If not for Gold and Glory...?

[Yora]

When working on my own campaign material, something I get hung up on regularly is how to explain to the players what kind of people PCs are within the world of the game and what their position and treatment in society is.

I love fantasy worlds with giant wildernesses that are full of ancient ruins and fearsome monsters. But the typical adventurer role that is assigned to PCs in most such settings never felt real and believable to me. They are freelance mercenaries that roam around the lands to deal with monsters that local militias and the lords' knights can't handle, and fight of other vagabonds that are just like them but have turned to simply robbing villagers and merchants. From any historic precedents known to me, wandering mercenaries in need of money are not the kind of people villages would put their hopes into. Instead they are the very marauders the villagers need protection from. Having to convince people in every town to not chase them away with torches and pitchforks just wouldn't be fun and is not a practical campaign format, unless you deliberately aim for a bleak Sengoku or 30 Years War style campaign.
Similarly, it just doesn't feel believable that typical PCs at the start of their career would be the only hope for communities that have been helpless against a great local threat for months. I guess you could pick a game in which the PCs start at superhuman power, but it still doesn't sit right that a typical fantasy world in need of heroes just has knights in shining armor strutting around looking for trouble to fix out of the goodness of their hearts.

The other alternative is plain old treasure hunting/tomb looting. Yes, that absolutely works as a campaign concept, but such characters would be motivated to turn around and head for greener pastures at the first sign of real danger.

If the PCs are not saint's looking all day for kittens to save, and not selfish people hoping for a quick buck by gambling their lives, then how do you set up and structure a campaign for PCs who face dangerous monsters in ancient ruins in the wilderness?
I never was able to find any satisfying answer to this.

 

[Morrus]

I guess a good modern analogy is superheroes? Why do they do what they do? A certain suspension of disbelief is needed.

 

[Marc_C]

My solution was to make them children (siblings) of a baron. They work for him defending his interest, that are not always lofty. The barony is in a backwater section of the kingdom with mountains nearby.

 

[Doug McCrae]

If the PCs are not saint's looking all day for kittens to save, and not selfish people hoping for a quick buck by gambling their lives, then how do you set up and structure a campaign for PCs who face dangerous monsters in ancient ruins in the wilderness?

Perhaps they're thrillseekers. Neither altruists, nor rationally pursuing material self-interest, but driven by personal emotional needs. This would explain why they keep looking for greater challenges.

Alternatively, but similarly, they might be (despite your thread title!) glory hounds. Again this would mean they are pursuing continually bigger challenges, which is desirable in D&D-style long term play.

 

[Marc_C]

In another campaign I started them on a pirate ship against their will. They managed to escape after a few harrowing levels. After finding some gold they bought their own ship, became corsairs for the King to seek vengeance against the pirate and all his friends.

 

[Yora]

Adventuring as a stepping stone to something greater could be an interesting concept for the society of a setting.
Some men of the Roman elite got pretty desperate to find something they could conquer to secure their status. Worked out amazingly for Julius Caesar, but various of the most disastrous Roman campaigns were stupid ideas from the start that only served as someone's career move.

This could easily be combined with the idea of noble scions with nothing to inherit, and the old concept that PCs would start looking for a good place to establish a holding arounf 10th level. Even though by all accounts, that rarely actually part of campaign play.
But even if you leave that as the eventual epilogue for a succesfully concluded campaign, it still would work as a sensible motivation for some PCs in the party. Others might simply be along to help their friends working towards their lives' goal.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Having to convince people in every town to not chase them away with torches and pitchforks just wouldn't be fun and is not a practical campaign format, unless you deliberately aim for a bleak Sengoku or 30 Years War style campaign...

If the PCs are not saint's looking all day for kittens to save, and not selfish people hoping for a quick buck by gambling their lives, then how do you set up and structure a campaign for PCs who face dangerous monsters in ancient ruins in the wilderness?

Perhaps they're the latter but successfully pretend to be the former, thus avoiding the 'angry villager' problem.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

If the PCs are not saint's looking all day for kittens to save, and not selfish people hoping for a quick buck by gambling their lives, then how do you set up and structure a campaign for PCs who face dangerous monsters in ancient ruins in the wilderness?
I never was able to find any satisfying answer to this.

I still think Earthdawn handled this element really, really well. There's a reason to explore and be surprised (the world changed while everyone was hiding from the Horrors), there's no need for players to absorb tons of lore (again, hiding), there's a reason to venture into ruins (that's where some of the Horrors are still lingering, plus treasure/artifacts from the time before the Horrors swept in), players are specifically presented in the role of heroes, rather than mercs, in a way that's really wired into the setting as well as the magic rules, and you can add as much or as little about the wider world as you want.

Not suggesting you run Earthdawn or use its setting, but it's a fantastic approach, I think, that doesn't just randomly plop PCs into a setting, but really builds the setting around the entire question of "Why are there PC adventurers?"

 

[Yora]

My own setting is based on the premise that environmental changes are relatively frequent and unpredictable, and city states are abandoned and overgrown by forests because rivers dry up or fields turn into swamps quite regularly. But the same dynamics also constantly open up new areas for settlement and agriculture, and more often than not, there have been previous civilizations in those same spots at some points in the past. Or a city state that had already been considered doomed unexpectedly bounces back to even greater prosperity and a larger territory.

This absokutely makes a great setup for Kingmaker type campaigns, though I personally am more a fan of campaigns that keep moving to many different places instead of staying in one spot.

But it doesn't just have to be clearing an area and building a castle to establish yourself as a new domain. The society of the setting could expect potential new lords to havd some real street cred before gambling their livelihoods on these people's ability to actually secure and defend a territory. Getting skalds to spread the tales of your deeds could be a requirement to have a real shot at founding a new domain. And the magical treasures salvaged from failed domains would be invaluable tools when the creation of new magic items is a very slow and expensive process.
And to get yourself established, you first have to accept menial tasks that might not necessarily require true heroes to deal with, but get you some experience and credit if you can do them before the local lord's soldiers get around to it.

 

[DemoMonkey]

It makes an excellent cover for their inherent psychopathy.

"You killed Old Bill, the Fishmonger! You're wearing his boots right now!"

"Uhhh, he was ...an Illithid Mind ...Host?"​

"ALL HAIL OUR HEROIC PROTECTORS!"