oh god... when we first started this damned game....
There had been an idea Farnite and Gilly and I concocted along with Bodros that never materialized. Basically when you kill a mob, there is a 1 in like 1000 chance that you will see a small spirit gem/token (think like our current gem syste) - but it remembers what mob it came from.
If you activate the gem, it vanishes, you you get a charmie that is identical to the mob that it came from. There was also talk of merging gems or types of gems to create new critters, or making it a mage specific skill to merge them, or bonuses for certain types with certain classes, or freeing their spirits for random quest tokens... and so on.