Actually, I think all the triggers to make quests based on this idea are in...I'm going to go make some right now
Thanks for the great suggestion!
You know how absolutafantastic it is to see this?
"Hey, could we do X? ... Sure, let me go put it in."
The only difficulty would be to get the game to put in all the pieces and/or coding how you get them. In pirates, you could get them after just sheer persistence. If you place them as objects in the game world, an AI could pick up one piece and it would be a long long time before you got to see it.