Some ideas for added activity/changes in early game:
1) Make it so that the first training dummy gives you sufficient power to attack the forest guardian. Right now, you have to do a bit of it and some rats, to have enough.
2) Have the tavern keeper ask you to deliver a letter to a friend in the city, after you've helped them out. This could then set off a chain of events at the city. Say it allows you to take on postman contracts, to deliver letters to various people and thus lets you explore more of the world, in a different way.
3) Have the ability to set how much of an activity you want to do, in a queue. So then you could setup a basic run to auto-work on, while you do something else, waiting for the queue to get completed. Would eliminate a lot of the early game redo process, once you've managed to figure out a path for the short-term.
4) Have the option to find the cat of yours a mate. Then get it to have babies. All activities related to animal taming. Right now the cat is mostly there to facilitate taming wolves or for necromancy sacrifice, and this way the cat would have a different role to play.
5) Have the option to breed rabbits, wolves, and dire wolves. Might need some extra training from the elves to do this.
6) Have the option to mine extra ores, learned from goblin mining trainers. Then you'd have more iron and mithril ore you could acquire and use for special projects.
7) Have the option to visit the city that is to be pillaged. Maybe its a special city only available to visit, if you turn in the Necromicon, instead of using it and becoming a Necromancer.