If not for Gold and Glory...?

[Umbran]

I love fantasy worlds with giant wildernesses that are full of ancient ruins and fearsome monsters.

Sure, but there's a problem with that scenario - if those ruins are close to populations, they'd have been explored already. If the monsters were near people, they'd have been dealt with, too, or the population will have collapsed. It doesn't make sense as a status quo near people.

The most successful frame for this I have seen recently is to frame the campaign as being in a time of some change. For example: The Dragon of Icespire Peak. I have played, rather than read, the adventure, and for us it was framed in the following way: The PCs come to town, where the eponymous dragon has recently come to the area.

Now, the 1st level characters are not up for just going and taking on the dragon, but the dragon's arrival has changed the situation in the nearby mountains - various adversaries move out of the mountains to keep away from the dragon, and move into some of the local ruins, and start causing problems. The locals are not up to dealing with monsters and bandits and all, because they haven't eeded to be. The PCs walk into an emerging situation that more or less comes to them, rather than they wander around looking for trouble.

 

[Yora]

Solution: Put the ruins far away from populations.

 

[Umbran]

Solution: Put the ruins far away from populations.

Yeah but that doesn't solve your problem of motivations.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

This answer is between the lines/a summary of some earlier replies: write character backstories. If you don't have a satisfying campaign concept, it might be because you don't have any satisfying character concepts.

Yeah, this is something I learnt from GURPS and Champions all the way back when. Good character concepts can make the game happen by themselves. It applies to any game where characters are encouraged to have interesting backgrounds. Whether the game does it with Disadvantages that give some immediate bonus to character creation (extra points to spend) or say something like FATE and the way players come up with connections to other players by describing some shared scene from the past. Mo background, mo story hooks. But also mo interesting story hooks and outcomes.

We get our best gaming moments when we have a conflict between character needs and character wants. So, frinstance, a village is under attack by bad guys, led by the hero's personal enemy. The hero wants to fight the enemy leader but they need to get the villagers out of harm's way. Cue dramatic tension.

 

[dragoner]

Prestige, exploration, adventure; I try to let the players write their own ticket, as much as possible. Criminal mafia, alien ruins, or getting elected Prime Minister of the Human Continuum? Sure, let's talk.

 

[John Dallman]

But for a very interesting take on how other people see adventurers, check out China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, an urban fantasy novel that cranks the weird up to 11. They're not the main characters, but at some point a party of adventurers gets hired to deal with a monster, and the view you get of them is fantastic- the viewpoint character who you see them through (not the employer, btw) is both pretty intimidated by them and sees them as of low character; I think grave robbers is one of the phrases used to describe them. Anyway, if you get the chance, it's a book worth reading for that bit alone- and it's got a bunch more to offer, too.

Seconded. Mieville played a lot of D&D as a teenager, and that informs his fiction.

 

[MattW]

One solution that I've found useful is to say that the PCs are all members of a cult which believes in a prophecy: "The Great Battle between Good and Evil will soon begin".

The PCs are tasked with the following
1. Collecting as much magical firepower as possible
2. Finding safe places for the non-combatants (otherwise known as clearing monsters out of old fortifications)
3. Persuading other people to join the cult (even the lowliest villager/peasant may have a role in the conflict)
4. Obtaining information about the enemy.

In my experience, a "countdown to Armageddon" is actually better that "save the world". Players don't believe that you, the GM, are going to blow up your world.

 

[nevin]

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.

I always start my campaigns out without the PC's being in the middle of saving the world, or kingdom or whatever. Then I get to let them do things that weave them into the local story and grow from there. I "usually" know what they'll be dealing with at the end of the campaign but honestly i've had the PC's change things so much that almost nothing at the end of the campaign was what I had planned originally. I prefer a fluid game where PC's can change things.

 

[MGibster]

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.

Depending on the campaign, sometimes I've leaned into the silliness. In my first 5E campaign, the kingdom had been at war for many years when suddenly, out of nowhere, peace broke out and a lot of people found themselves out of a job. The king and his privy council came to the conclusion that having a bunch of young, physically fit people trained to kill sitting idle was a recipe for disaster so they came up with the Adventurer's Guild. Adventurer's are free to accept "quests" to take care of problems the king doesn't want to spend gold on and they're not even taxed for it. Sort of. Adventurer's have an inflationary effect on their surroundings and the prices in the PHB reflect that. Nobody in their right mind pays 2 gold for a barrel but an Adventurer will because they're loaded and they're too embarrassed to look like skinflints.

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.

I think to feel a bit more real, adventurers have to be few and far between in the setting. And my example above most certainly does not fit the bill for believable. There are plenty of examples of real life adventurers throughout history. Marco Polo, Hernan Cortez, Lewis & Clark, Pancho Villa, and Alcibiades son of Cleinias were all adventurers. There are always oddballs who don't quite fit in.

 

[TimWest]

I've built my setting so that it's in a state of (potential) change. Not quite post-apocalyptic but the old orders are definitely on shaky ground. There have been wars, famines, depopulation, changing alliances, hierarchies upended or re-ordered.

The underlying issue is that it's not good enough for many people to just maintain their position, that risks falling down the pecking order or be vulnerable in some way. People (the characters) need to be striving to improve their situation, in a sense they need to run just to stand still.

This gives characters the motivation to go after wealth, build alliances, do favours for people in order to build social capital, improve their skills and gain experience.