Looking back at my past campaigns, the ones I've had the most fun running (and which were arguably the most successful) were the ones where the PCs could take a fairly sandboxy approach to exploring a wilderness region. I'd like to develop a new campaign like this again one day, but what I could use for such a campaign is an interesting premise. I am ruling the following premises out:
- Adventurers plundering old ruins for profit: Too trite.
- Adenturer-archeologists uncovering the deep history of the region for academic bragging rights: A lot of fun, but I have done this before.
- Making the region "safe" for colonization and settlement: While the whole concept of "colonizing the frontier" provides plenty of interesting background drama for a campaign that I don't mind exploring, it is too ethically dubious to make the PCs take the side of the colonizers by default.
So, what other premises can you come up with that provide a justification for player characters to hang around a frontier region and explore it?
@juergen_hubert so my current campaign has the setting being semi-apocolyptic, we compare it to the fall of Rome. In the center of the map there's the Blasted City, which was destroyed (we recently found out they kept the Word of Destruction in a box, which was opened, a PC has this box, it's gonna be a problem). But it means the setting is kinda close to post-Roman Europe but with more violent collapse.
There's the old Lizard Folk empire and their scattered remnants, the late comer orcs, the scattered peoples, forest spirits, lots of ruins, and nomads. The goal isn't really making the region safe, but most of the time it's us tripping over forgotten dangers and then getting into conflict with the many forces trying to settle this area. We're slowly building the history of a thousand years of this land being unsuccessfully colonized, and the many problems that has caused this.
I dunno, this is fun but it's probably not an answer to "what do"