[Atyreus]

Another option worth looking at if you are aiming to create an LP-style mud is Genesis/ColdC. ColdC works like the various flavors of LP in that the game runs on a server (written in C) that provides the socket protocols and script interpretation engine, and leaves everything else to be put together using the scripting language (ColdC). It, thus, has the same advantages of coding in LPC - shorter development time, the ability to make significant changes without recompiling or rebooting, a stable interpreter which can absorb errors without crashing the game. Unlike LPC (except for the more advanced DGD), ColdC also allows you to make changes to objects which will propogate down through all its descendents without requiring them to be destroyed and recreated (it is also, unlike most flavors of LPC, the default behavior in ColdC for objects to persist over crashes and reboots). ColdC also provides a bit more control over low-level aspects of the game, giving you more control over the handling of sockets, and the parsing of incoming text, and the integration of MXP or other in-band or out-of-band protocols.

On the downside, I don't believe anyone is actively maintaining the Genesis server (though it's stable release is very stable), the documentation is minimal and assumes some programming experience, and the configuration script that ships with it sometimes needs to be kicked and prodded on some flavors of Linux.