That is certainly an evolution. You have Primordia, which is technically about figuring out the right path through the adventure, then you have TTON's meres, which uses narrative branching like a CYOA, and now you have FG, which has different events that offer player choice and allow for different paths.
It may seem that FG's events are only loosely connected (the multi-event arcs) but that is misleading.
If you examine the system at the level of its interactions, the interconnectivity between the interactions is actually what drives the game. The players learn what interactions can occur and how these can be ordered advantageously. Naturally there are different views, the player experiences this as exploration, and you see this possibly as design and narration.
Technically the first interactions between the player and the game world are choosing the avatar's skills and loadouts. The player does not only interact with the events by making choices, but also interacts with the events in many more nuanced ways by bringing along items, a fetch and a warband. The player also acquires resources and items in events and the avatar's state can change. This is noteworthy because the player learns what to bring along to achieve desired results.
This is actually very good design, because it focuses gameplay on an engaging mental activity.
But there is more to it. Cutting edge AI research shows that loosely connected events that adapt to the context are better suited to create systems that assume a natural order than more rigidly interconnected events. In this respect your design has a better chance of creating paths that genuinely feel like a consequence of the player's choices than KoDP.
Conversely, a bigger effort is required to make the interactions that drive the system do their work.
It seems you know this intuitively, that the traits, fetches, warbands, items and gold (are there more resources?) play a key role in the events.
It cannot be stressed enough that getting the foundation in order is paramount. How the world works, how its inhabitants interact with each other and the environment, and how their interactions are circumscribed. If you get this right, you have opened the door to create a convincing world and craft a game that lives in it.
As a writer you start this process in your imagination and flesh out the world step by step. If you write a book you can define the events and adapt these as your narrative evolves. The same holds for writing an adventure like Primordia. But as you have seen in TTON and now in FG, these require a much more involved type of writing that requires you to imagine different choices and outcomes.
Games have done that in a limited form before, for example Weird Worlds and FTL, but the design mantra for these games was to keep the events self-contained and only have the outcome impact your stats.
It appears that you have a bigger goal here, to make the traits, fetches, warbands and items narratively meaningful. This is ambitious and a warning seems in order. I suppose you have heard of the Legend of
Paal Paysam, but the principle holds for the design of interactions as well. In essence it means that you can only implement a small fraction of the potential interactions, and the choice of this is what truly limits the potential of your game.
You have at least traits, fetches, warbands and items. If you draw up a matrix of what interacts with what, you will discover that there is an astonishing amount of interactions. For example, your warband can have skalds, priests, maidens, witches, berserkers and at least three can trigger individual outcomes in the "Till Death" event.
The straightforward approach, simply to see how much you can manage to write, will work. It's not so much a limit of the events and choice and consequence that you write. It's more of what you don't do, so that people will ask, if I have this fetch, should it not also work in event X and Y? It's the expectations that are raised when players begin to learn and explore the game.
I have no doubt that FG will be a good game anyway. Eventually people will learn that a game somehow must be limited.
Still, there are ways to mitigate the limitations and to extend the reach of the game considerably.
Given that the interactions are ultimately the centerpieces that drive the events, I'd recommend to use two tools and a slight change to the game development process. Maybe you already use these, but there is no harm in mentioning their use.
The general idea is to define the interactions not directly (i.e. the witch can resolve the "Till Death" event by tricking the dead men) but to associate properties with each trait, fetch, party member, item and resource that define their use. I.e. the witch can trick the dead men, the death lore can send dead to their rest, the maiden can have sex, the priest can invoke the law and so on. Obviously each item can have many uses.
The first tool would be to associate and manage all these properties that any item in the game can have. This is the easy part.
The second tool would be to define events first abstractly, what options these will offer and how these correspond to the properties of the items in the game. This will need repeating for each outcome and its associated options as well. Once the events are defined abstractly, the tool will display the entire branching event outcome graph will all possible items that can resolve a problem and what rewards are offered.
The main use of this tool is to aid your writing that you can view what events are already described and add text interactively if you wish to write an event-specific problem/outcome/reward. But primarily it allows a layered approach to the writing so that each interaction type can have default text. E.g. give gold as an option and the jarl concurs with your request as an outcome. Plus all the intermediate layers, event-specific default text, defaults for groups of events described by their properties and so on.
Naturally it is possible to manage this all manually. While it is an effort to produce these tools, they will save you a ton of time down the road, particularly once you begin adapting items and interactions and do QA later on.
That's what I can think of right away without more specific knowledge, but I will ponder a bit whether there are more simple means to improve the process.
But as already mentioned, the most important thing is that you get the foundation right, that you understand how the game world works. But from what you have described so far, I have no doubt that you are on the right track.
