Encounters for adolescent PCs

[Slife]

Some scribbles

The first smith, who invented bronze. He's looking for a better metal. Perhaps the Promethus guy teaches him how to smith iron later on?

A talking monkey. Nobody has seen any other kind of monkey, so they think it's normal. He does something related to entertainment... a puppet show, maybe?

Anything that says it's from "the time before" would be interesting. You could even tie it into the demigod, if you wanted.

 

[RangerWickett]

Oh, I do intend to use a thing I had tried in a previous game (different players) which never panned out. If you've played Myst, you might recall the prison books, out of which you can let a dangerous looking fella. Well, the PCs will have a chance to find a book that holds a talking cat that has mild telekinesis. It's indisputably evil, but it's nice to the PCs because they take care of him. It comes from another plane that was somehow imperiled, and he put himself in the book to escape. His plane was ruled by cats, which were defeated by something else.

Ooh, I need to have elder deities.

 

[Varianor Abroad]

What if you give the PCs a list of names to choose from that includes the gods of d20 campaigns? Might be fun.

I'm reminded here of two books. The first is David Brin's The Practice Effect. The more you imagine something coming true, the truer it becomes. But you have to keep "practicing" it for it to be really true. (This is for your storytelling mechanic idea. Any "concrete" stuff the PCs come up with can occur slowly.) The second is Neil Gaiman's Sandman. There are parts of the book that talk about the early days of the world and the shaping of it with Dream's family involved. I could almost see that the village is full of people with names that become "concepts" like you talk about above.

Anyway, one thing you could do if you're going with a more "story" approach is not even have them have stats. Just let them play out kids adventures with some spooky undertones and odd happenings - a "day in the life" of the village.