Tips for Town and Overworld Design

I'm trying to design a town for my game as well as the accompanying overworld. 

The town is a small village that sprung up from a trading post and an abbey set up for religious pilgrims. The abbey will later become the site of the first dungeon in the game. The town is built next to a volcano of important religious significance, but the villagers themselves aren't terribly religious.

Meanwhile, the entire game takes place on a small island just off the coast of a FAR bigger island, so the village is isolated enough to limit it's growth without limiting trade.

Other areas of significance are a large forest and a mine connecting the volcano with the village. 

Any ideas as to how this world should look? Any tips for making this world look good? And better yet, any images for inspiration?

Could have a large forest surrounding most of the volcano. Then in the more open area next to the volcano could be the town, with a few farms that do well thanks to the fertile soil. A little seperated from the town could be the abbey, which would be even closer to the volcano. From the abbey there would a road leading up to the volcano to a shrine for worship or sacrfiices.

Some basic map lay-out:

This is a basic idea of the layout I've decided to use. If anyone has any ideas on how to improve on this, be my guest.

The upper part of your last picture looks good, but the orient-esque village doesn't fit such an environment. It's usually very hard to justify X different cultures on a tiny island, much more so when they are represented in a region they don't belong to. (In this case forest&hills instead of desert&oasis.

If you're talking about the cities, they're placeholders. If your talking about the thing labelled Qal'at al-Habai, that's a foreign military fortress built by another kingdom in this world, the Surayfi peoples of the Western deserts.

Personally I'd put smaller mountains and or Hills sepearting the two countries, otherwise what stop one from walking over and stabbing someone else?

Or make the Qul'at more hidden inside of trees/canyons, a half secret culture rumoured on the island but seen very rarely.

This is only one island in this VAST kingdom. The kingdom is roughly the size of the British Isles. The Qal'at is more of an embassy. The Surayfis aren't a myth, it's more like uneasy allies. 

The ACTUAL kingdoms are separated by a large sea.

Unless you have good reason, I'd recommend against using such important real-world place names as Ravenna (the capital of Western Rome from 402-476 and location of the Byzantine exarchate from 540-760) and Galilee (region of the Levant, mostly in Israel) unless you really want the strong real-world associations those names have. If you're aware and want those associations, then go for it.

Also, it is doubtful that the Qal'at people would ship the sandstone to build their embassy (especially if the kingdoms are far away). It's more likely that it would be made out of more local materials.

For your first point, the Britannians are a HEAVILY Christian society, while the name St. Ravenna is a name of a person, rather than named after a city. A nearby city is named Ravenwood (a corruption of Ravenna's Wood) and this island is named for her. She's pretty important to the Britannians, namely being the first saint named after they arrived in this fantasy world. Galilee is another sign of the Christian influences.

As for the Qal'at, the Surayfi might... Well, they could've... Maybe they... Stop saying things that make sense.

In short, Rule of Cool must prevail.

You could easily write it off as a show of power.

"We're so great that we will ship tons of our building materials across the ocean rather than using your inferior building materials."