I had the idea of companions in mind when doing the AI for that. This would all be awesome, but require some pretty big changes. Right now the "village" and "npcs" are menus. I'm thinking that there would be a new menu that opens in game, in fact it could easily take over the communication section.
The canned dialog could be held in parts of the existing map files easily. Probably edited via a text editor. However, turning people into shops would be a challenge. There'd have to be some kind of scripting, or just a flag in the dialog.
My big concern is the mapping section itself. Right now all things with logic are monsters. There'd need to be new entity numbers added for this. Then the artwork would need to be accessible.
The Lua conversion is focused on simplifying a lot of these things, but at the moment, getting new art into the game is a challenge. Another thing is that modifying how scripting and entities are added to maps changes the compatibility of maps. I mean, right now we only have a handful of user maps to convert, but it's a consideration.
