Janus,
I don't have a story in mind, but I'm looking at different actions that I would enjoy having included in mods. I've added dueling to my game, I'll add brawling (taking a break after wasting a few hours on it). My current "project" (I'm really a geek, coding when on vacation...), is to add messengers to the game. So instead of asking for something directly, you could send a messenger to do it. You could also receive a message asking you to do something... it could be very flexible, but it actually surprisingly hard to implement without data structures and the ability to store state in troops.
My two main difficulties are can be illustrated in a fictitious strategy mod:
You want to ask your allies to attack an enemy base.
1/ How to have in interface to specify where to send a message for a free form game. Your allies could be in any city, and you don't have a way of building dynamic dialogs to specify which city to send the message to. I could hack the python generation scripts though. It would then be difficult for a "real" modder to use...
2/ How to hold the information you want to send. I'd like to have a callback script, but I cannot hold state in the messenger. I thought of using items (letters), and there would be a generic script that would do a switch, e.g. if messenger has <send troops letter> then send troops from destination of msg to origin of msg elseif... But I cannot hold third party information like attack other party, since there is no way to pass that information. An obvious hack would be to limit the feature to 10 messengers and hold state in 30+ variables... For someone who's currently reengineering 100 KLOCs of spaghetti code, I'm not too keen on that.
sv