Or to provide a simple escort for a trading caravan making its way across the continent to another settlement. Or to retrieve valuable items from monster lairs. This introduces you to the contract system, which forms your main source of income for most of the game: bandits, wolves and even scarier beasties will be plaguing a settlement, and you’ll be hired to hunt them down and stop them. These survivors promptly trudge back to a nearby settlement on the world map, where they get a new contract from the town leaders to go back and finish the job by taking revenge on those dastardly bandits.
Every new company starts the game by picking a name and a wonderfully detailed banner (that you can eventually construct in game and have carried around by your sergeant) and then doing the training contract, where the remnants of the previous company get wiped out by a group of bandits leaving only three survivors. To explain how Battle Brothers works I might as well tell the story of Bjarni the Learner of the Face Manglers, one of the unassuming stars of my first successful mercenary company - because what Battle Brothers is ultimately about is telling stories. Battle Brothers is the low-fantasy mercenary company management game I always wanted.