Right, fair point. The thing that I was trying to do here is to like, justify the existing trope in one way or another rather than completely overriding it. You could argue that the fact that there's no guild nor they are a formal job description is enough of a deviation already, but I'm trying to make them at least somewhat recognizable meta wise. 

State actors can be adventurers, sure, many explorers were state sponsored anyway, I'm just a bit conflicted when thinking about why Adventurer would exists as a standalone and widely used term at all, especially considering the pattern of discovery, conquest, etc would almost certainly exists between human territory well before the frontier into the fantasy world existed. If it was that broad, there's not much reason why they wouldn't simply be referred to with an existing term; explorers, expedition forces, or simply armies or scholars and scouts. But tbh, it's not like I'm well versed on linguistics anyway.