So, you want to be an adventurer?

The polities of Latter Earth are no stranger to adventurers, and some basic social expectations have gradually built up around the role. Adventurers serve as human society's early warning network. They form a ceaseless stream of sellswords and tomb-robbers who are always plunging into the wilderness or voyaging to far off lands. If a great danger is brewing in the unknown, adventurers are likely the first to discover it. News brought back by adventurers has often provided the critical margin of warning for the defense of a town or an outlying village.

Adventurers also serve as cheap, disposable hireswords for those unfortunate tasks the military officials and nobles want done but don't care to expend trustworthy men in accomplishing it. There is rarely anyone of importance to complain about an adventurer's death, and if they never come back from the task, well, who is to miss them? Most novice adventurers are also poor and coin-hungry enough to take silver for jobs that more temperate warriors would never dare attempt.

Adventurers also serve as a societal release valve for the pressure of the most ambitious, driven young men and women in a settlement. Rather than staying at home and causing trouble with their frustrated ambitions, they take up the adventurers' pack and set forth to find treasure and glory in the borderlands. Most of them die terrible and unmourned deaths, of course, but the few that survive can become powerful and time-tested warriors in defense of human civilization. If a gutter urchin manages to accomplish great deeds and stuff his vaults with ancient gold, few practical nobles would deny he deserves a place among them.

Adventurers that manage to survive the perils of the early profession often form the driving force behind expeditions to reclaim lost human territory or colonization attempts amid the ruins of past glory. Most of the hardscrabble border settlements owe their survival to the leaven of grizzled former adventurers among the peasantry and their practiced familiarity with the ugly, brutal warfare. The wealthy merchants and jeweled magistrates who often back these colonies may not care to dine with the rough characters that man them, but they know better than to send out colonists without a proper number of hardened bordermen to protect them. Some of these retired hireswords eventually find themselves village headmen or captains of lonely border outposts.

Until then, however, adventurers are generally viewed as violent, untrustworthy, lawless figures who are to be lauded for their usefulness in times of danger and sent on their way during other seasons. Everyone rejoices in a hard vagabond’s sword hand when a raid is impending, but afterwards they tend to encourage such men to find further adventures elsewhere. If an adventurer perseveres through this quiet scorn, however, they may yet manage the deeds that will turn them first into a folk hero and then into a legend to light the annals of Latter Earth.

(adapted from Kevin Crawford's Red Tide campaign book)