The Copper Piece Gang

D&D Session Summary

Having returned Elira safely to her family and secured stronger protection against acid, the party went back to the Witchlight Fens. Their destination was the drowned ruin of Kalton Manor and the ancient complex hidden beneath it. The Ward of Choice had already revealed that the ruins concealed magic related to the Shardhold of Silence, while the black dragon Shadowmire had made it clear that the secret below had not gone unguarded.

The companions entered through the cellar where they had found Elira and followed the passages Krovuur had discovered beneath the old estate. The first tunnels were recognizably the work of the Kaltons. They had been hacked through the earth with ordinary tools, reinforced only where necessary, and left dangerously crude in places. Ancient pickaxes and chisels still lay where the excavators had abandoned them, several stamped with the Kalton crest.

The deeper the party traveled, however, the clearer it became that the Kaltons had not created the place. Their excavation merely led into something vastly older. Rough earthen passages gave way to immaculate stonework whose age and craftsmanship dwarfed anything associated with the ruined settlement above.

The route also preserved evidence of earlier violence. Acid had scored portions of the underground stone, and immense claw marks showed that Shadowmire had reached these depths before. Other damage told a stranger story. Some walls and passages appeared to have been shattered by force coming from inside the ancient complex, as though something imprisoned below had once tried to break its way out.

The descent soon became treacherous. The party first encountered a colony of enormous, vampiric voles. Rather than fight the entire nest, the companions moved carefully through their territory. One creature was killed in the process, and its blood and remains helped mask the party’s scent from the rest long enough for them to pass.

Farther down, aggressive fungal growth released clouds of spores. The contamination caused severe itching and an almost irresistible urge to draw a deep breath, but the companions endured the exposure and pressed forward until they found cleaner groundwater. Shadra read the flow of water through the surrounding stone, guiding the group around flooded passages and to a safe place where they could rinse the spores from their bodies and equipment.

The unstable Kalton workings eventually began collapsing beneath them. Sections of the route fell away into a seemingly bottomless chasm, forcing the party to leap and scramble across failing platforms before the remaining supports disappeared. Their combined endurance, speed, and knowledge of the underground environment carried them through without losing anyone to the depths.

As they approached the true ancient complex, a pulse of magic passed through the tunnels. For a moment, everyone felt suspended between instants, caught in a sensation resembling both stopped time and déjà vu. Within that unnatural stillness, each companion heard a whisper speak their own name.

The passage ended at a sealed stone door. Across its face, words had been carved in Draconic with strokes so large and deep that they seemed to have been cut by a massive sword:

“I came to stop the Kaltons. I stayed because I learned what they had found.”

The message was signed only with an enormous S.

The magic sealing the door was overwhelming. It belonged to the same ancient order of power the party had encountered in the Shardhold and in Nyssglass, and no ordinary attempt to force the entrance was likely to succeed. When the Ward of Choice was brought close and touched to the stone, however, the seals released. Lines of power withdrew across the door, and a handle formed where none had existed before.

Beyond lay a small chamber containing a solitary stone chair. Seated upon it was the ghost of Arrol Kalton.

The spirit looked proud and imposing despite the exhaustion and shame that clung to him. At first he mistook the party for treasure hunters and warned them that the legendary Kalton treasure was gone—and that it had never been what later generations imagined. His manner changed when the companions explained why they had come and revealed that they had encountered the Vitriol Fulcrum.

Arrol confessed that he had once believed his ancestors were cowards. They had guarded the hidden door beneath their land but had failed to exploit what lay beyond it, and he had assumed fear was the only reason. He had entered the complex determined to prove them wrong. Instead, he discovered that their fear had been justified.

The carved warning on the door had been left by Shadowmire. The dragon had attacked the Kaltons and the settlement more than once, destroying much of what stood above. Arrol never learned the whole truth, but he eventually understood that Shadowmire believed it was protecting something from him—or protecting the world from whatever his intrusion might unleash. The attacks had not been simple acts of territorial destruction.

Arrol had died of old age centuries earlier, yet his spirit remained bound to the chamber and to the consequences of what he had begun. Unable to complete his work himself, he asked the party to continue into an archive deeper within the complex. Whatever truth survived there might explain the wards, the dragon, and the purpose of the place.

Before allowing them to proceed, the ghost gave one final warning:

“Do not trust everything you read there.”

The party had little time to consider the warning. From somewhere above came the renewed grinding and tearing of earth and stone. Shadowmire knew that someone had returned. The dragon might need longer than a few minutes to reach them, but the companions clearly did not have hours to spare.

They pressed onward and entered the archive.

It was not a library in any familiar sense. The knowledge stored there did not wait quietly on shelves. Thoughts, memories, ideas, and fragments of history flooded directly into the companions’ minds. They experienced impressions from their own pasts alongside visions of the Kaltons, the ancient Nentir Vale, and an age reaching almost to the foundation of the known world. Countless voices overlapped, making it difficult to separate recorded truth from interpretation, manipulation, or memory.

Amid the flood, several fragments stood out.

The companions perceived a vast historical sequence with a deliberate gap in it. Someone or something had not merely been forgotten; it had been removed from the world’s account of its own past. A phrase repeated through the visions: “the one who remembers.”

They saw a stone tablet describing a gathering of divine powers and a device or system created to imprison someone. They glimpsed a far younger Avarice, accompanied by the declaration, “He spoke the name.” Another image identified the Vitriol Fulcrum as the first. A separate record claimed that the first witness had been a monstrous entity destroyed by the gods.

The visions also exposed an uncomfortable truth about the Kalton family. They had not been chosen because they were uniquely strong, noble, or worthy. Their pride made them useful. Their certainty that they deserved greatness allowed older powers to manipulate them into opening a path that wiser guardians had left sealed.

The fragments suggested that Avarice was the one who remembered a name or being erased from history. They also indicated that the mysteries confronting the party were parts of a much larger system. The Ward of Memory was the first ward, and the Ward of Choice was the fourth, leaving the purposes of the second and third still unknown. The Vitriol Fulcrum appeared to be connected to the first stage of an ancient imprisonment, though the incomplete and contradictory records did not reveal exactly how.

As soon as the party began to assemble these pieces, the archive reacted.

Dust and light coalesced into two immense celestial defenders. They offered no warning and showed no interest in negotiation. They were embodiments of the archive’s defenses, created to prevent forbidden knowledge from leaving the chamber. More soldiers then phased into existence around them, resembling the ancient guardians the party had previously fought at the Lake of Severed Reflections. They were not the same beings, but tools made by the same forgotten power.

Krovuur struck first, unleashing a curse that caught both of the largest defenders. The attack blinded them, threw them to the ground, drove them backward, and left their defenses compromised before they could fully form. It was a devastating opening, but the archive continued producing threats.

The smaller soldiers closed in with impaling attacks and psychic assaults. Their most dangerous power was a Memory Rend capable of tearing away the knowledge the archive had just placed in the party’s minds. The larger defenders radiated waves of psychic force as they were wounded, battering everyone nearby and making it increasingly difficult to resist the archive’s effects.

The companions fought to keep one another alive while the battlefield filled with overlapping hazards. Zarnak’s Rimebite Mace froze and staggered the defenders, leaving them slowed, dazed, and vulnerable to the others. Rae marked enemies, shifted companions through space, hurled acid, and used temporal magic to exchange places with an endangered ally, taking an immobilizing blow before answering it with a counterattack. Shadra supported the group with moonlit bonds and healing magic, restraining the ghostly skull-like creatures released by the fallen defenders and restoring Krovuur when the concentrated assault threatened to overwhelm him.

The archive’s constructs became even more dangerous in death. Some exploded when destroyed; others split open and released shrieking spectral forms. When one dying defender was about to detonate beside the badly wounded Zarnak, Shadra drove it away before the blast, saving him when he had almost no strength remaining.

Krovuur continued spreading curses and visions across the chamber, stunning and weakening the defenders despite an extraordinary run of failed attacks that left much of his strongest magic spent. Rae forced enemies away and knocked them down, while the others concentrated their attacks on the remaining constructs. One by one, the guardians began to fall.

The fight came at a cost. Repeated Memory Rends stripped the archive’s revelations from most of the party. By the end of this phase of the battle, only one companion still retained the knowledge they had uncovered. Whether those memories could be shared, restored, or trusted remained uncertain.

Then the digging stopped.

The sudden silence was followed by the sound of something immense moving through the underground complex. The celestial defenders vanished at once, abandoning the fight as though a more urgent protocol had superseded their purpose. In the darkness beyond the chamber, Shadowmire drew in a massive breath.

The session ended there, in the same continuing encounter: the archive’s defenders gone, the party bloodied and magically depleted, and the black dragon entering the ancient place it had guarded for centuries.

Quick Recap

• The August 21 session began with the party returning to the Witchlight Fens and descending beneath the ruins of Kalton Manor.
• The opening spoken recap described the August 7 and August 14 sessions and was not part of the new session’s events.
• Crude Kalton excavations led into a vastly older complex of immaculate stonework.
• Abandoned tools bearing the Kalton crest showed how far the family had dug.
• Acid scars and claw marks proved that Shadowmire had reached the underground passages before.
• Damage directed from inside the complex suggested that something once tried to escape.
• The party passed enormous vampiric voles, clouds of aggressive fungal spores, flooded passages, and collapsing platforms above a bottomless chasm.
• Shadra used the movement of groundwater to guide the party around dangerous flooding and to a safe place to wash away the spores.
• Near the ancient complex, a magical pulse briefly suspended the companions in time, and each heard their own name whispered.
• A sealed door bore a Draconic message: “I came to stop the Kaltons. I stayed because I learned what they had found.” It was signed with a giant S.
• The Ward of Choice released the ancient seals and opened the door.
• The party found the ghost of Arrol Kalton seated beyond it.
• Arrol admitted that he had mistaken his ancestors’ caution for cowardice and had been manipulated by his own pride.
• He revealed that Shadowmire’s attacks were connected to protecting something from the Kaltons, not simple destruction.
• Arrol had remained bound to the complex since dying of old age centuries earlier.
• He asked the companions to continue his unfinished work and investigate the archive below.
• His final warning was: “Do not trust everything you read there.”
• Shadowmire began digging toward the party while they proceeded deeper.
• The archive forced ancient thoughts, memories, and histories directly into the companions’ minds.
• Its visions contained a deliberate gap where a person, being, or name had been erased from history.
• The party encountered references to “the one who remembers,” a younger Avarice, and the declaration “He spoke the name.”
• The visions described divine powers creating a means of imprisonment and identified the Vitriol Fulcrum as the first.
• The party learned that the Kaltons had been exploited because of their pride rather than chosen for their worthiness.
• The Ward of Memory appears to be the first ward, while the Ward of Choice is the fourth; the second and third remain unknown.
• Celestial defenders formed from the archive and attacked as soon as the party began connecting the revelations.
• Additional soldiers resembling the ancient defenders from the Lake of Severed Reflections phased into the chamber.
• The constructs used psychic attacks called Memory Rends to erase the knowledge the party had just acquired.
• The party survived a long battle against blinding, impaling attacks, psychic auras, explosions, and spectral creatures released from fallen defenders.
• Shadra pushed an exploding construct away from the critically wounded Zarnak, preventing the blast from killing him.
• By the battle’s end, only one companion still retained the archive’s revelations.
• The digging abruptly stopped, the remaining defenders vanished, and Shadowmire could be heard moving nearby.
• The session ended as the black dragon drew a massive breath, beginning the next phase of the same encounter.