Here's an idea. Each village has a number of quests, each of them related to one of the commodities that village produces. They aren't very epic - in fact, it's more like helping the commodity producers work more efficiently.
Now here's the catch - each of these quests would be a mini-game. For example, one of the quests would help the dwarves in Southgard mine more gold by making the player mark unstable rock formations which could collapse when the miners would try to dig under them - sort of a mine sweeper game.
However, the mini-games part could be ignored if they are too hard to code. The point is, that if a number of people (for example, at least 20) finishes the quest in the current month, the village will produce more of that type's commodities at the start of the next one. The number of those extra commodities shouldn't be proportional to the number of people who will finish the quests - otherwise the larger cities/communes would have too much commodities. Rather, it should be that if a fixed number of people solves the quest, the village produces more stuff.
Moreover, the quests would have a very quick reset time - maybe even a practically unexistant one. However, each person would be able to help in one village only once a month.
Therefore, players with more pacifistic tendentions could get some more gold and experience, and even help their city while they're doing it (yes, I know we already have the honors quest, but only one person can do them at a time).

ooo sounds wierd but fun