Nothing you've tried will do any good. Except the old world part, that's a must.
In advanced world generation you need to increase the amount of secrets in the world.
To do that you go into data/init/world_gen.txt
From there you pick whatever type of world you want large region, large island, medium region, medium island, and etc. Probably should just go with a Small Island world in these versions right now for FPS. Then copy and paste all of the parameters for that type then rename it to whatever you want (My Small Island). Then you can access it from the ingame advanced world gen and create it. No need to worry about all the other extra stuff on the world gen screen and seeds, only mess with the text file.
From there you just find the Secrets_Number parameter and increase its number by half or so. After that, you will get more knowledge of necromancy starting in the world. Given enough history, towers should pop up. As long as there are evil races alive to do necromancy.
You will also want to customize the world further if you want to add more volcanoes, make it more savage, or add more metals. For minerals, the best setting I've had for mineral_scarcity has been just 100. That is if you want tons of metal showing up in the world along with flux. You can find more info about this on the wiki. Changing the number of werebeasts, titans, and megabeasts makes things more fun too. If you make it too high, civilizations get totally destroyed early in history, leading to a dead world.