I have often wondered at the lack of any spiritual successor to KoDP, enough so that in the past I toyed with the idea of trying to make one, being more of an artist and writer than a programmer. Never did it of course.
Then recently I got the idea of making a game based upon the player interacting with NPCs that had complex personalities, something maybe like a political simulation or maybe having more to do with the intrigue around a royal court. The whole thing would be text based, graphics if done at all would be for flavor only.
I searched for the best engine for this type of thing a d came up with the best candidate: Ren'Py. Upon closer inspection, creating a game similar to KoDP with Ren'Py would be quite simple in terms of coding. The significant work would be the writing, art and of course the logic behind the branching nature of events. There is even a dating sm framework for ren'py that looks like it would be easy to convert into the personality and event handling for the game.
Most, if not all of the game could be handled with Ren'Py and for anything else it has full access to python and pygame.
Dwarf Fortress spinoff anyone using story events written/drawn by forum members? I would scream with glee if that happened.