Working on The Necklace - Map Generation

Klax and I worked a lot more on the Necklace last night, on setting generation tables. We came up with a sweet method to generate maps of the local area. Set a center point in the middle of apiece of paper. This is most likely a settlement of some kind, but could be anything - a wreck, an asteroid, some godforsaken mat on the River, whatever. It's Where You Are Now. Roll on the main table, take the result - say Rock in the River, meaning an asteroid that has been lodged in the river, making an island - and then roll 1d100. This tells you how far away from the center it is. Go along the river, up or downstream, and put in the a symbol for the rock and a note "Rock" and the distance, like "Rock (54)". Roll again and do the same thing - say "Jungle Ball (27)". Put a symbol for the Jungle Ball approximately 26 units away from the center, away from the River, floating in air. Continue until your local area map fills up to your satisfaction.

Now for each setting element, roll on the proper sub table. So, for "Rock (54)", roll on the Rock in the River table. You roll up a result of "Carnivale Settlement", then the size of the rock (large) the composition of the rock (Nickel-Iron), and the vegetation (forest). For settlements, there is a further sub-table appropriate to the culture (Carnivale) you can roll on to define things further. Say it turns out to be a Large Carnivale town, with a fishing fleet, river port, and mine. There's a cultural sub-table you can use to create the specific Carnivale culture - because Carnivale tech level is so low, each town or village can be wildly different from its neighbors.

The distances you roll are undefined, and you can define them. Travel time is a good way to define things, say the number of hours it takes to get there, and that would depend greatly on the method you use to travel. A fusion jet airship travels a lot faster than a riverboat, which travels a lot faster than a dugout canoe. You could also define the units as kilometers, or days of travel, or whatever. It's all relative.