Experimenting w/companion-related missions, one answer could save lots of time

[td_klondike]

My goal is to initiate dialogue with a companion as a prisoner rescue.  I've succeeded in a very small way by adjusting the initial npc dialogue under module_dialogue.py, but what I'd really like to do is remove that line entirely for initial interaction and replace it with a quest.  Has anybody experimented with this before?  I don't understand the coding for how the npcs tend to appear in taverns randomly, and I'd like to keep from having the same one show up in a tavern while he's in my party.  Can I recruit a party member through quest dialogue without complicated consequences, or am I doing this the wrong way?

 

[Somebody]

Originally, back in the days, you recruited Borcha by speaking to a lord who had him imprisoned in a cage in his halls for grand theft equine. You then had to drag him to Sargoth for a bounty as a quest, but half-way there he'd speak to you about having made up that bounty, and you'd have a chance to recruit him. Go look for the commented out section in module_dialogs about that stuff, although most of the conditions/effects of recruiting him might have changed since then.