I've noticed that the player character still has all of the mental stats (like courage, charm, confidence and wit), and they still accumulate traits as the game progresses, they are just not shown. Could we potentially make these part of the game?
1) First of all, I think it would be great if the master could get off their ass and work just like other mansion residents. This would allow the player character to gain some experience and pull their weight financially, which would be a vital addition at the very beginning of the game for those starting in Gorn or Frostford, where bandit encounters in surrounding areas are for all intents and purposes impossible to win with just two level one characters. It also seems strange that the pc does nothing just by the virtue of them owning the mansion, especially in clean playthroughs where none of the residents are branded and everybody joined voluntarily and therefore none of them are formally their slaves. And if, say, food were running low and there were not enough coin to buy it in the market, I don't think the mansion owner would just sit there and starve to death. They would lock the door and go hunting, realistically speaking. So let us go hunting/cutting trees/etc.
(*) An interesting twist on this concept would be to think about what happens when no one is at home and everyone, including the master, is away on some job outside of the mansion grounds. Since the resources are scarce and banditry is ubiquitous, I assume there would be a lot of people out in the world who would love to pilfer a lavish mansion left unattended. Why not introduce a separate type of a daily event with burglars whom residents stationed at the mansion need to fend off? Their level and number could scale with the master's level. If you are away, then results of the combat encounter may be determined automatically, and if you are inside, you can choose your party from those who are with you inside the mansion at the moment and resolve the encounter manually. Frequency of burglaries could be determined by your reputation and number of residents at the mansion, maybe by their average level as well if power is considered a deterrent. If none of the people inside have sufficiently high awareness and thieves decide to be sneaky instead of charging in guns blazing, then there could potentially be no combat whatsoever and you just return to your empty gear stash and coin chest and your servants none the wiser. If you have permadeath on, returning to your mansion full of corpses and empty of your valuables would be pretty hardcore, so very much in line with the spirit of permadeath itself.
2) Our character starts out as an everyman. A poor yet lucky person whose wealthy relative died and left them the mansion. Our nominal mental stats, which can be viewed in the save file, tell us as much. The master from my most recent playthrough, according to the save file data, is of slave origins, with ~19 courage, ~20 confidence, ~26 wit and ~36 charm. So how in the world does this person eventually teach their underlings how to become a noble god of mind with hundreds and above across the board?
I suggest we extend the learning point system to our master as well so that they go and make use of library themselves to increase their own mental stats before they can teach anyone anything. Make their own stats the hard cap for training the rest of the slaves, and restrict earning learning points by the slaves via teaching in such a way that they cannot accumulate more than would be necessary to reach the current stat cap and learn the skills they have yet to learn. If the player tried to teach their slave some more after they had already reached the maximum for the number of learning points you can give, the game would say something like "You attempt to tell X more about the world, but you quickly realize you have nothing else to teach them." Maybe assign "noble" grade to our master once they get the mansion to evade the need to raise their grade at the slaver's guild while keeping their true origin as a hidden stat. This would be more realistic and make the player character feel more like a person and less like an almighty MacGuffin.
3) Also, if our master could learn a specialization by, for example, being taught the same specialization one of their servants has by that very servant over the course of several "meet" interactions, that would be great. I don't see a reason why that's not a possibility. You could flavor it as mindreading your servant and rummaging through their memories for several hours, retracing their training in that specialization in your own head, and then impose a mana cost for learning it as a master as a substitute for the fee you pay to the guild.
As for more minor improvements, letting us cast spells on ourselves inside the mansion as well as view our own statistics and traits would be nice. Just for the sake of convenience. I would love to heal myself inside the mansion and not need to go out and do it exclusively in front of everybody in the street.
Apologies for the wall of text.