Fantasy RPG Design Draft Update

A Grim world of Perilous Game Design:

Okay, so I've got around twelve pages of a design draft for this thing I've been tinkering with.  Right now, it is a bit of a Frankengame (see here), but I keep drifting things so that (hopefully) I end up with something that isn't totally derivative.  That said, I'm also not trying to reinvent the wheel with this game--it is both mechanically and content wise a homage to those games of the past that I have loved.  It just brews them into a slightly different package.  I've no illusions that the world wants or needs ANOTHER fantasy roleplaying game, but I've always wanted to do this for my own satisfaction.  So far it has been fun.  The pain will come later I suspect.  So, what's next?

Once, I do another pass or two on the design draft my next goal would be to play the game to see how it runs.  I'll post about that after it happens, but it may be a while as my group is finishing up this fifteen month Amber campaign that we've been playing.  After I play the game, I have to do some serious thinking about where I'd like to go next.  Do I try to develop this into a coherent game text?  Doing so would mean some serious writing as I could see the design draft expanding to eighty or a hundred pages once everything is explained so that other people could play and run the game.

One of the other things I do want to include is some kind of beastiary, but I haven't even turned my mind to that yet.

There will be a setting in the game, but it is my intention that as with Chaosium's Runequest the game could easily be adapted to your own dark fantasy campaign world.  The world right now is a mix of old school Warhammer, Ravenloft, A Song of Ice and Fire, and real world gritty medieval.  However, the imagined playstyle the game supports is a semi-sandbox that the players can wander around in, and there will be concrete advice on how to set up this up.  When I say semi-sandbox I mean that the map space the characters wander around in will have opportunities for the characters to use their skills, attain a bit of gold, and even achieve personal goals--it isn't exactly the pure sandbox of old school D&D, but it is a close relative.  I'm not interested in a "missions" or railroads as that's not usually a playstyle I particularly enjoy (Uther-period Pendragon being a notable exception).