We’re getting close to a climax of our campaign, and we needed to get to the City of Temples. The issue is that the City of Temples does not have a permanent teleportation circle, under the belief that it should be some level of a pilgrimage.
The issue comes from the problem that the three closest cities to it are the Human Capital (Where the Queen, secretly controlled by a space rock from before time modeled after the Yellow Diamond, has had our paladin wanted in the past), the neutral City of Tomorrow (Which we fled after a fight with a devil assassin caused a lot of collateral damage) and the main port for the Human Empire (See above)
So with the port being our best option (Outside of my own suggestion of seeing if we can get transport from a Hag we know, but we’re unsure the cost on that), our Paladin attuned his long unused Hat of Disguise, agreed on the fake name Virunus.
Upon arriving at the port, I give my usual nickname as my name, the guard remarks it’s a short name for an elf and I say I just got back from the Feywilds (True) and am working on getting it all back (Not entirely false, but not true). After a short bit of back and forth, my young-ish elf (20 years since birth as a human, less than six months since I was reincarnated as an Eladrin, but I also spent 700 years in the Astral sea, so toss up which number counts), treating the 47 year old guard as a young fellow, and saying he can call me auntie. This and a joke from our Halfling, had the guard now being scared I am some level of actual fey, if not an outright hag.
The halfling and his goblin fiance who is disguised as a halfling give normal fake names without issue.
The half orc signs with a rough scrawl of a bear, and it’s accepted relatively easily
But then the Paladin signs as Sir Virunus. Then when questioned if he’s a knight of some sort, he backs down to erase the Sir upon questioning. This, of course, was sus as heck, which leads to them sending a navy captain to talk to us as we are getting horses, which leads to…further issues >.>
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Don’t overcomplicate things. Not every single NPC you meet demands a half hour RP session. I’m Bob, this is Sally, the guy in clerical robes is Father Steve, and the dude in the plate is Sir Dinglus of Berryvale. Yeah, he has a weird name but that’s apparently normal where he’s from. Off to the southeast somewhere. You folks have a nice day.
And the Paladin probably would have been fine if he’d doubled down and stuck with the “Sir”, but backing down to erase it when questioned is going to raise suspicion and make it more obvious he’s lying. With the guard getting a lucky 17 on insight roll from that, it just went downhill
But what if it’s reaally fun?
Isn’t this exactly what you play dnd for
I don’t need a fantasy to be an awkward mess
This is the best part of a TTRPG.
It’s amazing just how bad at lying some people are. My players were investigating a building for the mayor, and attracted attention when they just tried picking the lock on the front door. Instead of just saying they were there on the mayor’s behalf the bard decided to try to convince the guards it was “just” a piece of performance art.
I was just tryinbg to give them an in game reminder that there was a back door that would be easier to pick or force, but instead they talked their way into being dragged back in front of the mayor 15 minutes after being given the task.Hey wait a minute, this isn’t !theowlhouse@lemmy.world!
But now it’s a meme. I’m good with that.
So that’s great news, no? Now you have a cute side quest where you have to get out of the dungeon! Kudos to the paladin for doing a good job.
It wasn’t a dungeon, it was a harbor city we were literally just using as a point to teleport to in order to cut a week+ off our travel time. And it’s kind of thrown some wrenches into our long term issues.
As it stands it lead to a Navy Captain and her plattoon coming to see us while we were getting horses near the city gates.
That lead to him revealing to her, in a private talk, that his church has some demonic infiltrators of some sort, which will cause issues with the shade we’ve been having them throw on the Human Queen as she is controlled by the Yellow Diamond (Yes, that one), but as he did not mention that latter bit to the captain for some reason, she just has partial information, meaning she can give this to the queen as cassus belli to have her millitia march on the neutral City of Temples without knowledge that her own monarch is compromised.
If he had just not suddenly added Sir to his name, or doubled down, the worst we’d have is maybe some monster hunters coming for me thinking I’m a hag, which isn’t that bad honestly, but our current plan is less than a week from our big plan to stage an assault on a Drow capital to free them from the demon worshiping leadership, we just got this information that there may be some level of issue among the Paladin’s church, and now we have another timer until the Captain decides to pass this information along and we have the Human Empire marching on the City of Temples.
