As Yazda said, it happens in October. This can be October in the game, or October on your device's date and time system. Either will allow it to trigger. I believe you need to head to the swamp north of Gwen's cottage.
If you just need the beginning part finished, each published version of the game comes with a save file included, which has the beginning completed with some basic quests done already.
You're right about the love and corruption routes, there does seem to be more motivation to go for corruption, at least for now.
For talent checks, a number of things to point out:
1. Hunting, after reaching 3, auto-hunts rabbits (if they haven't been spooked); same for deer when hunting reaches 5. Getting additional meat and fur after killing them is also automatically successful, iirc.
2. Some skills help with stats besides the talent checks. Strength, for example, helps with chopping and mining, but also makes the character harder hitting in combat. So there's more to it with talents.
3. Talent checks don't always have the same number to deal with. For example, with Lockpicking, the difficulty of the lock varies, depending on what it locks. The easier locks are very easily picked if talent points are added to Lockpicking. Hard locks continue to be hard to some degree.
4. The game isn't meant to just become easy by applying a couple talent points here and there to make all your talent checks happen like an easy breeze. You have to make hard choices about where to spend your points, and that's part of what makes the game interesting. If you don't like it, you could always cheat using the in-game cheatbook. But for those of us who enjoy playing a challenging game, we like it how it is, thank you very much. Have fun cheating if that's what makes you happy.
December will continue the orc village.
Shortened. I forget by how much, but it's not that long, maybe a month or two.