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Interesting premises for "Frontier Exploration" games?
(ttrpg.network)
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?
My current game might be helpful, but it will require a little context to explain and work to adapt to your purposes.
All my games take place in the same world. The last game was a pirate campaign, and, by the end, the players were legendary pirate kings (queens, nonbinary monarchs) that ruled the seas.
That leads to the setup for my current game: Sea travel is impractical and dangerous. A land route to totally-not-asia would be great, but none is currently known, due to a thought-to-be-impassible mountain range between there and here. The Explorers Guild is offering bounties on both a pass through the mountains and a viable charted land route to totally-not-asia. The players (and their rivals!) take a dangerous sailing journey around the mountains, to explore the jungle on the back side of the range and try to find a pass from that angle.
EDIT: They're incentivized to work with the locals, because pissing them off would make a potential trade route dangerous and therefore worthless.