Terania is a city with a few problems.
Firstly, the Interregnum seems to be in full swing and becoming the standard order of things. No-one really wants to repeat the excesses that the population suffered under the last Primarch, and the Civil Committee seem to be doing a pretty good, if rather dull and uninspired, job of running the place.
Secondly, the mountain passes, dark forests, burning desert and wide ocean that surround its local fertile plains have become somewhat unreliable; occasionally foreign guests manage to make it through, but Terania's not exactly in regular contact with its neighbours any more.
Thirdly, Terania does have a few noisy neighbours - the various greenskins, troglodytes, beastkin and seaborn that keep poking their noses out of their various inhospitable habitats and threatening the delicate tracery of farming, mining, fishing and woodcutting villages that supply Terania with food and raw materials.
And while the Primarchs would often ride out with their personal retinue to put this kind of thing down personally, or at least recruit formal Watches and so forth, the Civil Committee doesn't like to get their hands dirty and, to be frank, what with foreign trade being down and all, the Treasury isn't really up to funding a full-time Watch or Militia or whatever it would take to defend the place in an organised fashion.
So Jereniah of the Civil Committee comes up with a novel solution: The Adventurer's Guild.
They do up a down-on-its-luck tavern on the outskirts - in a high-crime area, obviously, to kill two birds with one stone. They stick a shiny new Adventurer's Guild sign outside, and put up a noticeboard. Then they send out the criers, offering free drinks, potential monetary windfalls, and wide-ranging pardons along with future immunity to prosecution for all Guild members, so long as they keep up their obligation: at least one mission a year, or Equivalent Service as decided by the Civil Committee, and don't do anything which forces us to blacklist you.
Even better, that means it's a central place for the Committee to send all those irritating troublemakers who want some kind of help from their betters, but can't properly articulate the problem...
Religion And You: Don't Call It 'Will-Working' In My Hearing
Of course there are religions; there are always religions. Throw a rock and you will hit a Temple of Something. There is no State Religion and the Civil Committee operate a strict policy of religious tolerance, primarily in reaction to the last few Primarchs - who, naturally, made their own religion the State Religion, causing quite a lot of unnecessary executions on the change-overs.
And religions demonstrably have power: miracles regularly heal the wounded and sick, embolden (or weaken) warriors and remove (or grant) dread curses.
Unfortunately for the religions, all of them appear to have the _same_ power. It appears you have to believe in _something_ to tap into the power - and to have great dedication and submit to some course of ritualistic action - but it doesn't appear to matter _what_.
Still, people who refer to the power of religion as 'will-working' and claim to have found their own personal path - who believe in _themselves_ - are unfortunately not protected by the Civil Committee's decrees on religious tolerance, and tend to meet sad-but-predictable ends.
Indistinguishable From Magic: The Noble Art of Wand-Making
There is another route to power (other than the standard way of doing something a lot - like swinging a sword or getting hit - until you get really good at it): wand-making.
Now, we call it wand-making. Not everything that comes out is wand-shaped; in fact, it merges almost seamlessly with the manufacture of basic equipment and items at the lower end, and the principles can be used to 'enchant' just about any item. But the wand, or rod, or staff, turns out to be a suitable form factor for a wide range of potential effects.
Of course, it takes just as long to undertake the arduous courses of study and carefully inlay the rare reagents into the correct woods and so on as it would to just learn how to use a bow or take a beating - but some people prefer to study than to practice, and to store their power in artefacts.
The lead-into-gold promise of Wand-Making is that you should be able to give your wand to someone else and they should be able to do the same thing with it you can. Does it work? Not exactly - you can trade implements with parties that understand the basic principles, but hand your wand to a bruiser or a priest and they will gaze at it in blank incomprehension.
Yet, frustratingly, some 'wands' do exist that can be used by everyone - often in the form of 'enchanted' weapons and armour; someone in foreign lands must have discovered the secret...
So this is a kind of low-fantasy setting (but with room for magic healing and all that good stuff) - there are obviously supernatural powers, but there are no obviously supernatural/higher beings or planes or so on behind them (although don't let the temples hear you say that!). It's meant to mostly revolve around doing missions, saving the villagers, occasionally worrying about what some of the Civil Committee are up to, maybe appointing a new Primarch or two, dealing with weird shit brought in by foreigners and maybe discovering more about the local inhabitants of the nearby wildernesses.
In general it should be quite easy to run plot in this setting and then return to the status quo, in a similar way to many long-running TV series; your plot blows through, slightly rearranges some things, and then leaves back into the trackless wilderness from whence it came, leaving Terania pretty much as it always was, except for maybe a plaque (or a minor magic sword) or something. But there are some setting elements which are available for longer-term Leaving A Mark On The Setting by players - mainly the political and religious situation.
Some more stuff that I wrote for this: