The High Gate

The High Gate was the first RPG to be played on Discord rather than in person or over a group chat texting program. Chronologically in HILT canon it is second after The Corridor, taking place about 40 years after the former's completion.

Story
After two of the Four Ancient Travelers had died (and one, PG Copper, had gone missing), the last remaining one assigned his granddaughter Walta to complete something he and his companions had never been able to. Travel to the rift in the universe (also known as the High Gate) where the Four Ancient Travelers had crossed from the Original Universe to HILT and find a way to seal it or block it off. As the rift was dangerously unstable, different objects continually fell through it from parallel universes, and it was imperative that the rift no longer be accessible by anyone who may try using these objects for evil.

Walta assembled a small team of trustworthy (or so she thought) companions. Pierre Navi, Veriticus Goldstein, and Baron Leopold Frederick Legosi. Why she chose these people, who knows.

They set about with their team and a pet wolf, who then immediately fell into a swamp, and the team adamantly refused to get their feet wet to save it. So it drowned. So it goes.

On the other side of the swamp, they encountered a roving band of Los Lobos troops. While three of the team (Walta, Veriticus, and Pierre) fled up into a tree to avoid being discovered, Baron Leopold Frederick Legosi confronted them directly, and was then fired at by a swarm of arrows. Amazingly, through a combination of his agility and sheer charisma, he survived uninjured and even made friends with the Los Lobos men, promising them an abundance of kumquats at a later date.

As they continued Eastward for the rift, they stumbled across a seemingly abandoned house alone in the middle of the forest. It became obvious that the house was in fact inhabited when a guitar playing hippy named Clyde the Slyde emerged, claiming he was awaiting the return of his manager Jerry Goldstein (a relative of Veriticus) who had left to invest all of Clyde's money. When they were just about to depart, Veriticus stopped by the outhouse nearby the house, only to discover that it was occupied by a lumberjack simply named Bob. Turns out, the house was Bob's and Clyde had been squatting there for three days, the entire duration of which Bob had spent on the toilet. Being infuriated by this home invasion, Bob killed Baron Leopold Frederick Legosi (which is a relief to this hiltstorian, as it saves me from having to type Baron Leopold Frederick Legosi over and over in this record).

Bob was then incapacitated by the remaining team, robbed, and then they continued on for the High Gate. As the forest ended, gradually turning into barren mountains, the team realized why the Four Ancient Travelers had never returned to the rift themselves to close it. Standing between the forest and the High Gate atop a mountain lay a large herd of dinosaurs. In a heartwarming moment of self sacrifice, Jed the Murderous Hobo (who had joined the group earlier. Keep up!) consumed a large amount of poison, killed Clyde the Slyde, and then allowed himself to be fed to the dinosaurs. While successful, his poisoned flesh only fed and killed two dinosaurs, leaving still 87 to contend with.

The team fled into a nearby cave, where they discovered yet more characters who would inevitably join their team and die. These included Sebastian, a talking horse; Meatfang Fuzzlekins, a talking dog; and Avis, a falconry expert, whose falcon surprisingly didn't talk.

Utilizing these animals (who had been proven to be expendable in the team's eyes) they distracted the dinosaurs and fled to the High Gate. With the dinosaurs hot on their heels, they panicked and tried stepping into the rift, which in a shocking twist of die rolls, actually succeeded in getting them out of there safely and transporting them to the Original Universe in the year 2018 (though allowing their animals to once again be killed in the rift). Overjoyed, they chose to stay, whereupon their bodies and collection of foreign bacteria caused the Coronavirus outbreak a year and a half later.

Having no immunity to more common diseases there, they personally were all killed by canker sores in the midst of the pandemic.

The High Gate was never sealed in the HILT universe, thus allowing more objects to pass through, and gradually grew larger and larger until it was unsealable.

Characters

 * Avis
 * Baron Leopold Frederick Legosi
 * Clyde the Slyde
 * Meatfang Fuzzlekins
 * Pierre Navi
 * Sebastian
 * Veriticus Goldstein
 * Walta

Reception
The game was highly experimental and fragmented, being the first attempt at playing a HILT game on Discord, rather than in person or over WhatsApp. Due to this, the storyline of the game was muddled and chaotic, but in a good way, as the audio channels allowed greater levels of player interaction than was possible through simple texting.

The enthusiasm for this new system of playing led to the rapid development and debut of the much more well crafted game Saving Ochoromana a week later.