oklabsoft
a bit too much lo and unto thee bible speak but killing an uppity worm is a good enough reason to go crawl some dungeons. i hope all those worms show up as bosses and that you can steal shit from them with your party thief.
what're you thinking of doing regarding racial attributes, modifiers and class attenuations, if anything, btw? the more layers the better. race, primary attributes, skills (either class skills, racial skills, or generalised skills, or any combination of them all), secondary attributes (if any, but this can be a catch-all category for misc. options for the player that are dependant on character and party composition), etc.
what type of spell system are you thinking of using? Wiz-style vancian casting or something else?
you ever given thought to borrowing some already-done ideas in previous Wiz-clones such as implementing racial affinities (wizardry empire series) where each race has a +1, +2, -1 and -2, or "0", disposition modifier towards another race
and their Alignment, so that if you for example fill a party with half-devils they they'll sport a -1 affinity penalty, and then (in the wiz empire games) the sum total of pluses/minuses is calculated and a Party Affinity Rating is given to the player's party and this modifier can end up being a -1, a +2, a -2, a +3, etc, and that number is then added (or substracted) to every character's primary attributes!
obviously i'm not saying you should copy or even implement that system just letting you know about it as it's something (that i know of) no other turn-based dungeon crawler has done before.
as for classes: how are you gonna do them? are you thinking of using "sub-classes" that co-exist with the original class of the character or something different?
but... the absolute most important question I want to ask you: are you planning on using the Wizardry style loot-by-floor and tier system?
IMO one of classic Wizardry's greatest strengths that has stood the test of time is the fact that treasure chests appear after you defeat the enemy, but they are
not tied to that enemy nor any enemy group; instead in Wizardry each dungeon floor has 3 different "tiers" (common / uncommon / rare) and those 3 tiers are meticulously hand-picked by the designers, such that
there is no random loot in Wizardry, and then each
dungeon floor is assigned 3 tiers of chests which will drop after battle.
the type of enemy fought has absolutely zero bearing on what tier of loot drops, or if a drop happens at all, as that happens only via "fixed encounters". Even though wizardry features random battles and random encounters the ingenious design of the first 5 scenarios and the later japanese-developed Wizardry games is that the treasure chests (loot) is gated by encounters
that are not random, and these encounters can "farmed" via various ways (exiting and re-entering that dungeon floor being the most common), however they take care to place "fixed encounters" where appropriate and they always make sure that they matter beyond the fact that they drop chests.
random encounters serve a different purpose (in earlier scenarios) where instead of dropping chests (although there is like a 0.2 % chance of them doing so in a few of the scenarios) instead the random encounters have a random chance to be "friendly" and this provides the player with the opportunity to choose to fight the enemies or to leave them in peace; an incredibly simple mechanic that functions as a way of keeping the character alignments (and thus party alignments) constantly fluid throughout the cours eof the entire game.
you can expound on these concepts and make them your own as they are such simple, and such elegant game design decisions that while seemingly simplistic serve to dovetail infinitesimally throughout every single mechanical layer that the games are providing.
The fact that loot is tied to floors in Wizardry (and thus Elminage, and many other Wiz-clones) means that there will
always be a valid reason for the player's band adventurers to continue exploring further deeper into the dungeon as the lure of danker loot (and more dangerous encounters, more difficult puzzles and more extravagant navigational challenges) will always be just one floor away.
Some people mistakenly think Wizardry and its clones utilize "random loot" but it absolutely does not, which is why I wanted to explain how the loot systems work, and also in the off chance you didn't know about it to give you food for thought as it's one of the most simple and elegant ways to design a naturally symbiotic itemization map of progression for the player and the game.
Games that allow every enemy to drop all that they were carrying, when not handled well (OBlivion, Skyrim, etc) will lead to haphazard itemization (being generous here) and when treasures are made as literal random drops from random encounters (Grimoire, StarCrawlerz, many more, etc) then it can easily lead to "yay, more random junk" syndrome for the player.
itemization is one of the most difficult things to implement well in an RPG and I think studying how Wizardry 1-5 and Wiz Empire and Elminage series of games do it will most definitely serve as creative inspiration for anybody, as 30+ years onwards and there is
still no other RPG that has managed to make a better skinner-box implementation than Wizardry and its legions of clones.
TL;DR: you should post about the nitty gritty stuff you want to implement, hehe; as for example I'd love to know what the primary attributes and char. class are for those wurms.