Alone on a Map by Kaden Ramstack
A cartographer is tasked with mapping the landmarks of the entire known world (note: I made a few changes to the rules; see the notes at the end for more info).
This peninsula used to be riven with tunnels where sea- and river-water dissolved the ancient limestone, leaving behind sunken natural catacombs we could navigate freely. However, in recent generations the karst has collapsed, vent by vent, cenote by cenote, cavern by cavern. The cliffs are crumbling into the interface and soon only the mountains will be left.
The court's favoured summer palace lies in this well-warded and -guarded lagoon, from which dancing lights can be seen across the interface.
The earth drops off not far from the summer palace, leading down to a vast and lethal lake of brine. It is a matter of historical record that members of the court or even the royal brood have occasionally wandered from the summer palace while under the influence of alcohol, and other pleasures, and unthinkingly drowned themselves in the lake below. Some speculate they may have committed suicide instead. Either way, this is a sadly-common affliction of the royal bloodline.
The court's favoured winter palace perches on the caldera of this volcano. The palace must be rebuilt every year at great material and labour expense, as the volcano grows and exhales and quivers, and shakes the palace to pieces. Given the pace of its growth, it is estimated that the volcano rim will breach the interface within five generations from now.
This archipelago of atolls has long been used by both us and our forebears as a prison for the unpacifiable, undesirable, and unmentionable. However, the seas have been slowly rising, and we no longer know who's trapped in these rings of sand, who will be emerging to take vengeance on us, or if they'll even be like us any more.
The kelp here is strung up by hardy life-glowing beacon sacs. Our noble farmers have tempered these through their mastery of agriculture and now this forest overflows with life and light. The wildlife in this place has reacted with fear and aggression, but the queen's naturalists believe these pests can be driven off with dedicated, around-the-clock labour.
Great engines and shattered steel. Skeletons line the corridors in disarray, but picked clean by crabs and squid. Whoever brought this here has much to answer for: Its cracked heart bleeds light and heat into the water and it is poisoning and transforming everything that lives here. The problem is—where did they come from, and how do we bring them from there before the royal court? We think it arrived through the interface, but we need more evidence.
None who live here know how deep this abyss reaches. However, it's an easy place to dispose of the worthless remains of our dead, when the scales and muscles and gills are stripped from their bodies. Gods only know what feasts on the bones and cartilage and ligaments that pile up at the bottom of the pit.
An experiment of the court botanist—air-dwelling plants that dwell also in the water. The root galls are a more reliable source of ink than octopi, and less likely to bite or strangle the farmers. Our queen has even expressed interest in the garish fruit that sometimes drop through the interface.
A vast brine lake looping around a bountiful island and whose lakebed is encrusted with the most precious of metals and gems, trapped under half a mile of deadly salt.
The last piece of truly ungoverned wilderness in the royal domain. Only nomads and bandits live here, and sometimes—despite the queen generously reserving seabed and a fraction of the water column for them—sometimes the nomads themselves become bandits.
A feat of engineering of a scale and complexity seen nowhere else in the world. This is a vast and expertly-hewn trench with exquisite ornamentation leading from the frontier to the reservation. There are valuable minerals below the lake, and warmonger tribes in the wilderness. Displacing the brine from the one to the other is an elegant solution to both problems. The only problem is the constant threat of nomad raids and the cost of our reprisals upon them.
I went kinda heavy-handed, but hey.
Before actually writing anything I set up 12 landmarks (rolled for coordinates, drew cards and flipped coins for details). What I found is, the card suit mechanic is weird cause it crosses with the coordinate-rolling mechanic. The weird thing specifically is there are two mechanics that can contradict each other. I swapped the card suit stuff and the coinflip mechanic out for these card suit meanings instead:
These aren't mutually exclusive—something could be ancient and artificial—but they're just meant to be another detail to build on, not exclusive categories to slot things into.