I've spent a bit of time making a mud (but in C++: [github.com]), then lost steam and abandoned it after I implemented most non-combat stuff. I can't imagine how nasty full multi-player group combat would be to implement, especially with spells, minions and other fancy mechanics. Would be nice to hear about / discuss your challenges as you go along.

Might be worth thinking about a nice design pattern to handle the state changes in character-creation vs in-game. It's kind of a drag because in a MUD the player's input console "state" is always the same: they're in the open world and every line they input performs some action. There's the temptation to just write one-off boilerplate to handle the character creation, but who knows if you need it again later... I ended up being lazy in character creation and forcing the player to write a string of 6 space-separated numbers to choose their stats (obviously with limits) to limit the amount of code I had to write.