Some example maps: (Right-Click and Save Target As..)
Central Square, Shagock
Main Strip, Shagock

I guess what I most want are places you'd "go on adventure" in. Settings for quests. Ruins, dungeons, large castles, mountains, canyons. Anything, really. My aversion to people making towns is that theres a lot more involved in making them. Shops need shop nodes placed on all turfs that define the shop. The day/night/any variants of these define what time of day the shop is open. People found in shops that aren't open are considered to be trespassing and may be fined or thrown in prison. There needs to be shop spawn nodes placed for shops to stock themselves with goods.
In order for those to work, they need to be able to reference an "economy". Economies are defined in the code. They're basically just an associative list of how many of each type of something there are in an area. Economies then have producers, products, imports, and exports. Producers create more objects or mobs every day, usually based on the existence of other objects or mobs. Examples: 2 monsters + food = an additional monster, 1 hunter + 3 game animals = 10 meat + 15 furs, 1 especially tough baddie + 5 goodsies = -5 goodsies. Products define a group of objects as related. They are referenced by shop spawns to determine what is available and what can be sold at a shop. Examples: Weapons are sold with ammo and quivers, armor is sold with shields, wands are sold with potions and scrolls. Imports and Exports transport goods between economies, like a cross-economy producer. Example: 1 hunter + 20 meat (in the forest) = 20 meat (to the town) and -20 meat (to the forest), 20 wolves and no food = 5 wolves to the town. There is no distinction between mobs and objs in economies.
There are two ways to spawn mobs into a map (three if you count mobs being spawned as merchandise as in stables and pet stores). The first method is with spawner nodes. There are a few different types of spawner nodes that define different behaviors. A "posted" spawner node, for instance, makes a mob stay on the turf it was spawned at, unless bothered, and return there when things have settled.
The second way of spawning mobs is through "encounters". Encounters are a property of swapmaps. New encounters may be added through the swapmaps interface in the character sheet, or by manually editing the swapmap text files in the save folder, but the prior is easier. Encounters are defined in the code, so if you want to add your own, you'll have to do a bit of fishing. Basically, an encounter is a group of mobs or objs that is spawned randomly on a swapmap. You can define whether they spawn at day or night, or both. A few options can be set, making them behave like "posted" spawn nodes, for example. I have more work to do in this area, too. I want more flavorful encounters, perhaps you stumble upon mobs in a fight (if you spawn mobs that hate each other they'll fight anyways, but I mean with dialog going on) Encounters rely on economies for their mobs and objs. If the economy doesn't have the "supplies" for the encounter, it won't happen.

I hope that answers some questions, if it doesn't raise others.