There are no more quests in DF2014 like there was in past versions, all you have is some npc randomly telling you there's a beast/bandit/whatever in a remote location and that's it, even if you go there and destroy whatever is there to destroy no npc will care, "it was inevitable" will be the most likely answer you'll get for reporting the deed, very disheartening .
Rarely they'll think it's great, but you get not much more answers.
... or they'll spit at you and call you murderer because it happened that the bandits they told you were terrorizing everyone happened to have a membership with one of the many groups those npc belong to or was somehow related to them in a way or another.
The only rumour thing that seem to really matter for the npc is kids rescue in goblin dark fortresses/pits.
But the lag is so horrible most of the time ( as those sites generate thousands of gobs/trolls + pathfind calculation hell due to how convulated the sites are + respawn bug ) , that unless you mod the game/delete massive population from those locations with dfhack, it will be so unplayble you're not likely to have much fun.
When you become/are a heartperson of a lord/lady , sometime you can ask for order and instead of them not giving any to you, they can ask for you to do something that sounds like a quest, but good luck if it's the "create trouble with some elf civ" as whatever you do to that elf civ does not really solve the order.
Hopefully next version of DF will get better for adventuring as Toady mentionned in his logs recently :
I decided it was time to shift gears to adventure mode so that the last remaining dwarfy bits can grow up with the adventure bits that need to be finished, and so adventure mode doesn't creep up badly on us as we try to get this release completed.