@HF - good suggestion! I spent some more time looking at CoreGameEvents.xml and found it interesting. I'm just going to dump my findings here before calling it a night. Basically, seems they've just added a new quest TriggerType in LH... this one:
<TriggerType>FactionResourceLevel</TriggerType>
It works in conjuction with these:
<TriggerStringData>Fame</TriggerStringData>
<TriggerData>1</TriggerData>
This tag specifies what value of for the FactionResourceLevel that will trigger the quest. In the case of the CoreGameEvents... currently the only things in there are the Fame triggers. There is one "quest" for each fame trigger point, i.e. 3, 50, 100, 200 etc..... and each one of these "quests" essentially does nothing but this:
<Treasure>
<GameModifier InternalName="Reward1">
<ModType>Player</ModType>
<Attribute>RecruitFreeChampion</Attribute>
<Value>7</Value>
</GameModifier>
</Treasure>
... where <Value> is the Spawn Rating for the champion that appears. On a side note, this "RecruitFreeChampion" appears to work in GameModifiers otehr than quests.... so you can have a Champion appear upon building an improvement etc.
Anyways....
This new trigger type is pretty useful. You can use it to do exactly what I was after, yay!
You can create a ResourceType that is set to 0 by default..... but 1 (or more) if you have faction trait X. Then you create a Quest that triggers when this resource = 1 (or more). This lets you trigger a specific quest immediately (when the game starts) if you have the relevant faction trait.
This is kinda cool. In theory it would let you give the "Shire" faction a quest to take the one ring to mount doom, right from the get go (example discussed above).
I have uploaded a demo to dropbox if anyone is interested. Pretty sure it should work if you just drop this file in your LH Mods folder:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/100348448/CultEyesDemoQuest.xml
This demo fires a copy of the "Bandit Quest" automatically when starting a game as Resoln (or any custom faction with the Cult of a Hundred Eyes).
Thanks for the input everyone.