A quest about questing

I'm very fond of the character of the Wise Old Man because he's so flawed while still being likeable. He's a Saradominist adventurer; people like that tend to be stereotypical good guys; however, the bank robbery shows that he's really not such a good guy after all. Yet he doesn't see himself as a bad guy. If you confronted him about the bank robbery, he'd have explained that he was furious to find that the world had never adequately rewarded him for his lifetime of doing adventures to help people, so he felt that he had the right to take what he wanted from that bank. Perhaps he was never such a good guy in the first place if he did it all in the hope of rewards; I'll leave you to ponder the ethical issues at your leisure.

The Wise Old Man is a sort of archetypal adventurer figure who's done lots of heroic deeds throughout his life. In a way, he's a lot like a player doing quests! What is a typical quest? Someone wants help. They can't solve the problem themselves, so they need a passing adventurer to do the job. At the end, the adventurer is rewarded and is sent away satisfied that they've helped. That's basically the Wise Old Man's history too; it's been established that he did adventures like these when he was younger, helping save villages from monsters and other similar deeds. We can, therefore, think of the Wise Old Man as being like a player who's primarily interested in questing. During Love Story, you'll even get to see him perform the Quest Cape emote.

What would be a fitting opponent for this archetypal quester? I came up with the idea of an enemy who'd hate the Wise Old Man (and you) because she doesn't like people doing quests. So, in this quest, you won't just be fighting for your own life, you'll be defending the reputation of all adventurers against a foe who thinks you're a stupid bunch of do-gooders.

Along with the combat and puzzles, this will be a chance to step outside the fantasy for a moment and take a tongue-in-cheek look at what the game's characters might think of their universe and the players wandering around it.