Back to that map...

With only a 16% chance of having a settlement in any given hex, I was expecting a big, empty frontier, but I ended up with 56! The breakdown is like this:

Single Dwellings - 12
Thorps - 9
Hamlets - 6
Castles - 8
Villages - 6
Towns - 4
Cities - 5
Ruins - 6

I was pleased how things seemed to spread themselves out, I was nervous I'd get say, 4 big cities all in a row in a swamp or something.

Obviously, I havn't detailed every little thing yet, and probably won't until needed, but I did want to determine the nature of the 5 cities. Rolling the population for these, I got two with 60,000, one with 30,000, one with 20,000, and one with 10,000.

One of the 60k cities, the one down in the southern part of the map, was surrounded by ruined villages, so I decided this would be a theocracy gone mad, devotees of a dark god scouring the countriside for sacrifice. Its far enough from the PC's "home town" that there won't be any immediate prblems to deal with, but close enough that rumors and the occasional spy or refugee may be around to make things interesting.

The next big one (NW area, in the little forest by the lake) ended up being a demihuman city (I gave each only a 5% chance of being non-human, as I wanted a humanocentric world, somewhat Vancian), and my random determination came up being Gnomes! The chart is something like this, btw:
d%
01 Lizardman
02 Dwarf
03 Halfling
04 Gnome
05 Elf
06-99 Human
00 Humanoid

A city of 60k gnomes! Gnomes have always been one of those "meh" races to me, sort of a mish-mash of halfling, dwarf, and elf, the guardian of flower gardens everywhere. But here in this world they are a force to be reckoned with. I decided to make them the "higher order" in this campaign world, filling the role elves normally take. Elven culture would be somewhat dark, off in the shadows, with Gnomes filling the roles of the great loremasters, healers, wizards, and fearsome non-human military. For them, I came up with the "City of Gold and Glass"(enhanced by their powers of illusion, probably), hidden away in its forested ravines, amid several waterfalls running down into their great lake, a sort of Rivendell-meets-Metropolis. As there is a gnome fighter in the party, some of this could actually come into play.

The next biggest city, pop.30k, up in the NE area, kind of out in the open, I decided would be the default "good" city of the area, good being the perception of the city, though its probably more along the lines of Lawful Neutral or even Lawful Evil. At any rate, its the center of humanity's power in this area of the continent.

The 20k city ended up in that big depression up on the top of the map. This fortuitous placement immediate brought to mind a Lost City, of perhaps a Roman level of technology and society, tucked away in their secluded rift, xenophobic to extremes, convinced the outer world is still under the sway of whatever dark cataclysm forced them into exile in the first place.

The last city, population 10k, ended up on the point between two great estuaries in the middle of the map. This, I made my haven of thieves and pirates, a lawless place, a middle ground between the forces of the lawful city to the north, and the chaotic Baalites to the south.

Next I decided to roll up an encounter for each of the 10-15 hexes around Beckshire, and got still more interesting stuff. To be continued...