#RPGaDay2025 - Day 20 - Enter

Day 20 of #RPGaDay and the prompt is "Enter."   

Enter was one of the prompts I gave to my players, and I chalk it up to "fuzzy twenty year old memories."

At the end of our Hackmaster campaign, we had a great war, the forces of The Master pouring out of the desert and attacking the Barthey Empire.  

Barthey was a geographic bottleneck, but if Barthey fell, the rest of the region was sure to follow.  The problem was, no nation wanted to fight The Master, so the Empire sent the party (The Burning Trogs) as Ambassadors Plenipotentiary to try convince them to join the fight... by any means necessary.

To be truthful, they were all horrible diplomats, but when completing quests could balance out a quid pro quo, they had a chance.  

The Senators in the Republic of Danaan gave them a simple task:  The head of the hill giant chieftain Evar would be enough to convince them to fight.  That would require them to infiltrate the steading of said hill giant chief.

In all honesty, the Trogs worked with precision, scouting the complex, taking out auxiliary guards that wouldn't be missed, and finding a secure location to rest and allow the spellcasters more time to recover.  

Heck, there's even a rare entry by Ambassador-General Fonzie "The Fonz" Schlepprock while he contacted a patrol in the pre-dawn hours.  

Everything was fine, until the Trogs got sloppy.  Room after room in the basement had been storerooms, or three or four smaller humanoids they could easily dispatch.  Zorin Redrock, hero of Fort Titanicus, barged through yet another door.

But instead of a few ornery hobgoblins, he had found the door to the main chamber beneath the steading, a massive room full of bugbears, hobgoblins, and a few giants. 

Entering the room, Zorin:  "This isn't where the loo is..."   and he promptly retreated. 

This encounter set the whole complex on high alert, and the Trogs turned a running retreat into a last stand, fighting through a smaller doorway.... and winning!   A party with three Gnome Titans were literally built for this type of battle.  They repelled the mass of attackers, went back upstairs, and very quickly the head of Evar was en route to the capital of Danaan. 

At least that's how some of my players remember it.  The Actual Play from the party journal says that they released a few prisoners from the basement.  An elf in particular, one Carlino Oakland, somewhat acquired a Javelin of Lightning and began wildly attacking his captors, resulting in the last stand.  

In hindsight, I remember the loo comment somewhere in the lower level, but I definitely remember Carlino losing his god-damned mind, with a magic javelin.  Not everything makes in onto the page of a journal.  The victors get to write the history, but they also determine what's remembered and what's forgotten.