From Humble Beginnings

It always blows my minds when a three-act story starts with misadventures in a home town and ends up in an alternate plane of reality, and somehow I never noticed how far we've gone.

There's something comfortable about seeing heroes come from humble beginnings. They're so relatable and identifiable. If you opened your story with a rag-tag group of misfits wielding deadly magic and blasting away golems and winged serpents, people may think that it's cool, but weird, and others may just be wondering what the heck is going on and why they should care.

But when you start with characters that live a simple life in a simple town, have some moderate danger come to them, and slowly give them stronger equipment, greater threats, bigger challenges, and have their experiences shape them along with it all, then you can reach that end point, but every change was so slight on its own that nothing ever triggered as being out of place. (The first magical items may have been out of place, but if the moment is awesome, then we don't think about it as being weird.)