Hello all you experts!

I have been building a fantasy world. the World of Rodinia, for about 10 years now. Ever since I began building it I have been using Fractal Mapper by NBOS to make the maps. Even after 10 years I'm a complete numpty when it comes to map making, hence asking for help here.

My world is one great big map in FM8 and if I want to work on a given country I simply zoom into that country and work on it. I often take snap shots of a given country and output to a JPG file which I then upload to my web site and add an HTML map to so that you can use it to browse a map of the country and hot spots will appear to allow you to bring up entries in the 'gazetteer' for that particular place. This works best viewed in IE, but here is an example link: http://www.rodinia.info/map.php?id=4. It's a neat idea and I'm very happy with the way the gazetteer works in general.

However as you can see from the above link, my maps suck.

What I would like to do is to take my existing map and convert all the icons on the map which represent forests, mountains, hills, swamps etc and convert them to textures which I can simply overlay where the terrain is currently. So I'd get a good looking 'mountains texture' and just draw a shape where my mountain range is to be and then delete all the stupid mountain icons I currently have on the map in that location. I think that will make a much neater, smarter looking map. I also want to replace all the town and city icons I'm using with simpler black dots and squares and so on. In fact I'm aiming more for a style of map like this one of Elsir Vale that some professional drew.

This is going to be a HUGE undertaking as my FM* map is massive as you might appreciate. So I'm after a bit of advice if there are any FM8 experts out there.

1. Do you think this is a sensible approach?
2. Can you point me in the direction of cool textures I can use for mountains, forests, etc?
3. Is there any way to automate this process at all?

Many thanks all
Blakey