This is perhaps an odd question but I wanted to ask if you were at all inspired by Steve Jackson's Sorcery! games for the battle mechanic in Carillon. I just found out about those games and they immediately reminded me of your game
Not an odd question at all! While I am a Steve Jackson fan, I wasn't aware of the Sorcery! books when I was developing Carillon, but I can definitely see the commonalities. The primary inspiration for Carillon's navigational system was MUDs and text adventure games, and Sorcery! was a direct analog parallel to those.
As for Carillon's battle mechanics, those mostly came from IRL experience as a fencer. The rock/paper/scissors of attack/parry/feint always struck me as good material for a game mechanic, and I'd been experimenting with it for a while (an early 2p version had players placing their actions on a tic-tac-toe grid). The fencing game Nidhogg was the other major influence, which I think shows a bit more in the original 2018 build of Carillon:
