Some thoughts on rewards and motivations. The question starts with this: why should the party go off to some dark hole in the ground to fight goblins and orcs? And second - when they do - what should they get out of it? What can they get out of it?
I can think of three answers to this.
1) They go for the treasure. This is the simple answer - straightforward: they go because they expect to profit. And they do profit. That's kind of how we have always played - you fight things for the rewards, straight up - XP and GP. Magic. It's simple, logical enough, practical enough, but it does have drawbacks - it can become abstract: what do you do with your gold and magic? assuming lots of it gets handed out. And it warps the world around you - here's first edition Leif, with 193,685 GP - what's that - two tons of gold? You either ignore the facts or you invent an elaborate society that can accommodate a bunch of people shlepping around 2 or 3 tons of gold. Or you invent credit and banks and checks and the like, the way the real world did. That is - if you're going to play wealth and power, you have to figure out how it fits in the world - and you're off #1 whether you want to be or not.
2) Personal motivation. Backgrounds help with this. But this also gets to what I think is an important part of this problem - it's like this: why would some character go on some kind of high risk expedition without any idea what they are going to get out of it? Well - the truth is - because it's what they do. Why do adventurers go on adventures? because they are adventurers. But what this is doing, I think, is moving the question back a level - why is Bono heading off into the wilderness to kill stuff? because he's an adventurer - he heads off into the wilderness to kill stuff. The question is - why is he an adventurer? why does he do this? That's where the backgrounds come in what made these people adventurers? Maybe it's simple - they want power and money and women and castles; maybe it isn't simple - they want vengeance on the southern lord who drove their family off their land and left them impoverished and desperate in a foreign country. Or specific - they want to find the 6 fingered man and kill him. The idea is that these background motivations are ends, ends that provide short term motivations. To do those things - get wealth, power, vengeance, liberate their homeland, become king - they need to become strong. They become strong by adventuring - so in the present, they go off and kill orcs. The best thing about this is that it can go either way: thinking of backgrounds as motivations to take up adventuring keeps you moving through the normal run of dungeons and such; but the specifics of the motivations remain in the back of your mind. You fight orcs and you look for clues about the 6 fingered man. You break up a smuggling ring and win the approval of some merchant who can help you reestablish contact with your home town. You drag off a chest full of coin, which you can use to buy land and some cows. Etc.
3) The World’s Motivations. This is related to the others, but oriented toward the overall setting. For adventurers it might be straightforward - you're being paid to clean out a next of monsters and made the river safe again. But that second part is the world's motivation. That motivation (cleaning out monsters, say) can exists regardless of the character's interest. Now, it might be the character's motivation too - a paladin righting wrongs will share the desire to destroy the monsters - but it's still outwardly directed, and the character's motivations don't matter. The PCs can share it or not - they might be doing it for the money (and XP and such), but there is another motivation at work as well - which, against regardless of the character's commitment - is going to have further repercussions on the story. To be sure - if the characters don't share the broader goals, you have to find their reasons as well - so this is usually grafted onto the first two - but it still shapes the way the campaign goes.
So: when building an adventure, I think you can use any of these. Though all require some work and thought, to make them become important. For #1 - you have to have an economy. You have to understand the economy and work on making it all fit. That means - you have to think about how much gold or magic is in circulation, and how much of out might accumulate in some old mine or crypt. And you have to have an idea what happens if a party finds 10,000 GP somewhere - what are they going to do with it? I don’t just mean, how do they get it out of the place - I mean - how do they use it? what can they buy? That kind of thing.
Same with personal motivations, though this is clearly more in the hands of the player. You should have these built ahead of time, and keep them in mind. Granted, they may often be superfluous to the adventure at hand - but they should still be there - at some level the characters should be thinking about how this adventure is going to serve them in the future. Maybe it just makes them stronger and richer - maybe it takes them a tangible step closer to something they want. The more of that you can work into the game, the more interesting it becomes.
Finally - Campaign Plots and the like are worth keeping in mind. Maybe in the large sense (whether in an ongoing storyline, or just in terms of building the world around individual adventurers), but even in the smaller sense. If you can make one adventure feed into another - create situations that generate more trials for the characters, more challenges, opportunities and so on - that will help build a better world, a more engaging campaign. Even relatively loose links from one dungeon to the next give the game texture, make it better.
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