History Main / AdventureFriendlyWorld

* "VideoGame/NewHorizons", explores the Caribbean at the height of colonialism. Every nation is fighting for power, piracy is running rampant. Ancient temples and dungeons are open for fearless explorers, and plenty of opportunities to get rich and famous (or die horribly) are awaiting adventurers.

* ''Literature/ThisUsedToBeAboutDungeons'': Dungeons are ubiquitous, having been set up far in the past to keep natural magic from getting too out of control. Occasionally they need to be cleared out as a way to vent the power they accumulate, providing a valid if niche career path. It's pretty common for young people to try dungeoneering, but few have the temperament and inclination to keep at it after the first few.

* ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'' takes place in a galaxy where most international disputes are settled through battles between two to twenty HumongousMecha. The mechs and their number is the result of MinovskyPhysics which discourage large-scale FTL travel and dictate that a giant robot can carry more weapons and armor than tanks, but the most Adventure-Friendly part is the [[http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Ares_Conventions Ares Conventions]] -- one of the most exhaustive sets of FictionalGenevaConventions ever written -- which make non-military targets sacrosanct. It's pointed out ''in-universe'' that the Conventions are good in that people and cities are unlikely to be stepped on by giant robots... but they are bad in that without any real consequences for warfare, wars are fought pretty much ''[[ForeverWar constantly]].''

* ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}'': Creation has gone through at least three apocalyptic events in the backstory, most recent one happening seven and a half centuries ago. The Great Contagion (a magical plague) has wiped out 90% of everything living and then the Balorian Crusade (an invasion of TheFairFolk hell-bent on returning the world to Chaos) killing off a lot of the rest. The world has climbed up since then, but it still has vast swathes of unexplored lands and ruins everywhere. Oh, and the Scarlet Empress that stopped the Fae with an ancient superweapon has just vanished and all the threats to the world are stirring with new plans (and new and very powerful champions) in absence of that threat. Have fun!

* ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'': World politics are an ongoing three-way SpaceColdWar between {{Mega Corp}}s, [[VastBureaucracy bureaucracy-strangled governments]] and new nations of magical races and {{Magical Native|American}}s. Players are "Shadowrunners"; deniable mercenaries hired to engage in operations-other-than-war between these factions. On top of that, the return of magic has resulted in plenty of opportunities and perils, including Awakened creatures, mana storms, and oh, yeah, the dragons (some of which run said megacorporations). Expansion of cyberspace and cybernetics have led to the rise of AIs, strange memetic horrors, and people who seem to interact with the Internet using only their minds. Everything inside a city is usually a mixture of corporate intrigue and gang warfare; everything outside a city is likely an overrun wildland full of dangerous and hungry magical beasts. Shadowrunners often find themselves in the position of [[AdventureGuild fantasy adventurers]], investigating and battling threats the established authorities are [[CopsNeedTheVigilante unwilling]] or [[WhoYouGonnaCall unable]] to recognize or confront.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Starfinder}}'': The Pact Worlds, and the Starfinder galaxy at large.

* ''TabletopGame/TheWitcherRolePlayingGame'': The world of the continent is currently engulfed by a war between the Northern Kingdoms and the Nilfgaardian Empire. The entire continent is affected by this, even relatively peaceful regions. Villages have all their men and boys sent off to fight, nations are going bankrupt, people are starving, civil order and infrastructure are descending, the authorities that would normally handle problems such as monsters and brigands are too occupied - the perfect environment for a team of adventurers to make their fortune or die trying.
* ''Franchise/{{Thunderscape}}'': Aden was deliberately designed to allow encounters with varied enemies. A decade ago Darkfall -- some ill-defined, either malevolent or mindless force -- brought to life all monsters that were considered extinct or never existed outside tales. Additionally, Darkfall seems to grant monstrous powers to anybody who asks. When you venture outside fortified cities, or just enter some real dangerous city slum, you stand an equal chance of being attacked by scrap metal that came to life, ambulatory dead, mutant rats, or a corrupted feral child-serving Darkfall.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}'' has a strong interstellar [[TheEmpire Imperium]], but due to [[FasterThanLightTravel the jump drive]] taking a minimum of one week to travel from one system to another there is a lot of room for [[SpacePirates pirates]] and other trouble-makers. Many players are [[IntrepidMerchant traders]], so there has to be a fairly workable economy. And there have been at least two collapses, and the Third Imperium is still expanding. And then there's ''Megatraveller'', which takes place after the collapse of the Third Imperium.

* ''Franchise/{{Warhammer}}'': One of the reasons the ''TabletopGame/WarhammerFantasy'' and ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' settings are so prone to violent upheavals that sweep up all the factions is that every army needs to be able to fight every other army within canon (including ''itself''), so high political instability is the order of the day. Notable however in that, for ''Warhammer'' in particular, the tabletop RPG version of the setting slightly modifies the setting in order to keep the world Adventure-Friendly for a different kind of Adventure. Although the high degree of political instability, mistrust, and constant war is still present, the rules go to great pains to make it possible (and potentially highly lucrative) to set yourself up as a trader. Indeed the 2nd edition of the rules contained vast supplements detailing the incomes one could make, and the game's careers (read: classes) included things like "Smith" and "Merchant" as well as "Soldier" and "Wizard". The game even included rules for a wizard selling spells and favors to locals.

* ''VideoGame/{{Defiance}}'' takes place thirty years after an alien invasion. What's left of the Earth Republic and the Votan Collective have an uneasy truce, but malfunctioning terraformers have spawned a variety of monstrous creatures and pieces of the Votan Arks periodically fall to Earth, causing destruction but also bringing valuable tech that Arkhunters scavenge (and fight over). And, of course, not all humans and Votan are aligned with either of the big factions (heck the [[Series/{{Defiance}} TV series]] takes place in a multi-species city-state that frequently clashes with both of them). The Irathients and Volge in particular seem to have little interest in "civilization".

** In particular, High Rock, home of the [[UnevenHybrid Bretons]], supports an adventure friendly culture. Rising in class by performing quests and services to curry favor with various rulers is considered the best way to do, which has created a cultural "quest obsession" among young Bretons.

* ''Franchise/TouhouProject'' is a ShootEmUp series (or in the case of the {{Gaiden Game}}s, {{Fighting Game}}s) that devotes ''multiple'' {{Universe Compendium}}s to explaining the type of setting where everyone fights everyone else at the drop of a hat and events that risk upsetting the social order or just killing everyone are a regular occurrence, yet still manages to be a functioning society. Gensokyo is a small, isolated FantasticNatureReserve with creatures [[FantasyKitchenSink from all sorts of mythologies]], most of whom are {{Blood Knight}}s that recognise killing your opponent means you can't fight them again, and the humans recognise that {{youkai}} need to cause trouble so they don't [[ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve wink out of existence]], so NonLethalWarfare was instituted and everyone is [[EasilyForgiven remarkably forgiving]] given that it's all part of the fun.

* ''WebAnimation/{{RWBY}}'' is set on a world where humanity is mostly restricted to four kingdoms, with everywhere else being the domain of monsters that grossly outnumber mankind and are out to KillAllHumans. Huntsmen and huntresses are trained to beat back the monsters threatening civilization, but the female narrator of the first episode (revealed to be [[spoiler:the BigBad Salem]] at the end of Volume 3) thinks their failure is inevitable. In addition, the Grimm are a constant, unrelenting threat. They specifically only target humans (only fighting normal animals due to territorial concerns) and large human expansions outside of the natural barriers protecting the kingdoms tends to result in disaster because of massive Grimm attacks. There are villages outside the kingdoms and nomads who roam the wilderness, who are often protected by the Huntsmen, but they are still vulnerable to being attacked by the Grimm. There is actually an in-universe theory that the Grimm don't even need to eat, and only eat human flesh because they ''choose'' to.

* ''Webcomic/{{Goblins}}'', being a ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons''-based comic, has adventurer as a separate profession. For their convenience there are several dungeon crawls around the world that is specifically designed to test the strength and wits of adventurers. Of course, most adventurers fail in these and get killed.

* ''Webcomic/{{Housepets}}'': Part of TheMasquerade in Housepets is that the entire Earth as we know it is the setting for a centuries-long TTRPG. This doesn't effect day-to-day life, but springs up when relevant; Temples are all but explicitly dungeons, and the rules of reality within them bend to RPG conventions, allowing characters to select classes and gain powers all according to the outfit they wear inside. Other, subtler changes to reality exist to allow leveling for the player characters; Faith and Mana are both numerical resources that can be added and subtracted. Avatars have separate classes decided by certain aspects of their lives (Dream Sunderers, for example, must not be in love with anyone, and a Dark Paladin must be kept discontent) which are predetermined by forces outside the player's control; presumably the game's Rulebook.

* ''Webcomic/AModestDestiny'' is meant to be a deconstruction of RPG tropes, with an economy dependent on the ThievesGuild, and an industry of custom made dungeons.

* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'': Interestingly, Equestria technically qualifies. Within the borders of actual cities, ponies are generally able to go about their lives normally, but there are numerous monsters and lost artifacts outside said borders--even nonpony civilizations appear to be more rough and tumble than what the characters usually experience. It's simply that most episodes focus on the life in the safe zones; there was even a joke where the main character had an epic adventure off-screen, leaving her assistant to lounge about for a while.

%%* ''Fanfic/TriptychContinuum'': WordOfGod asserts that roughly 6% of the land and 7% of the sky of Equestria is actually a "settled zone", a place where ponies actually live and work. The rest of the continent is all wilderness, often crawling with monsters.%%Missing context; how is this used to facilitate adventures in the story?

* ''Webcomic/{{Goblins}}'', being a ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons''-based comic, has adventurer as a separate profession. For their convenience there are several dungeon crawls around the world that is specifically designed to test the strength and wits of adventurers. Of course, [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome most adventurers fail in these and get killed.]]

* Likewise, ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' builds its world to accommodate adventure. The world starts off with a significant divergence from the real world in culture, technology, and some of the laws of physics. ''Fallout's'' Great War happened after decades of resource strain and international conflict, resulting in piles of weird science kept secret in the name of national security, and that's ''before'' the nuclear holocaust remade the planet's biosphere. The end result is that most communities are clustered around what resources remain and separated by long stretches of wasteland with no easy way to travel between them. Any number of mutants, mechanicals, or secret superweapons can crop up anywhere. Finally, the continental US is so large that each game can pick and choose what it inherits from the previous entries, justifying the large distance between them.

* ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'': [[Spoiler:The world suffered from an apocalypse about 1,000 years ago due to a nuclear war and the [[TheMagicComesBack return of magic,]] and still hasn't quite recovered.]] Civilization is limited to small, sporadic kingdoms, and the rest of the world is filled with ruins, ancient dungeons, monsters, etc, perfect for any young adventurers out there.

* ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'': The world suffered from an apocalypse about 1,000 years ago due to a nuclear war and the [[TheMagicComesBack return of magic,]] and still hasn't quite recovered. Civilization is limited to small, sporadic kingdoms, and the rest of the world is filled with ruins, ancient dungeons, monsters, etc, perfect for any young adventurers out there.

[[folder:Literature]] PointsOfLightSetting

* [[WeWillUseManualLaborInTheFuture Certain advances in technology]] may eliminate types of action and adventure that you want. If you want space combat to resemble the Age of Sail, you probably don't want the possibility of fast, autonomous drone fighters or A.I.-guided missiles to battle at extended range with little human input, or FTL communications, which would cut down enormously on the captains' autonomy. PointDefenseless has to be present if you want the glamour of fighter jocks that don't get unceremoniously blown out of the air en masse by AntiAir.
* Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, cybernetic prosthetics and bioengineering made a lot of science fiction readers wonder whether baseline humans in general will remain relevant at all by the point CasualInterstellarTravel is possible. In order to plausibly explain the lack (or rarity) of {{Transhuman}} characters or ArtificialIntelligence in a SpaceOpera, the authors often have to resort to "tried it, didn't work" explanations such as CyberneticsEatYourSoul or AIIsACrapshoot.
* If you want knights in gleaming full-plate or lots of sword-dueling, you probably don't want gunpowder to be [[FantasyGunControl common or useful at all]].[[note]]Interestingly, this is a case of RealityIsUnrealistic: full–plate armor was actually ''developed'' in response to guns, and therefore shouldn't exist at all without it.[[/note]]
** Alternately, in a setting heavy on functional magic, guns may be [[GunsAreWorthless deemed comparatively inferior, or tough to maintain and conceal]].

** As a result of the above, MinovskyPhysics is commonly used in better-developed settings. Need a static world? Have something [[EnforcedTechnologyLevels destroy technologies outside the paradigm]]. WeWillUseManualLaborInTheFuture? The Plott-Devais machine enables humans - perhaps even just a small number of humans - to consistently outperform machines. Need to make cybernetics less common? Discover [[CyberneticsEatYourSoul "souls" that machines lack and cybernetics damage]]. Want melee weapons to make a comeback? Invent shields that stop fast projectiles but not slow ones, or just some Phlebotinum that destroys gunpowder.

* {{Bounty Hunt|er}}ing in the classic fictional sense relies on a similar kind of logic as piracy, in that you need a setting where the police are overstretched ([[PoliceAreUseless or incompetent]]) or the criminals are otherwise beyond the reach of the long arm of the law, but the government (or perhaps a wealthy individual with a grudge) has the resources to make a bounty hunting career profitable to anyone who's willing to take the contracts.
** Alternatively, governments and/or wealthy individuals may use those people as sacrifiable proxies to avoid a direct confrontation.

* WideOpenSandbox crime games, or mob dramas in general, usually take place in a WretchedHive where PoliceAreUseless or {{Dirty| Cop}} to explain why there can be so many or powerful gangs running around openly while the cops only go after the protagonist for the slightest offence.

* ''Literature/{{Mogworld}}'': The fantasy parts take place in an {{MMORPG}} computer game (no, that's not a spoiler, they tell you on the back cover) that is specifically set up to have as many countries, implausably well-equipped tin-pot tyrants, shadow-organizations, monster tribes, and even religeons (they bicker over who gets the best quest zones, as churches act as respawn points) at each other's throats as possible. The only faction not fighting with everybody is the AdventureGuild.

-->The entity passed by him, and it leveraged a power. Wiping a memory, setting a block in place. The same blocks that prevented accord between the Wardens and the Shepherds. The same blocks that prevented Partisan’s special sight from seeing the entity’s power at work.\\
--[[https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/interlude-29/ Interlude 29]]

* An old-school ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons''-styled game needs a lot of unexplored wilderness and ruins (possibly even a DungeonBasedEconomy). This strongly implies a recent collapse, or people moving into a new territory if you're willing to forego unlooted ruins. Guess what two things most fantasy roleplaying settings have in their recent background?

* In ''Manga/DeliciousInDungeon'', "dungeons" are a specific type of structure that can occur either artificially -- as an Evil Lair or so on -- or ''naturally'', as new dungeons appear from caves, basements and the like, and then grow like an organism. Naturally, this attracts adventurers, who are necessary parts of a dungeon's "life cycle", according to in-universe research.

* Battleworld, the setting for ''ComicBook/SecretWars1984'' is noted to be tailored for all the superheroes poofed there to be able to freely and easily use their powers; Storm finds the atmosphere perfectly conducive to flight, Spider-Man has a lot of things to attach his webs to, and so on. It's justified since the Beyonder created it for heroes to fight on, and it would be kinda anti-climactic if circumstances disabled some of their powers.

* ''Fanfic/{{Bird}}'': Played with. A great deal of the worldbuilding is oriented towards explaining how a psychiatric hospital for parahumans would function in the real world. The kicker? It [[CrapsackWorld couldn't]].

* ''Fanfic/TriptychContinuum'': WordOfGod asserts that roughly 6% of the land and 7% of the sky of Equestria is actually a "settled zone", a place where ponies actually live and work. The rest of the continent is all wilderness, often crawling with monsters.

[[folder:Literature]]
* ''Literature/DonQuixote'' is a deconstruction of this. The protagonist wants to be a KnightErrant in a MedievalEuropeanFantasy. Unfortunately, all he can be is the original LordErrorProne in a {{Picaresque}} novel, and his world (heavily based on RealLife Spain) is really focused on maximizing the misadventures wrought by his idiocy. La Mancha, where the plot of the first part of the novel happens, has a hierarchical structure where everyone knows his place: an innkeeper calls the VictimizedBystander that wants to kill Don Quixote (because he attacked them first) invoking the InsanityDefense so that Don Quixote will never be found guilty. But the population always takes the law on their hands, so they become {{Badass Bystander}}s who beat Don Quixote; when Don Quixote doesn’t want to pay another innkeeper, they gave Sancho a HumiliationConga. There is a rural police called the Holy Brotherhood, but they cannot be bothered with a loony guy. They are seen doing their job escorting criminals to their punishment, but their competence is dubious when Don Quixote can outsmart them. The second part of the novel shows how all the resources of the Spanish Empire are invested in fighting the Ottoman Empire. At the end of the second part, Don Quixote goes to Barcelona where there is currently a civil war. This environment, which you might expect to be more friendly to a KnightErrant, is even more aggressive: the LovableRogue, a AffablyEvil AntiVillain, fears treason from his own men; most of the {{Pirate}}s are the Ottoman Empire's {{Privateer}}s; and we discover the Spanish crown has convinced the Muslim population to do TheMigration as a better alternative to a FinalSolution. The idea is that even without a InstantEmergencyResponse, La Mancha's population knows there is a government and they had better behave. The clash between fictional assumptions and reality is one of the book's themes.

* ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' was one of these early on. There were great swaths of unexplored lands filled with ancient temples, marauding 'heroes' and evil monsters. There were cities, but their law enforcement was a joke, fatal brawls were daily events and it takes almost nothing to get the largest city, Anhk-Morpork, burned to the ground in the first novel. However, over the course of the series, this changes. Many of the 'monsters' (e.g. trolls, vampires, zombies) immigrate to the cities and become productive members of society. The City Watch becomes a formidable force for good. Technology advances, and the invention of clacks towers, newspapers, a reliable post and steam power eventually causes the sun to set on the old world.

* ''Literature/TheToughGuideToFantasyland'': Parodied. The book constantly points out that Fantasyland doesn't entirely make sense economically, geographically or culturally, since it exists purely as a place for an adventure to happen. Later deconstructed in the follow-up novel ''Literature/DarkLordOfDerkholm'', where an evil extradimensional mobster is ''forcing'' a fantasy world to remain adventure-friendly so that he can sell trips there for tourists, at tremendous long-term cost and damage to its inhabitants.

* The fantasy parts of ''Literature/{{Mogworld}}'' takes place in an {{MMORPG}} computer game (no, that's not a spoiler, they tell you on the back cover) that is specifically set up to have as many countries, implausably well-equipped tin-pot tyrants, shadow-organizations, monster tribes, and even religeons (they bicker over who gets the best quest zones, as churches act as respawn points) at each other's throats as possible. The only faction not fighting with everybody is the AdventureGuild.

* If you want pirates, you need either virtually no state at all, or fairly weak states. Or, alternatively (or in addition to), you can use their cousins, Privateers, who require at least fairly potent states capable of commissioning and supporting one, but not strong enough to send regular forces out to do it themselves. Another possibility is lacking a desire to do so, maybe due to political complexities where privateers are deniable assets that states can disavow but regular armies obviously are not.

* ''LightNovel/GoblinSlayer'': The world is a CosmicChessGame between two rival gods. One puts monsters everywhere, the other keeps creating adventurers.

* ''VideoGame/{{Solatorobo}}'' has an economy that largely centers on quest brokers and people who sell stuff for adventurers (though there are mentions of musicians, fashion designers, cooks, etc., they tend to get little more than a passing glance in the game proper). And, notably, these quests tend to center on someone who has a functional MiniMecha and possibly some basic fighting skills; there are no quests up for plumbers, for example.