K, so here's latest effort:

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layer with some rough blobs of darkish green where I wanted my foresty bits to be, then added some noise (2% gaussian m/c) and used directional light x2 and diffuse darken only.

just as an aside, my intention is for the scale of the map to be around 150 - 200 miles across the lat-long squares, so the country should be a bit bigger than say France.

The red borders are going to denote province edges (each ruled by a particular scheming noble family), so I put my forests mostly in the low lands and near rivers etc, then "cut them back" away from province centers and the larger rivers where I'm going to position towns and cities etc..

I'll probably play around with the locations and densities as I start to flesh out the population centers but I'm reasonably happy with the look of the forest itself.

..what do you guys think, does it work?