This good post about the concept of "Bandits" as guilt-free cannon fodder in fantasy settings got me thinking about my favorite twist on the concept, in the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone. In central Kath (fantasy Old West America), everybody lives in constant fear of Raiders. Every town is semi-fortified against Raiders – always with a capital R – who come out of the night to plunder and kill and kidnap. This is treated as a self-evident, obvious fact of rural Kathic life.
Eventually it's revealed that the Raiders are a relatively new phenomenon. They're ordinary people who came into contact with a misfiring piece of ordnance left over from the God Wars, about fifty years ago. The curse drives them to kill, but the enemy it was designed to target is long dead.
It all comes together when Tara Abernathy stumbles into the aftermath of a Raider attack on a homestead, where the farmer's daughter is being dragged away.
Anyway, I just think that's neat. Gladstone is an extremely clever writer; you might know him as one of the co-authors of This Is How You Lose the Time War.
