Editing Adventurer (section)

==Mercenaries==
[[image:Landsknechts.jpg|thumb|300px|right|Landsknechte; because Germans wanted to Pirate too but didn't have boats.]]
Mercenaries are people who fight in conflicts for the sake of direct profit provided by their employer. In most fiction, they exist to provide a group of people who have military force capacity, while not being associated with particular political and societal factions. This means that most mercenaries are used for protagonists and anti-heroes, as it's much easier to create a believable and unique character without restricting them to a set group of beliefs of a faction. Equally frequently, the mercenaries are shown in the dark light as well, being pragmatic villains who have little interest in anything besides money, thus allowing them to be the bad guys by doing anything and everything evil for the sake of wealth.

The difference mercenaries have though is that they actually existed. However, real mercenaries tended to be amoral (often Swiss) pikemen who would serve as royal guards for monarchs too paranoid to trust their own people to not murder them. The ones that DID actually go and fight wars, they tended to be Germans and were often as not in it for [[Pirate|the looting]]. And if the other side offered them a better deal, they were almost always more than happy to betray their now-former employer. Some, such as Francesco Sforza, even ended up as prominent aristocrats themselves. Needless to say, the aforementioned unreliability is one of the reasons why modern nation-states use their own standing armies to fight wars now (with some exceptions, of course). 

In many a game, the PCs are hired as mercenaries to provide services for someone, starting from removal of [[Giant_space_hamster|Giant Space Hamsters]] from the cellar of a local noble, to poisoning the king during a banquet so his brother's cousin's sister can usurp the throne. And, since parties can range from [[Chaotic Stupid]] to [[Stupid Evil]] to [[Stupid Good]] (even at the same time), all characters can act towards a common goal without having to resort to fratricide because they can't agree on an approach to the situation (as most players use their status as mercenaries as an excuse to do things out of character, because "[[Derp]], [[Games Workshop|Money]]").