Well, being that my first attempts at a fairly geographically sound world are failing with bryce and ps, i thought i'd open up the floor to suggestion from others.. since it seems many of your know a hell of a lot more about fractals and all such tools. I guess i'll start with what i'm looking for, then let people suggest programs/methods i may get them...

Basically i'm looking to create my entire realm with elevations, and use ArcGIS and raster imaging to do a whole lot of analysis for vegitation, animals, cultures, etc... I'm not to enamoured with fractals (at least my understanding of them) because it seems to be just a random generator for hight maps, where as i'm looking for something thats a bit more geographically sound... such as continental shift, volcanes, and plently of erosion to find out rivers and such. I'd like the results to be anything that can be imported into ArcGIS, the main ones are raster (jpg) or DEM... Since this is sort of a one time thing, as in i won't use it enough for me to justify spending money on purchasing a program, i'd like to be able to do this with freeware or a demo/limited product... resolution is also quite important, since the results in arcGIS will look better the higher the resolution... I've already had tonnes of helm from su_liam and others, but i thought throwing out these questions in a new thread will help get more suggestions (and possibly debate). (and remember i'm a noob to world design, so even though i may know a bit about geographical stuff, i've never really created a world with fractals and such)

Thanks all, i know if any forum anywhere could answer this question its you guys