable little alchemical monsters, each reacting differently when attacked.

The fight that followed was one of the stranger combats in the campaign so far. Each small cube had its own reactive effect. One flashed with bright electrical energy, shorted out, then later began to recover and recombobulate. Another ignited into flame and started launching little fire bolts around the room. Another burped out poison gas in response to being hit. One created a metal-pulling effect, trying to yank gear toward itself. Others revealed cold or wind-like reactions. Instead of being a straightforward fight, the battle became a strange experiment where every successful hit taught the party something new and usually unpleasant.

The party handled it with a mixture of cleverness, chaos, and a complete disregard for conventional battlefield dignity. Nucky opened by striking one of the cubes and learning the hard way that these things were going to react unpredictably. Rae attacked another and set off a fire-based response. Krovuur unleashed heavy divine area attacks, hitting multiple cubes and also clipping allies in the process.

Zarnak had one of the most memorable turns of the fight. Faced with multiple low, dangerous cubes clustered together, he decided a table was the correct tactical answer. He kicked it up, grabbed it, and slammed it down over multiple cubes like an improvised crushing shield. The table effectively became both weapon and cover, turning a laboratory fight into a wrestling match with furniture.

By the end of the session, the party was still in the middle of this alchemical cube fight, but the larger shape of the scenario was clear. They had uncovered the operating heart of the ooze level, met the unstable alchemist running it, accidentally ruined one of her experiments, poisoned themselves with her furnace, learned more about the machinery and materials behind the level’s horrors, and then stumbled into another live experiment when six smaller gelatinous constructs burst out of the vats.

Quick Recap

• The party explored a side room beyond the ooze-essence chamber and found rubble, burnt fuses, and evidence of an earlier explosion.
• They discovered several barrels of valuable distillants that could be worth a lot if recovered.
• The group found technical notes about temporal transfer refractors, harmonic plate assemblies, and related alchemical machinery.
• They encountered an unstable researcher working a huge furnace-and-machine setup while an invisible magical creature hovered nearby.
• Krovuur found crates of empty grenade shells packed in sawdust, showing the scale of the lab’s explosive work.
• Nucky used charm magic and the party tried to help the researcher operate the machine.
• Their assistance caused a catastrophic failure, filling the room with poisonous gas and badly injuring the party.
• One distillant barrel was wasted, and the researcher became furious but not fully hostile.
• After resting, the party entered the next vat room and learned more about Danasca’s experiments with gelatinous cubes.
• The vats malfunctioned and burst out six small unstable ooze constructs, two from each vat.
• Each cube reacted differently when struck, producing effects like lightning, fire bolts, poison gas, metal-pull, and other unstable responses.
• Zarnak used a table as an improvised weapon against multiple cubes, and the session ended with the party still fighting through the chaos.