Dealing with Evil Adventurers

Adventurers are generally a positive force for society. But those who don't have society's best interest at heart pose a serious danger. 

A community threatened by adventurers reacts the same as a community threatened by monsters. It seeks to endure, survive, and prevent recurrence. Villagers will avoid confronting murder-hobo adventurers directly once they've demonstrated they're more powerful than ordinary bandits. The villagers will flee and disperse. But they will also remember everything they learned about the PCs; how they looked, what they said, where they came from. If they can grab a scrap of clothing or spent ammunition, it might be enough to  use later to clue a diviner into the person's identity and whereabouts.

Merchants, landowners, and others with sufficient wealth band together in mutual protection insurance groups. Everyone in the group pays a fixed amount yearly, and if one of them was robbed by adventurers, the group uses the fund to hire their own adventurers to find the criminals. The group publishes the names of fund participants in newspapers (or equivalent means of dissemination) to notify adventurers that it would be a bad idea to rob them. 

Charitable associations extend this protection to those who can't afford to form their own associations. These groups share information to improve divination and early identification efforts. In a high magic setting, particularly reckless adventurers would eventually find themselves the subject of repeated scry-and-die attempts, or even sleep deprivation attritional assassination by a warlock with the Dream spell.

Next: The Charmed Guard