The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session picked up with the party recapping the chaos on the ooze-workshop level of the Scarlet Citadel. The immediate memory was the fight against the six strange slime cubes, each of which reacted differently when attacked. One sparked with electricity, one burst into flame and fired off burning bolts, one released gas, one pulled metal toward itself, one whipped up violent winds, and another revealed cold effects. The fight turned into a bizarre lab encounter where every hit taught the party something new about the creatures.

A lot of the battle had a slapstick edge even while it stayed dangerous. Zarnak kicked up and surfed a table into multiple slimes. Nucky ended up airborne and bouncing across furniture in a room with a ceiling that somehow did not seem to care about geometry. Krovuur dropped heavy divine punishment into the middle of the room, damaging enemies and allies alike while also dazing himself. By the end, the cubes were dead, the room was full of difficult terrain and residue, and Darnaska was already taking notes like she had learned something useful from the mess.

After that fight, the party took a short rest and started exploring again. One path led toward a corridor full of corrosive fumes so nasty that even testing it made clear it was a bad idea without protection. Darnaska, being Darnaska, pulled out some kind of breathing aid and went farther than the rest of the group could safely follow. The others checked the route, confirmed it was miserable, and backed off before they all melted in their lungs.

The other path led back toward the door and storage area where the invisible dire gelatinous cube had been dealt with. There was still unfinished business there, including doors the group had not fully explored and the realization that the map itself had accidentally revealed a secret door the players were technically not supposed to know about yet. Rather than ignore that, the group leaned into it and treated it as something their characters could now carefully investigate.

Once they examined that hidden entrance properly, they discovered that the secret door was real, not trapped, and not locked, but opening it quietly took some finesse. Nucky managed that, cracked it open, and found a goblin hideout tucked behind the wall. Inside were six goblins, a barricade almost up to the ceiling, and multiple crossbows embedded in the barricade and aimed toward the door. The room looked like a stolen, improvised survival camp, with hides, scraps, broken boxes, and food remains. These were not goblins in control of the level. These were goblins hiding on it.

The party quickly realized the room was defensively organized and that the goblins were being quiet on purpose. There did not seem to be a leader present in that first chamber, which implied the actual boss or decision-maker was deeper inside. That gave the group a choice: try to talk, back off, or do the thing adventurers always do when subtlety almost works.

They did the last one.

Zarnak slipped inside first and landed an absurdly clean stealth kill on one goblin. He killed it so silently and hid the body so well that the goblin beside it did not even realize anything had happened. That shifted the whole mood of the scene from tense infiltration to horror movie. For a moment, Zarnak was effectively the monster in the room. Outside the door, the rest of the party had no idea exactly what had happened because they heard no commotion at all.

That led to a messy split between “this is amazing” and “we may have just ruined diplomacy.” The one party member best suited to communicating with goblins had just gone in and started murdering them, while the others were still outside trying to interpret the silence. At the same time, the group knew the barricade, the loaded crossbows, and the hidden camp all meant these goblins were scared of something and not simply waiting to ambush strangers for fun.

From there, Krovuur escalated the encounter with Scourge of Heaven, managing to kill one goblin and miss another. The miss was important because that goblin reacted perfectly, dodged, and tumbled out of the room, likely to alert someone deeper in the hideout. That snapped the whole situation fully into combat mode. Whatever chance the party had of walking in and establishing dominance cleanly turned into an active, noisy fight.

The session ended in that transition point between stealth success and open conflict. The party had explored the corrosive corridor enough to know it was a problem for later, found and carefully opened a true secret door, confirmed that goblins were hiding behind it in a makeshift defensive camp, and then immediately kicked off combat through a combination of stealth murder and divine artillery. It was one of those very D&D sequences where the players did something clever, then something reckless, then something effective, and now had to live with all of it.

Quick Recap

• The session opened with a recap of the fight against six weird slime cubes, each with a different reactive effect like fire, gas, lightning, wind, metal-pull, or cold.
• Zarnak surfed a table into the slimes, Nucky bounced around the room, and Krovuur dropped a big divine area attack that hit both enemies and allies.
• Darnaska studied the slime aftermath while the party took a short rest.
• One route led to a corridor full of corrosive fumes that the party could not safely traverse without protection.
• Darnaska had breathing protection and pushed farther into that area than the others.
• The group then investigated a secret door near the earlier gelatinous cube area.
• Nucky quietly opened the hidden door and discovered a goblin survival camp behind a barricade with built-in crossbows.
• The goblins appeared to be hiding, not ruling the level, and there was no obvious leader in the first room.
• Zarnak slipped in and silently killed one goblin without the others even noticing.
• Krovuur followed up with Scourge of Heaven, killing another goblin and alerting at least one survivor.
• The session ended with the party on the edge of a goblin fight after turning a stealth approach into open combat.