Thanks all for the kind words and also for the pointers.

"The mountains....i'm not sure. I like them, and I don;t....need to think on those."

"Now for the brickbats. Some of the mountains (such as the Grimious Faces) are a bit to "striated" for my tastes. I'm not sure how you would do it, but any method that breaks up the lines and made the range look more "moutainy" would be good."

"The the mountians have this long straight ridge that I'm not used to thinking of in mountians. That might be what is making people step back from them."

Mountains are something I need to work a lot more on. I am still struggling to get the right look. On the other hand I think actually looking at mountains from above revelas something we dont often contemplate when we do fantasy mapping. It is often extremely difficult to make out peaks from above. What looks like a row of separate peaks from the ground often looks more like a ridge from above.

"How did you bring it into GIMP from Inkscape? As SVG paths or as an exported bitmap?"

I save it as an SVG path and then just opened it in Gimp and added the whole thing as a layer.

"You might also wish to brighten up some of the map features (such as the forests, mountains and steppes). I have no desire for your map to look like a cartoon, but some of the features seem a bit muted, perhaps overly so."

"I love your muted colors. I'd be worried if I ever tried to print them, but since none of them push to the edge of the CMYK color gamut, they should work well enough."

I tend towards more muted colours. I'm not sure why but it just seems easier on the eye. Maybe it allows the eye to be drawn more easily to the labels and key features.

"Are you going to use this for a campaign?"

No, I dont have a campaign in mind. It really was a practise. I havn't done much with labels and particularly a map thats really crowded with them, so I just wanted to take it to that stage. If anyone wants to use it for their campaign they are absolutely welcome.

Thanks again.

Torq