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Wow. Assuming you are telling the truth, your friends are all going to flunk out of law school.
When someone has a registered trademark or copyright and someone illegally uses their IP, damages are PRESUMED. In other words, they would not even be required to prove they suffered economic damages. Whether or not they were damaged would be decided in their favor on summary judgement, and the only question would be "How much?" You would not even be allowed by the court to argue that they were not economically damaged. Depending on how many users your game had at the time they decided to sue you, the damages would start in the thousands and could very easily and quickly climb into the tens of thousands if not worse.
The reason this is such a titanically bad idea is because there is another company (Mythic) that is currently working on a Warhammer MMO. As a result, there is a much more immediate reason for at least two companies (Games Workshop and Mythic) to defend this intellectual property specifically as it pertains to online RPG usage. You couldn't pick a much worse time to be considering making a Warhammer MUD (well, I guess you could wait until the Warhammer MMO is released - then it would be a tad worse).
As an added bonus, Mythic is well aware of the mud community, as they still run a commercial text based mud that is actually listed here on TMS. So it is very unlikely that anyone who made a Warhammer MUD would be able to "fly under the radar" for very long - especially after posting here.
The smart thing you could do would be to email GW and/or Mythic. Then when you get your polite rejection, you can choose a different genre for your mud. The foolish thing to do would be to plunge forward, following the erroneous advice of your "law school friends."
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