montier wrote: I would like to pose this question to Kaivan or Boomland...
Off hand, without research.. Do you know of any instances where the guards ventured outside of town during our era?
Off hand, no I can't think of anything like this, especially if they were "town guards" - town guards instantly kill aggressors and when they kill an NPC, the corpse is suppose to vanish. Based on that, these types of guards have no place outside of town zones. You can always hire an army of NPC rangers and mages. In mass numbers, those are very effective killing machines.
Edit: There were some bugs, pre-T2A (might have lasped into T2A) where you could get town guards to travel into the woods near town. For example, I specifically remember playing as a Dread Lord and getting guard whacked at Vesper crossroads sometime in late 1997, maybe early 1998. I can't recall this ever happening during T2A though.