I'm a big fan of rogue-like mechanics in general and they can be a lot of fun in EQ. I actually had a server similar to this some years ago. It never got any significant population, but there were some die-hard players who really explored the concept to its fullest and we all had a good time of it.
I modelled mine after Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, which is one of many really good rogue-likes out there. Part of the random loot distribution included a variety of weapons with diverse procs (or brands, as they're described in DCSS). To pull these off we chose an appropriate spell and cranked the proc rate up so that your weapon was going off all of the time.
We also had wands, which were basically 5-10 charge clickies that could be instantly cast. Some of these included AoE spells so the caster could meet a quick end if they tried to blast the more powerful wands at close range.
I attempted managing hunger and thirst but aside from being a boring and annoying mechanic, it was a pain to keep it synced with the client.
If you're trying to work with the existing world you might also think about innate racial abilities to spice things up. We found that it was very enjoyable to see yourself rise to power quickly but still keep the possibility of dying horribly at the hands of a new or unknown foe.
Basically our thinking was to make a spell set with the racial abilities we wanted per race that we wanted to augment. You might want a slam for ogres that has a mean knockback, incrementally nasty poisons on all snakes, maybe a bleed dot for lions, etc.
From there I would use a script to hook the spell sets up to any NPC without an existing spell set that has a matching race.
Alas, I digress. I don't mean to hijack your thread or anything, but I would love to see a server like this really become established and get some polish so I figured I would share some of what we tried and intended to try.
Good luck and keep up the good work!
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