The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

This session opened in one of the strangest stretches of the dungeon so far, with the party already dealing with the fallout of time magic that had become personal. Rae had previously lost an arm to the temporal chaos in the ruins, and the first major moment of the night was his attempt to get it back. The solution was as weird as the problem. By carefully reaching into the time-distorted room at just the right moment, syncing himself with a version of events in which he still had the limb, Rae managed to recover his arm. Technically, it worked. Practically, it came back wrong. The arm looked normal enough, but it did not feel right, and the whole thing had an unsettling quality to it. There was talk of ooze-like essence involved in the room’s effects, and the recovered arm carried an eerie, altered feeling that made the success feel more like the beginning of a future problem than the end of one. The process also ruined the clothing on that arm, leaving Rae with a half-T2, half-arcane-horror look that fit the situation perfectly.

Naturally, Zarnak’s first instinct was to test the room by simply walking into it, which the rest of the party immediately treated as the kind of confidence that gets people turned inside out by dungeon magic. Instead of feeding anyone to the time room, they experimented from a safer distance. Nucky fired an arrow into the chamber, and what they saw only made the place more disturbing. Objects and events inside the room flickered in and out of phase. A clay jar seemed both intact and shattered. Gas appeared and vanished. A desk scene flashed in different states. Worst of all, at one point the party saw what appeared to be Nucky himself leaning over the desk in a future or alternate moment, possibly dead or on the verge of dying. The room had shown them a glimpse of something terrible, and the only practical response they had was, essentially, well, that is bad, moving on.

So they did move on. The next room was a storeroom, less dramatic but still useful for grounding the session after the time-distortion madness. It held wine and ale casks, various crates, and a cave-in toward the back. Zarnak opened one crate and found it packed with salt-preserved olives, which became one of those small details that makes dungeon exploration feel real. The cave-in mattered more, though. Nucky climbed up through it and found himself looking down into a different chamber from a vantage point above the floor.

That hidden room turned out to hold a large magical circle marked with old elven script and anchored by heavy pillars. In the center was a huge demonic skeletal serpent. The party pieced together that the conjuration circle was not summoning it so much as containing and weakening it. The magic seemed to be actively suppressing the creature, making it smaller and less dangerous than it ought to be. That was enough information for the group to make the wisest decision of the session: leave it alone. The serpent was trapped, the circle was holding, and nobody felt like their night needed a bonus demon skeleton snake. So Nucky came back down, and the group looked for guidance elsewhere.

Krovuur turned to ritual magic and cast Hand of Fate to help decide whether the party should continue exploring through the cave-in route or head down the hallway. The answer was subtle rather than dramatic, but it favored the hallway slightly, and the party followed that nudge.

Following the hallway led them into one of the session’s stranger discoveries: a room occupied by mushroom-like servants acting as librarians and scribes. These fungal creatures had odd appendages and unnatural mannerisms, and they appeared to be trapped in endless remedial work. They wrote on pages that vanished and reappeared, copied texts in unknown languages, and seemed dimly aware of the party without ever really engaging them. Zarnak tried speaking to them and asking whom they served, but they ignored him. The party quickly got the sense that these were not independent beings so much as controlled tools, bound to repeat a task forever for some absent master.

Behind that chamber was another danger. Krovuur identified an arcane barrier across the threshold of a room piled with humanoid bones. Once the party started paying attention, the bones began to shift. Something beneath them suggested an active magical source, and when Krovuur tested the barrier with an explosive shell, it detonated at the threshold instead of passing through. A skeleton tried to rise and cross the barrier toward the party, only to hit the magical field and collapse back into pieces. The party filed it away and kept moving.

Their next stop was a trapped door, and Zarnak found a needle trap designed to punish whoever tried the obvious solution. He disarmed it, unlocked the door, and the party stepped into yet another section of the library.

This room held shelves that were mostly empty, tables with tattered books and scrolls, and a huge hole dropping down through the floor. Nucky noticed dust patterns that suggested objects were sometimes present and sometimes not, as if books were blinking in and out of existence. The party realized the books were being displaced in time. That led to a series of experiments that were both ridiculous and useful. Someone grabbed where a book should be. Someone else threw one into the chasm. Nucky lit one on fire and tossed it down.

That experiment got a result. Down in the rubble below, something large, vicious, and very much alive stomped out the burning book and growled up at them before moving out of sight. That moment answered two questions at once: the collapse dropped into an occupied lower level, and whatever lived there was not thrilled about flaming books raining down from above.

Then, just as the party was settling into investigation mode, the session turned on them. A loud poof and a rushing whoosh exploded from behind the group. Two party members were caught in the blast and thrown hard across the room. When the cloud settled, something utterly alien to the rest of the dungeon stood in the center of the room: a glowing blue-and-gold machine of cogs, governors, levers, springs, floating orbs, cold mist, and impossible motion. Two frost-covered humanoid constructs stood beside it with arms full of books, scrolls, and papers.

That was where the session ended: with the group reeling from the blast, staring at a newly arrived impossible machine and two frozen constructs that were just beginning to wake up.

Quick Recap

• Rae recovered his lost arm by reaching into a time-distorted room at the right moment, but the arm came back feeling wrong.
• The party experimented with the time room and saw flickering events, including what looked like a future version of Nucky at a desk, possibly dead.
• In a storeroom they found ordinary supplies, including a crate of salt-packed olives.
• Nucky climbed through a cave-in and discovered an elven conjuration chamber containing a debuffed but still terrifying demonic skeletal serpent.
• The party wisely chose not to interfere with the serpent’s containment circle.
• Krovuur cast Hand of Fate, and the ritual subtly pointed the party toward continuing down the hallway.
• They found mushroom-like scribes or librarian servants endlessly copying texts while ignoring the party.
• Behind them was a bone-filled room with an arcane barrier that caused skeletons to collapse when they tried to cross it.
• Zarnak disarmed a nasty needle trap on another door and led the group into a time-warped library chamber.
• The party figured out that some books and objects were phasing in and out of time instead of staying fully present.
• Nucky threw a burning book into the collapse, which drew the attention of a large hostile creature on the level below.
• The session ended when a massive blue-and-gold machine and two frost-covered constructs blasted into the room, badly injuring party members.