Thanks for the note.
Feel free to post your suggestions... I have a series of books which was started back around the turn of the century. Ten of the Eleven book series is now public domain, so I can use anything I want from the series.
It's a fantastic world in which swordplay is the dominant trade for everyone on the planet. There is no magic. The environment is a desert planet with ancient cities and ferocious nomad tribes and beasts. Some pockets of the world contain swamps and forested valleys. There are various races of humans divided into civilized nations with capitol cities.
I'll try to use existing EQ city zones for the capitol cities and palaces. I'll try to use the multiple desert zones to create a vast desert world. Some of the dungeons will be used, too, for interiors of cities and caverns described in the books. I'm thinking that I can modify the ocean zones, too, to remove the layer of water (and movement characteristics associated with water) to create giant desert zones.
I think I'll limit the game to two classes, human warrior and a hybrid human warrior-healer. The healing aspect will be more skill based and dependent upon agents, such as salves and bandages, etc. I was thinking of modifying the warrior to add the monk's mend skill and the warrior-healer would have salves with the various heal spells, minor, light, healing, gheal, complete heal. The ability to apply salves, and the appropriate level of heal "spell", would be dependent upon the character's skill level and agents acquired. Much like current cleric armor buffs use gems.
Much of the fauna and flora in the EQ game would have to be modified to fit the books. That will mean figuring out how to get zone specific mobs modified (physically) and usable in other zones. Some of the zones would have to be modified, too, to get rid of iksar statues and other items that just don't fit.
Trumpcard mentioned, above, that any changes to EQ files, such as zones, PCs, NPCs, would have to be available for download. If I pull everything together I envision, it looks like much of the game will have to be downloaded and installed, which may prove tricky to support. I believe I will use the 4.3 version of EQEmu and Drawde's world data, to start, modifying the database significantly as the project moves forward.
At any rate, I'd be glad to chat about the new content project with anyone. Just email me at
arley.mcfarley@spils.com and I'll try to keep up with the email.
Obviously, I have alot of research to do relevant to world-building. I've seen a lot of good information in this forum. I may end up posting problems I run across to the world-building forum to see if developers have any insight.
At this point, I'm just pulling together maps, mob and NPC information from the ebook texts of this series. Once I have the project layed out, I'll likely build an impromptu website to post status, the public domain ebooks, etc.
Thanks for the encouragement!
Arley