Adventuring isn’t something normal people tend to do. Normal people instead tend to farm or run a shop, stay safely inside a set of walls when the sun goes down, and let some kind of armed forces (or failing that, some crazy adventurers) battle the forces of darkness safely out of sight. But for normal people to do this, there do need to be some crazy adventurers willing to battle said forces of darkness. Which is where character motivations come in. Besides the obvious reason of “they have class levels”, an adventurer needs to have a good reason for why they’re out there, risking their lives delving into the crypt of a long-dead (you hope) Necromancer, instead of sitting at home and eating bread, or whatever people do in fantasy lands.

Back in the early days of Dungeons and Dragons, the assumption was more or less that your character was in it for the money. The game was all about the loot back then, with treasure giving you far more experience points than battling monsters. As times have changed, however, the game has become a bit more about the story (although plenty of people back then still roleplayed), and while there have always been wealth-hungry maniacs, they’re becoming less prevalent. Instead, there became something of a trend towards angsty backstories, with characters often having a whole family tree of murdered relatives they seek to avenge as their motivation for adventuring. Now, this works once or twice, but it might start to feel samey over and over again. So here are some ideas for other motivations that could motivate a character to adventure, while their relatives get to breathe a sigh of relief at not dying. Yet.

Knowledge

Not all knowledge, sadly, can be gathered from libraries. A lot of it can, mind you, but not all of it. For one thing, somebody needs to actually go and find out something about it before a person can write a book or a treatise about it. So it may be that your character seeks knowledge about something that they can’t get anywhere else, and so they go out adventuring in the hopes (however vain) of learning something.

There could be any number of reasons a character needs or wants to acquire this knowledge. Perhaps, for instance, they are a scholar (a Rogue, Bard, or Wizard could easily have that role) who staked their professional reputation on the existence of a magical artefact, creature, or lost city, and lost a lot of their credibility. Now, desperate to regain some of it, they have to quest in search of leads for its existence. There are some things you can’t just make an apprentice or grad student do, unfortunately.

Alternatively, maybe you have a character who encountered something inexplicable one day (my go-to is the Wild Hunt due to my love for Fey, but it could be a Fiend, an Outsider, or just a high-level Wizard dropping some high-level magic), and have since then had something of an obsession. They seek to learn more about what they saw, either to set their curiosity at rest, or for some other end involving them. I know some people somehow manage to contact an Archfey before Level 1, but a quest to find the Wild Hunt, ending with you multiclassing into Archfey Warlock would be pretty cool, in my opinion.

One of the better examples I can think of for this character motivation is Roland Deschain in The Gunslinger, the first book in Stephen King’s epic and very, very weird The Dark Tower series (spoilers for that book below). He’s actually a bit of a subversion, in that for much of the book, you think that he is pursuing the Man in Black to avenge his murdered relatives. A couple of times he does even shoot at the Man in Black, because that’s the sort of guy Roland is, but the Man sees the funny side of this. Instead, as it’s revealed, he’s doing it to learn more about the eponymous Tower, and his desire to learn has led him to pursue the Man in Black for what is potentially hundreds of years.

So, while it lacks the angst of your entire family being murdered in front of your eyes, a quest for knowledge can threaten to consume your character every bit as much as revenge can, and I think it’s an underused character motivation that can lead to some great adventures and great roleplay.

Reputation

People love adventurers. Okay, they don’t always love adventurers, perhaps because there always seem to be terrible and adventure-ish things happening around them, but they respect them. And that respect pays off. Adventurers, past a certain level, get invited to dinner with nobility. They dance with people at masquerade balls. They are given gifts, up to and including a castle in disrepair that the party will conveniently have to spend a lot of their adventure loot on restoring.

And in fantasy worlds, as in real life, a lot of people crave the benefits of fame and a good reputation. It opens a lot of doors that might otherwise be closed, and there are people who crave that. While ideally they might still be a good and selfless person who just wants to be well-regarded, this is a good motivation for an Evil or more selfish Neutral character, adventuring despite their overall lack of care for helping people because they like the perks of people thinking they’re a hero. Part of the difficulty in playing an Evil character is giving a reason for them to stay with the party of do-gooders, and pretending to be a hero like the rest of them works for that.

Plus, I’m always a sucker for character development, and an Evil or Neutral character who starts out only caring for their reputation could discover that doing good feels good, and that they want to do it. Maybe they start off only being enthusiastic about the things that give the best reputation hit for minimal risk, and then later on they start rationalising it like “Well hey, people would expect me to wrestle that Frost Giant to save that little girl’s puppy. I had to do it,” and then later still they just drop the pretense, and they just adventure because, well, that’s what good people do. Obviously, it doesn’t always have to go this way.

There are two quite good examples of this sort of character. Booster Gold, from DC Comics, starts off as this, with a bit of time travel thrown in for good measure. He starts off being a showboat and a glory hound, but over time he does undergo that character development mentioned above, as personal tragedies and the downsides of a good reputation turn him into a better and more altruistic person. Ciaphas Cain, from the eponymous series from Black Library, is a more complicated case, in that he claims he does everything for his reputation (and self-preservation), from saving worlds, to charging into burning buildings, to being an excellent and caring tutor for his young students. It’s ambiguous whether it is, or whether he’s really a good person in denial.

So, it’s a bit of a cynical motivation, but sometimes you have a cynical character or a cynical campaign. For a character who might struggle to fit in with a more traditionally heroic party, a character seeking to build a heroic reputation might be a good choice.

Exile

A character who cannot go home again. It’s the foundation of numerous heroes (and several villains) from throughout the history of fiction. Whether this is from conventional exile, banished for some sort of crime; a political or other situation that means the character cannot return home; or other, more esoteric problems like a curse on them or their homeland. A character with Exile as their motivation might seek to come to terms with it, to have the best shot at forging a new life for themselves away from their homeland, or doing something to reverse the situation that led them to be unable to go home in the first place.

Now, this particular sort of background and motivation does run the risk of having every bit as much edge and angst as a score of relative’s corpses caused by a cackling vampire, but it can also be played maturely, or even upliftingly, if the motivation is to find a way to break the character’s exile (not to say that avenging murdered relatives can’t be played maturely). Unlike most cases of murdered relatives, an Exile motivation can lead to a touching reunion with the home or the family your character thought they could never see again.

As said, there are lots of examples throughout fiction, both heroic and villainous, but the example of this motivation that springs to mind is Ashitaka, the protagonist of Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke. He is cursed by a demon, and must leave his homeland, never to return, in search of a cure. It helps that this is one of my favourite Ghibli movies of all time, but it always struck me as a particularly poignant plot element. But there are various other examples, such as Tidus in Final Fantasy X, or Dominick Cobb from Inception, to take inspiration from.

Overall, it just strikes me as an underused character motivation, and one that, when played maturely, could lead to some very powerful RP moments.

Legacy

A heritage. An ancestral destiny. Something to live up to. A legacy is a fine thing for the person who leaves it. They live on in their reputation and the memories of others. People write songs about them. They may even get a book or two. But for the people who have to inherit that legacy? It can suck. You’re expected to live up to it, to not shame your heroic ancestors, and the pressure can be immense.

So a character with this sort of a motivation might be adventuring to try and live up to the legacy left by an adventuring ancestor. Whether this is somebody as direct as a parent, or going back more generations and being an expectation on all members of the family, somebody they are descended from did great deeds, and the character, despite only being 1st-level and being armed with a short sword, are expected to match them, lest they be a disappointment. Or maybe there’s not even any expectation from anybody else on the character, and they are just driving themselves to live up to the deeds of those who came before. Either way, it’s the reason for why they are adventuring.

One reason this can be a good motivation for adventuring is that there is no defined end-point. Other motivations, such as Knowledge or Exile, may reach a point where they’ve been achieved, and a new motivation is needed (although these should hopefully be readily available), but it can be hard, even impossible, to tell for sure when you have lived up to the legacy of an ancestor. Is killing one Ancient Dragon enough? Two? Five? Thus, it can drive your character to continue adventuring all the way to 20th-level if needs be.

An example is the character of Jaune Arc from RWBY, who goes to great lengths to try and live up to the heroics his family are noted for, despite, on the outside, lacking the skill and resolve for such things. There are various other examples, from mythology to more modern fiction, especially in comic books (various characters calling themselves ‘Captain America’ or ‘Batman’ appear to be frequent offenders) to draw on, as well.

Hopefully this article has suggested a few potential character motivations (although there are obviously dozens more), and maybe even set some creative cogs turning in people’s heads. And if it saves even one D&D character’s family from death by backstory, I’ll be happy.

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Perhaps you’d also like to check out this article about the various types of adventures a DM can run, or maybe this one, about four Unearthed Arcana subclasses we want to see again.