Rail --
Nice work - and you deserve some rep for a first post with map attached.

Ditto what Jaxilon said - the background of the labels is about all I have suggestions on. By including the labels that go for a swim in the layer that got a coastal glow, you're actually defeating the assumed purpose of making them stand out. Those would show up better with just ocean behind them. The label across the large lake has two difficulties - one, the lack of contrast, but second, its placement begs the question of whether you're labeling the body of water or the territory around it. I guess the territory, based on the font size match with the obvious national labels... but I had to think about it.

Really, any labels crossing from land to water, or light to dark, is tough to pull off. Read the treatise on label placement posted a few days ago (THANK you, Ravells!) ... it is a gold mine. While that master says Never Break Labels Into Multiple Lines, for my money, labeling your Eventine Empire in two lines, all on land, would be more legible than one line, extending out to sea.

Thinking "hand-drawn look", maybe the whole faint outer glow on text could be revisited. If I were doing such a map with pen on parchment, I'd probably outright omit inking of any trees under labels. For that matter I might skip whole trees, not slice them off at some number of pixels' distance. In any case, you'd want to not put an outer glow - at least not land-colored - around the parts of labels that span water. Is that what's going on with Melanrike?

Still, a very nice map!