If you haven't yet, check out inform7.com. It's a free system for developing text adventures, with a sweet GUI IDE (cross platform Win/Mac/Gnome) and a language

If you haven't yet, check out inform7.com. It's a free system for developing text adventures, with a sweet GUI IDE (cross platform Win/Mac/Gnome) and a language that's similar to English yet has interesting support for relationships between game items. (ie, you can define a relationship of 'loathing' between characters that influences reactions.) It can compile to the same format as the old Infocom games, or to glulx, a new format by Andrew Plotkin (the guy this thread is about) that allows for bigger games.