I think using a raycasting engine is a little ambitious for the game as it stands right now. I will probably go with a top-down, 2D-ish look; a decision which was strengthened by finding a beautiful set of free tiles. I am not an artist, so resources like this are a big help.
I am currently putting together the town generator. I have an exhaustive list of goods available in my little world, and I spent some time last night going over a map of Ukraine, looking at hundreds of towns and breaking down the names into prefixes, suffixes and roots. A little more work and I should have a working demo of the town generator ready by this weekend.
The algorithms I use to generate the names will give me the practice I need to add the rest of the detail to the towns: Size, wealth, political leanings, adherence to The Law, specialities, unique items, and the like.
Right now all income will be purely based on trade, and any goods aquired through random encounters between towns. No item creation at this point. No hunting, no fishing, no foraging, no farming. Only trading. If, at the end of summer, I have made good enough progress that I feel I can add new features, then I may reconsider this position, but for right now I want to get something up and running by the end of the month. And that means keeping everything simple.
I can't wait to see what you have for randomization. I was working on some relatively complex galaxy randomizers for my old space RPG, which I kind of want to return to.