The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session began with the party taking stock after a string of encounters on the ooze-infested level of the Scarlet Citadel. The immediate recap covered the invisible gelatinous cube fight and then shifted straight into a new room: a strange goblin hideout tucked inside the dungeon. The hideout was heavily barricaded, with mounted crossbows built into the defenses, which made it clear the goblins were not raiders looking outward so much as survivors fortifying themselves against something else.

The party approached the goblin room with a mix of stealth and chaos. Zarnak slipped in first, killed one goblin cleanly, and hid well enough that the others did not even realize one of their companions was dead. When Krovuur followed up with divine punishment at the doorway, the goblins finally reacted. One fled deeper into the hideout, alarms went up, and the barricade crossbows fired. The whole thing turned into a fast, messy close-quarters fight with traps, smoke, and improvised intimidation.

The big turning point came when the goblin leader dropped the floor out from under Nucky. He fell into a spike pit below, though the damage ended up being survivable rather than catastrophic. The walls of the pit were slick and hard to climb, which turned the trap into both battlefield control and comedy at Nucky’s expense. From there, the scene shifted away from pure combat and into one of the session’s best social pivots.

Zarnak and Nucky managed to talk the surviving goblin leader down despite a lot of language confusion and panic. The goblin was not trying to conquer anything. He and his people were hiding. He explained that the goblins feared something even worse deeper in the Citadel, and that their whole position was defensive. Once that clicked, the party stopped treating the room as just another enemy nest and started treating it like a desperate outpost.

That led to the introduction of Kreeknark, the goblin trap tester and one of the most useful little weirdos the party had run into in a while. He helped get Nucky out of the pit with a rope ladder, explained some of the lower-level layout, and slowly gave up details about the threats below. According to him, there were several trollkin patrol groups roaming the lower areas, along with dire owlbears and a dangerous dog-like creature that the party suspected might be a wight or something similarly nasty. The goblins were trying to survive in the cracks between all of that.

Rather than kill him or abandon him, the party chose diplomacy. Nucky healed Kreeknark, Rae gave him a Selunite token, and the group more or less adopted him as a weird preparedness contact. He would not physically come with them, but he became a source of flexible help and practical warning. He also pointed them toward the next descent route, including a trapped door hidden behind the steps they had used earlier.

That next section led the party into one of the most interesting discoveries of the session: a room distorted by time. After disarming an acid trap, the party found a study-like chamber flickering with pink flashes and unstable temporal energy. Rae got a sense that the room was suffering from some kind of time-stream rupture, where past, present, and future were bleeding across each other. The room could potentially be navigated, but only with serious magical protection or a dangerously clever workaround.

Rae, already dealing with his missing arm, decided this was obviously the perfect place to make things worse. He reached into the slipstream hoping to reconnect with a moment in time when he still had his arm. Against all reason, it worked, sort of. He pulled his arm back out, but it was changed by the ooze-infused temporal instability in the room. It looked normal enough at first, but it clearly was not right, setting up a later payoff tied to the weird magic of the level and the experiments being done there.

The session then got even stranger when the party began testing the time room from a safer distance. Nucky shot an arrow into it, and the arrow disappeared into the time distortion. In the flickers that followed, the party saw flashes of different states of the room, including a shattered clay jar leaking some kind of gas and, more ominously, a corpse slumped over a desk. A later roll confirmed that the dead figure was Nucky. Not might be. Nucky. The group had essentially glimpsed a possible future death scene tied to the room, which made the danger feel very immediate and very personal.

Naturally, the response was not to leave, but to do one more weird experiment. The party used a Hand of Fate ritual to compare paths forward. The result subtly favored exploring the ordinary hallways over climbing into the strange collapsed passage and time-chamber side route. It was not a ringing endorsement. More like the universe shrugging and saying, “that option is slightly less stupid.”

Following that nudge, the group explored farther into the more mundane side passages. They found a storeroom stocked with casks, crates, and preserved supplies. More importantly, they found a collapsed tunnel leading upward. Nucky climbed up through the crawlspace and peeked into the room beyond.

That scout revealed another major threat. The upper chamber contained a very old elven conjuration circle with pillars and something moving within the center. After enough observation and Arcana interpretation, the party realized the circle was containing and weakening a large skeletal demonic serpent. The creature appeared smaller and less powerful than it should have been, which suggested the circle was actively suppressing it. The good news was that it seemed contained. The bad news was that the party was now one bad decision away from having a very different kind of evening.

By the end of the session, the party had turned a goblin ambush into an alliance, gained a useful local contact in Kreeknark, found evidence of organized trollkin patrols below, discovered a time-ruptured study that may already contain one party member’s future corpse, partially restored Rae’s lost arm in a deeply unsafe way, and uncovered a conjuration chamber holding a skeletal demonic serpent in magical containment.

Quick Recap

• The party entered a goblin barricade room and discovered the goblins were fortified survivors, not just another enemy squad.
• Zarnak killed one goblin silently, Krovuur exposed the party, and the room erupted into crossbow fire, traps, and confusion.
• Nucky fell into a spike pit when the goblin leader triggered a trapdoor.
• Instead of wiping out the survivors, the party talked the goblin leader down and learned the goblins were hiding from worse threats below.
• Kreeknark, the goblin trap tester, helped get Nucky out and became a useful friendly contact.
• Kreeknark described trollkin patrol groups, dire owlbears, and another dangerous hound-like threat deeper in the Citadel.
• The party followed his directions to a trapped door and discovered a study distorted by temporal instability.
• Rae used the time-rupture room to pull back a version of his lost arm, but it came back altered by ooze-infused time magic.
• Nucky shot an arrow into the room and triggered flickering visions, including a future scene showing Nucky dead at the desk.
• A Hand of Fate ritual suggested that exploring the normal hallways was slightly more rewarding than pressing into the weirder route.
• Further scouting through a collapsed tunnel revealed an ancient elven conjuration circle containing and weakening a skeletal demonic serpent.
• The session ended with multiple major threats identified and several extremely bad ideas still available.