How could friendship systems between NPCs work? Do you know games that do this?

I'm working on an action-adventure about building and maintaining connections between people. Ideally, this theme would be reflected in multiple layers, from the player character coming out of their shell and building meaningful relationships for the first time up to the different regions of the game being reconnected to each other through the players actions (clearing paths from danger, building bridges over divides etc.).

What I'm missing right now is a way to have the player connect individual people from different regions with each other, that is not just disguised fetch quests.
Example of what I don't want: The baker in town A needs an apprentice, asks you to look for one during your journey, so you travel to town B, find a young person that needs a job, you get their "phone number", bring it back to the baker and tada, quest fullfilled. Even if you removed the last step, it would still result in a fairly boring quest in terms of gameplay (aka you always do the same, go somewhere, find someone).

I'm not sure if I'm missing something, or just using the wrong search terms, but I can't find a lot of examples for relationship systems in general (other than romance systems or farming/life sims like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing). Do you guys have examples for games with mechanically interesting relationship systems, or even systems that are build on the player connecting NPCs with each other?

Thank you in advance for your help!