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I've been reading about banditry recently and now all fantasy bandits plots seem dumb to me. Western ones ("heroes get hired by city to take out bandits") even more so. Most historical bandits were in cahoots with their local city elites and the whole point was to force merchants to use the established trade routes, stop at the city, pay the tolls etc., with the added bonus of being able to selectively eliminate competition.
Whenever there was a crackdown against banditry it was invariably some more central authority (king, duke) trying to assert their power against the local power structures of cities, and said cities usually fought back.
City merchants hiring adventurers to kill bandits is like the mafia hiring hitmen to kill their own enforcers.
