The Fallen World : A Dungeon's Story

Adventurers and the Adventurer's Guild

Adventurers are an odd profession. Although everyone takes them for granted and a natural part of life on Alcheryos, adventurers (and their guild) once were vastly different from their current form.

At their core, modern day adventurers are disposable mercenaries specializing in fighting monsters and the other natural or unnatural abominations that haunt every corner of Alcheryos. Outside of dungeon delving, adventurers are usually occupied by extermination and protection missions, where they are tasked with eliminating some particularly troublesome creatures, or protecting assets from them. That doesn't mean that they'll decline fighting bandits of course, but for fighting humans generally specialized, proper mercenaries are preferred if available.

While a very important role, if adventurers were only limited to those missions they would hardly be the omnipresent force they are now. What truly sets them apart is their guild and dungeon delves.

The adventurers guild is odd. Originally, it was founded by independent scavengers and explorers, hired by governments shortly after the Dawn of Flames to explore ruins or scavenge certain areas, when the military wasn't available to do so, effectively disposable sub contractors. As their discoveries and fees made them richer and richer, they started feeling the pressure from their respective governments, and with the help of the newly created WMC, formed a guild to organize and protect themselves.

For the better part of a millenia, the adventurers guild was, in effect, a guild of explorers and mercenaries, with a healthy side of scavenging. As its operations and reach expanded, the guild began offering its services to corporations or institutes eager to forray into the wastelands, but who did not have the political backing to secure a military escort or enough forces of their own to protect their expeditions. Thus they turned to the adventurers guild. These contracts were displayed openly in guild halls on a common board, where any group of adventurers could read the requirements from the client, the objective, and the payment. These contracts became the first quests.

The omnipresence of the guild, and its importance for expansion made it virtually untouchable by governments. Oh, the guild threaded very lightly, and remained completely and utterly neutral, but no one wanted to disrupt a business on which their continued expansion and economic growth depended so much on. And that was essential, as the guild's greatest problem was personnel. To put it simply, even to this day, the attrition rate for adventurers is insane. It is, without a doubt, the single most lethal profession on Alcheryos by a factor of at least three, if you do not count nobles in particular countries due to assassinations. If you count resurrections, it is more lethal than any other job by an order of magnitude.

So the guild needed to be able to dictate its own rules to recruit. Effectively, in many nations the guild was the only way to move up in the world. At that time many caste systems locked people in poverty and prevented social advancement, even today many peasants and simple citizens are prevented from rising up due to an oppressive caste of nobles or an entrenched upper class. But the guild was outside of those rules. The guild could not give less of a shit if you were the scion of a noble house or a family of serfs. If you could pay the fee and bring a weapon to fulfil the base requirements of the clay rank, you were in.

Thus in many places the guild was, and still is, the only way for upward social mobility. Furthermore in some cases it is a way to gain quick, very quick upward mobility. Adventurers die quickly, yes, but they accumulate mana and essence at a rate vastly greater than anyone else, thanks to their high fees and the piles of bodies they tend to produce. Add to that their highly lethal assignment weed out the incompetent and the weak with ruthless efficiency, and that made their length of service, ranks and completed quest all of the proof of competence a recruiter needs. After a few months of adventuring, a peasant whose sole prospect would otherwise have been spending the rest of their existence tilling dirt could be welcomed with open arms into a noble's personal army or as a guard in a city. A few years, and they could become a knight or a member of a noble's retinue with ease. That was the lure that keep people coming to the adventurers guild despite the incredible fatality rate.

But what truly revolutionized the adventurers guild was dungeon delves.

Five millenia ago, a group of adventurers attacked a dungeon's surface installations. It wasn't on purpose, this dungeon had laid undiscovered for centuries, as it was deployed on the other side of a death zone, and they thought they were dealing with an active NLR core in some kind of opened ruins. They killed the dungeon defenders and looted everything they could, but upon failing to find a way deeper, they pulled back, and tried again the day after.

Only to find all of the defenses were back online. Defenses comprised of various traps and creatures whose carcasses and loot were very valuable. Valuable enough to risk your life, repeatedly, to obtain.

So they kept attacking. And the dungeon kept reinforcing. The adventurers found a way deeper eventually, even reaching the dungeon core, but were attacked by a massive wave of creatures, and decided to leave the deepest layers, the 'core room' and the dungeon's 'sanctum' alone. And the dungeon core itself, realizing just how much more mana it was making thanks to these adventurers, even greater than the cost of its slain defenders, decided to try and keep the adventurers coming back by replenishing its defenses and keeping them exactly the same, to avoid spooking the adventurers with change and danger.

And thus was born the first 'modern' dungeon. This style started to spread, as more dungeons learned of this way of 'milking' humans through their advisors' network. Eventually, it became a tradition. And now, things have been done this way for so long that even the Von Oswalds do not question it. It is just the way it is, and save for some archivist delving into old records, or the oldest dungeons, no one can remember it being any other way.

The dungeon delves took the adventurers guild from an economic necessity nations only put up with for the sake of their own expansion to a powerhouse bordering on a superpower. Dungeon delving was such a massive source of income that the adventurers guild became enormously rich thanks to its fees. Realizing the proverbial gold mine they had struck, the guild's leadership used all of their influence and power to establish a monopoly over dungeon delves. It didn't fully work, but the adventurers guild gained enough leverage and concessions from even those who refused to let them take over this newfangled 'dungeon delve' thing to make them powerful on an almost unimaginable scale for what was effectively a private entity. Even Arcadia Systems, who for all intents and purposes ran the entirety of the European Federation Star Navy's logistics and production needs, as well as supplying a solid thirty percent or so of the civilian sector's consumer goods and power requirements did not have the level of influence over the Federation's government that the guild regularly applied to nations.

Of course, that influence was used wisely. The guild was immensely rich and powerful, but its leadership was under no illusion of the base loyalties of its members, and a direct confrontation with a nation would only be possible as long as it remained a single nation, and the guild could keep up the payments to keep its adventurers fighting on its side. An alliance or coalition could have eventually crushed the guild. They'd decimate their own economy in the process, but they could do it. As such the guild made sure to divide and conquer, and made a point of only weighing in when matters pertaining to the guild's business were concerned, and always being as outwardly neutral as possible when that involved stepping into an international incident or an outright war. Of course, the adventurers guild wasn't above taking sides when safeguarding their business was concerned, but they would make every effort to appear neutral doing so, although it was only a question of plausible deniability at this point.

But the dungeon delves also gave adventurers a new alternative. Yes, dungeon delves would not yield the essence payday of regular quests, but they were an incredible way to make money. This allowed adventurers to make massive amounts of mana, which they would use to finance equipment to either go back delving, or do quests to gain in level. Rinse and repeat and the overall level and quality of adventurers went through the roof. So did their numbers, as more and more recruits joined for the promise of easy money from a successful dungeon delve. This brought adventurers from occasionally encountered mercenaries to effectively omnipresent, to the point that the mercenary companies that had until then been competitors for monster hunting were simply folded into the adventurers guild, or fully specialized to fight against humans altogether.