Characters are directly playable. A player consists of skills that allow the player to interact with the world in various ways. Characters can become proficient in magic, both divine and arcane, or weapons and armour. Characters mostly fit into the standard roleplaying genre of hack and slash.
In addition, a character can become either an artisan or a merchant. As part of their adventuring, they may also have a side skill, such as an apothecary with a collection of herbs or exotic animal parts. A character may choose to become a weapons or armour maintainer. This maintenance skill may then grow into blacksmithing. After a few years, the character may decide to retire and thus become a mage smith.
A character may start as a cleric and then be elected as the village mayor. From there, the character could look at increasing the wealth or expansion of the village. The cleric could then convince the populace to elect him mayor for life. Once elected, he could expand the village into a fortified city and thus to a duchy under the local king or even a kingdom in its own right.
For this to happen, the cleric would need to raise money to carry out his expansion. Increasing income might be through taxation, tariffs, or looting nearby settlements. So, the cleric needs to balance the protection of his citizens with the rate of expansion and income.
Failure to balance means the citizens revolt or the village to the north decides your village is easy pickings and invades.
The permutations of character development are endless, with a distinct push towards growing the economy, locally or globally, while allowing the standard hack-and-slash of roleplaying games.
It must be noted that character deaths in the game will most likely be permanent.