First.... wow. Nice, comprehensive worldbuilding there. Is this your first use of Inkscape, or did you already know it? If it's new to you, you're doing great at tackling a new tool.
Second -- immediate kudos for someone who lists peppers as a major natural resource. :-)
Third -- some of the rivers have issues. Put simply, at any one place on the landscape there will only be one direction that's 'lowest', so water will only flow that one way. Any spot where there is more than one lowest direction will be 'corrected' pretty quickly by erosion. So except for fairly rare cases, rivers join but do not split as they go downhill. Outlets from a lake are the same - only one spot will be lowest on a lake's rim, so that outlet will capture all the flow, and any temporary rival streams will lose out. A good reference is Redrobes' excellent How to get your rivers in the right place tutorial. You're in good company to need to think about streamflow to get it believable - my day on CG is not complete unless I've suggested somebody view that how-to :-).
That said, since you already have one major canal in operation -- if you feel like you're stuck with the river network as shown, you could designate a different color for canals, and 'correct' the extra connections by showing some as being man-made. Like one real river flowing out of a lake and several other dug connections to rivers that happen to be nearby. Differentiating the one big existing canal would be good anyway, since right now it takes a text explanation to keep the viewer from going "huh??"
Next - I know what you mean about being dissatisfied with a look that's "too cartoonish"... but what you have going isn't really *bad*. maybe you could be happier with a more subdued set of colors? Or some graduated colors instead of flat, discrete colors? Mind you, using flat colors and crisp outlines to permit output as small .gifs is about the only thing I could call my style, so I approve of what you have... but it has to make YOU happy first :-). If you're improving the elements you are using as symbols, you could benefit from several ongoing or recent threads on hand-drawn elements. The mountains for example aren't [I]bad[/], they're just kind of flat - I bet you could make use of the suggestions on making mountain symbols look more three-dimensional.
Next-th (already lost count - doesn't say much for my attention span) -- the outlining of repeated elements: How about if instead of giving them a background-color outer glow, you give each one a bit of a darker inner glow or border? Not black & bold, so distinct as to look like bits of a child's coloring book; just a pixel or less of somewhat-darker value? I agree the way you have a paper-colored outline looks odd. You're handling the scatter of repeated elements well, by the way.
The distribution of resources is good too - you've resisted the tendency of some to make every nation have equal access to stuff, or at least have something they are each 'rich' in... real (realistic) nations have surpluses and lacks, and that's what causes interesting trade opportunities (not to mention interesting conflicts... ). And face it, some countries are rich and some are poor.
You say this is for a role-play universe -- are players using this for a setting, or are their "characters" the nations themselves? One has to do a good sales job to get average players to accept a nation that has serious lacks - most people want to be biggest and best :-). Personally, in the geofiction games I've played, I have enjoyed playing underdogs.
Speaking of Hai-Etlik :-) if I suggest slapping a latitude/longitude grid or graticule on willy-nilly, I'll get in trouble :-)... but if you *do* want to hold yourself to the implied precision of such an overlay, synchronizing the gridlines with your filter boxes could hide the linear artifacts. Only doable if you have a rectangular projection going on -- unless you get fancy with the shapes of your filter boxes, which would seem to be a bit excessive. For that matter, a locator grid doesn't have to match any particular projection, so long as you make it clear by labeling your axes that that's all it is (say, A,B,C... one way; 1,2,3 the other). But the only reason for a map to have a locator grid is if you have a bunch of scattered items the reader wants to find - or if there's stuff you want to label that would make the map too busy otherwise.
Again - nice work ! I look forward to seeing it progress.
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