I've been impressed  with the [Motsognir gopher  server][0].  It was
almost a drop-in replacement for gophernicus, which I had been using
for  my  [RPG  gopher  site][1].  It  supports  the  same  features,
including executing programs from gophermaps and CGIs, both of which
I was using. There are three major differences I can see:

1. Motsognir runs as a daemon, not as an inetd service.

2. Motsognir has a separate config file versus command line switches
  in the case of gophernicus.

3. To display text in a gophermap (or other type-1 resource), you
  need to use the inline selector type 'i'.

The first  allowed me to run  two different gopher servers,  each on
its own IP address on one  host. The Motsognir manual has some clear
instructions on how to do this. So  I can host both this site and my
RPG site on the  same server (This is similar to how  we all used to
run multiple  SSL-enabled websites  before SNI was  widespread). The
drawback is,  of course, that you  need a static IP  for each gopher
instance. I was  just honest with my hosting provider  that I wanted
an extra IP for gopher, and they  gave it to me.  This is far better
than the  gophernicus virtual  hosting hack (which  I think  may not
even be supported in the latest releases), which I experimented with
but was too clunky to use in practice.

The  second  is  much  nicer,   IMO,  using  a  config  file  versus
switches. It  allows for  pretty generic  startup scripts  and makes
backup of settings  easier. There are also more  options as compared
to gophernicus.

The last  is a bit of  an annoyance, but  it is in keeping  with the
gopher RFC,  and it prevents a  common class of bugs  I've seen when
text is dumped  into a gophermap or type-1 text  file (commonly used
to enable embedded  linking in text documents) - that  is, if a line
starts  with  a  selector  letter,  like  'h'  for  example,  it  is
interpreted as  a selector for that  type, rather than as  raw text,
and your text block gets garbled. The 'i' makes it explicit.

ASCII art in a gophermap takes some  care now, you have to paste the
art in, and  then use your editor  to prefix each line  with the 'i'
afterwards. Actually, I found it's easier  to do this in all cases -
so I edit  my gophermaps as if they were  gophernicus-style, and add
the 'i' prefixes when I am done using a simple regexp find/replace.

[0]: gopher://gopher.viste.fr/1/projects/motsognir/
[1]: gopher://gopher.smolderingwizard.com