Adventurer
Something of a catch-all term for a series of freelance professions that all fall under a similar umbrella. Adventurers come from all walks of life, and are called upon for all manner of potential tasks. They exist in something of a legal grey area; while the profession is recognized internationally, the tasks that they are given can range from perfectly legal things like bodyguarding to illegal tasks like assassination or thievery. Many places have laws offering a certain level of protection to those adventurers who unknowingly commit crimes during the carrying out of their paid tasks, but not all places do.
Adventuring guilds are some of the oldest guilds in the world, and have been offering protection, steady employment, and necessary benefits to erstwhile adventurers for a couple thousand years.
Opinions on adventurers are mixed. Some people view them as overqualified and overglorified deliverypeople, while others view them as a means to fill in gaps in various fields. Given the fact that adventurers perform tasks from delivering packages to dangerous or remote areas of the world to helping people navigate confusing legal systems, the latter is actually a surprisingly common sentiment.
Some adventurers prefer to work solo, while most others often team up together, either temporarily or for the long term, in "parties." Adventuring is an often surprisingly social profession, meaning that those who have good interpersonal skills often find themselves in high demand among their peers.
Career
Qualifications
There's little to no barrier to entry for the adventuring life, though it's also not uncommon for people to pick up the profession for a time in order to gain some skills and pivot to something else. The variability of potential tasks means that there's always something for everyone.
Payment & Reimbursement
The pay for an adventurer is generally fairly good. Anyone can make a decent living from it no matter where they are, and the guilds have many, many measures in place to ensure people are fairly compensated for their time and effort. Few people are foolish enough to attempt to stiff an adventurer; while in the modern era few adventurers are prone to enacting retribution on their own, the guilds are another story. It helps that they've accumulated many highly trained legal teams over the centuries.
Perception
Purpose
Adventurers tend to fill many different niches in society. Their job is, essentially, to do the tasks that others might not be so keen on performing. As such, a significant number of adventurers are actually fairly mundane professionals like janitors, plumbers, deliverypeople, sewage workers, and the like. Of course, historically you also have sellswords and mercenaries, and you occasionally see even highly trained professionals like doctors or lawyers who prefer applying their skills on the go rather than staying in one spot their whole lives.
History
Adventuring as a profession generally rose out of a need for things to Get Done. Adventurers have popped up here and there over the millennia, often giving rise to stories of heroism and daring. But most adventurers were simply people who saw a job that needed doing, and took up the task of doing it themselves, often traveling around to wherever their particular skills were needed.
Over time, adventurers banded together into parties, and formed various networks that spanned not only different parties, but across cultures, nations, and borders. As people grew too old to handle the rigors of the road, older adventurers would pass the adventuring mantle on to future generations, eventually leading to longstanding legacies. As the world changed and grew, so did the profession, eventually leading to the founding of proper adventuring networks, and from there, adventuring guilds. With the advent of guilds, adventuring as a profession became even more widely accessible, even to people who weren't so keen on traveling outside of their places of origin. The guild began accepting a wider range of tasks, both above board and not, and gave people who might otherwise have struggled to find gainful employment more opportunities to make a living—and help their community, to boot!
Adventuring, and adventuring guilds, are now a regular staple of the modern world. So much so that some would argue (seriously or not) that without adventurers, society would collapse in on itself.
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