All quests are fetch quests

Fetch quests: “A Fetch Quest is a subquest of the overreaching plot which must be completed in order to trigger a vital Event Flag. Find a key, save a kid lost in the cave, defeat the monster attacking the town, rescue the trapped workers, resolve an Adventure Town’s problem … each of these is a Plot Coupon. Fetching back the coupons is name of the game.” tvtropes

The description above is usually used for video games, but can be applied to tabletop role playing games as well.

Fetch quests are usually seen as a pretty crappy way to run a game, go here, fetch that, deliver it here. But then again, a lot of the usual quests in campaigns boil down to being fetch quests in the end, or similar enough to making no difference. Go kill an ogre, get the treasure, buy new stuff. Fly your ship through space, look through a temple, fly somewhere else and use the McGuffin you found to convince the galactic council to stop the war and save the universe.

Go to x, do y, maybe go to z and give away x.

But even the worst fetch quests can be spiced up by adding a little flair to them. Consider the examples below:

“Hello world renowned heroes, and welcome to our village. Please take this crab to the apothecary. You will be rewarded.”

“You want a beer? You know, the last group of armed thugs that came in here and bought beer smashed the place up, wounded my busboy and smashed the giant mirror. To make sure that you’re what we want to serve in this village, we’ll need you to do us a small favour. There are some crabs that keep sneaking up behind our tavern and snacking on the supports. If they keep it up, the house will fall into the river. Take your turn on guard, and if any crabs crawl up, kill them. But try not to damage their shells too much. We’d prefer if you took the crabs to the apothecary afterwards that grind up the shells and make healing potions from them. Hell, he might even give you a portion for free if you drop by with a couple of crabs.”

It takes a bit more to change the quests around in a module to more interactive fetch quests, but if your group is into it, it’s probably worth it. It is an easy way to flesh out your campaign world, make the NPCs more noteable and memorable. Which adds additional stakes if a peril should befall them.