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 >.>
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