Dear Media:
Get off your asses and post dat shit.
The marketing game combined with the waiting game makes me horribly anxious - luckily there are a couple of sites that reliably post our updates when they're pushed, but we're hoping to snag a bigger site before KS. Sending out some "Hey, you still going to post that update this week?" emails today.
As for the Chosen One, he goes through a "Accepting his Destiny" quest at a certain point, and it has additional dangers (mostly just affecting how long it takes) based on how many previous Chosen Ones there were, and though it doesn't account for how grisly their end was it does take longer if the previous one was Corrupted - and a previously corrupted Chosen One always gives infiltration on the new Chosen One's destiny quests, which is obviously very useful.
When the Chosen One is corrupted/killed, a new hero of lesser level gains the mantle and must go through his Accepting his Destiny quest.
Hero's CAN retire but not from age - it is possible to get them to give the adventuring life by demoralizing them, and you can force class changes by removing values from characters. For instance, one of the "worst" classes is sellsword, which is an amoral hero that simply goes after gold based quests and gets very mundane abilities. You can "force" a class switch to sellsword by isolating a hero from friends or by having him betrayed by the cause he champions.
Retirement isn't in the picture because the amount of time that passes is meant to be relatively short, perhaps a decade or so. The game world is meant to be more static than something like Civilization - the resources that exist are what is available to be used and once expended are difficult or impossible to replace which breeds a different kind of strategic gameplay.