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[haakon1]

Originally Posted by S'mon

As a player I'm not too keen on running minor errands for the uber-NPC who could do it himself far more easily, but can't be bothered because he's 'too busy'.

My last campaign, I took the opposite approach. King Thongar the quest-giver was old and feeble, the PCs were the kingdom's Big Damn Heroes. If they refused the missions, the bad guys would triumph and the kingdom go down the toilet. And the kingdom was a point of light in a world of ruins and howling wilderness. So the players never had any trouble with their motivation.

Agreed. Let me think through the origins of the "quests" for my two current parties:
1) Cleric is dispatched by his anonymous superiors to the Keep on the Borderlands to investigate murders along the North Road. Two friends from a foreign country are traveling the same way, and fall in with him. At the keep, they discover the problem is humanoid attacks, and recruit more PCs and NPC's, who are local residents, to help investigate the Caves of Chaos. Later on, on a resupply trip to a nearby city, they meet more PC's in a tavern and have them join up.
2) The Keep having been rescued, a wounded merchant comes in. He's been robbed penniless, and his daugther and teamsters have been captured by humanoids. Off the PC's go.
3) The old man in the tower in town, who has been providing training for the PC's and generally runs adventuring groups for the country, wants a job done. A magic item that creates food would be useful for the war effort -- go fetch.
4) The old man in the tower in town wants another job done. An isolated neutral town that supplies the dwarven colony in the mountains is no longer in contact with the outside world, and the dwarven company that investigated never came back. The PC's are Tier 2 escalation for the country's problems now.
5) The old man in the tower in town wants to make the PC's nobility, but he needs them to deal with a current noble who hasn't provided the required troops for the war. Some lame excuse about orcs and wolves. Beneath the PC's station, but the real mission is to straighten him out and get the troops moving -- and the hint is the PC's get to keep the manor if the noble doesn't straighten out. Also, they hear rumors that a bard was singing about their last adventure in town and now has gone up river . . . since the baddy who escaped last time was a bard . . .
6) The bad guys in the last episodes weren't orcs and wolves afterall, but orcish werewolf commandos trying to cause political disruption. Some have escaped . . . others were captured and told about who hired them and where they entered the country . . . so the PC's go after them. Cue the chase and investigation of the infiltration route, which is a whole separate adventure.

Second party;
1) PC's go to a wild party, and are hired by an masked group to take out some bandits. (Three Days to Kill adventure.)
2) Arrested for possession of stolen goods (from the bandits they killed) and suspected of being members of a rival gang, the PC's are arrested and given a mission in exchange for being let go (much like the scene in "Conan: The Barbarian").
3) Having completed their mission, the PC's are free and rewarded. They decide to investigate a scroll they found, that mentions a lost dwarven fortress. The old man in the tower, a retired adventurer, and a dwarven jeweler they deal with all give them clues, and they set out in search of adventure.