Thanks to you I now have a really clear idea of what the game should be like and how it would have to be implemented.
Freak Circus will be a game built around mutations. It's the only form of character advancement and will be the center of gameplay. Nearly everything will either be dependent on or will effect the structure on your body. I'm a bit unclear of the goal of the game, but I think about putting in a story generator when the rest of the game is done.
Bodys will be represented as I described in my starting post, with a few changes of course. The neat part is, to represent items in the same way. This way, you will get to use anything you may find in any way the game allows you with anything else - this means, you can wield them with one of your grabbing bodyparts, eat them, take them apart (which might be useless at a basic level) or just throw them away.
Monsters and you yourself will just be an interface to an AI/the player and a bodystructure. Items will be just a reference to a bodystructure. This way I can do the whole corpses-thing just with reattaching the monster-body to an item.
An additional system, which should be easy with CL, would be parsing bodystructures into a (genetic) code, which would in turn be used to determine preferences for certain mutations. It will be harder to come up with a good system, when it should come into the game.
Then eating could lead to copy genetic codes out of the eaten parts and include them into the genetic code in a random mode (overwriting strands, placing between strands, at the beginning or the end... Function passing seems like a good way of doing this). To get desired traits, you would eat limbs which have the desired trait and in this way enhance the chance of getting this trait hen mutation gets triggered. You are what you eat.
This is the basic system. I've got some ideas about style and story generation in mind, but they aren't so much related to the topic and the last one will presumably be pretty hard to do.
