Yeah, a drop shadow on coastlines this way just makes the land look 'cut out' and like it's hovering over the water. For me, the distinction between your handdrawn elements and the digitally drawn ones is one of rough vs. razor-sharp / precise. That's jarring - your own elements have me thinking "yeah, guy with quill pen drew this". The subtly uneven font continues that thought. Then there's the outer border in all its digital precision. Then there's the faded area you use to set off the labels - effective, but think "how would a period cartographer do this, with <whatever>th century materials?" I'm thinking a work like a map would be such a big investment of time that the cartographer might plan out his area-symbology (mountains, forests, etc) so he wouldn't have to remove any to put in a label.

Drawing your own aymbols is great, and these look good. If imperfect, think "so the guy I'm role-playing isn't a master level mapper - so what? He still got the royal charter / publication contract / sixteen shekels from that adventuring party ..." <pick your rationale> However, there's a danger in drawing and scanning, in that you tend to think of them as vector art that can be infinitely zoomed in or out. And t'ain't so. The littler lines on your trees make me think you reduced them, with respect to the mountain and settlement symbols. That creates a subtle mismatch that drags down your realism. One's symbols work better if all were drawn at a similar scale. Same for fonts - irregularities that look fine at a middle size go all wierd at large title-size -- why would a 0.1-mm hand-shakiness scale up to a 1mm shakiness on a title - the importance of which by all rights would make the limnist *more* careful, not less. Same way in reverse for any tiny labels - the same font scaled down to a smaller point size looks sharper, more precise as those artificial wiggles get tinier. There's no good solution with fonts, unless you do your own irregularizing, or unless you find a font whose point sizes actually have different-scale irregularities... I'm betting the run-of-the mill free fonts from dafont.com aren't going to be that sophisticated. You can always use different fonts for drastically different sized labels to somewhat get around that effect. I do not know how one would go about applying the subtle level of distressing it would take to make different font size labels all have the same (-ish) wobbliness.

By the way, you owe that in-character cartographer a beer, for making him do *all*those*trees*...

The national symbology, of color washes that intensify gradually up to an exact correspondence with those digitally-drawn coastlines is another digital vs. manual mismatch. If one is going to do anything remotely watercolor-like on a period map, one can hugely improve the believability by introducing IMperfections. Let the land color slop over a teensy bit onto the sea, and vice versa. You see this all the time with meticulously engraved maps of old, which were then hand-tinted by obviously less-skilled colorists. Even manually following your drawn coastline with a manually (Wacom I mean, not feature-of-software exact following so many pixels offset, yadda, yadda) done color can give a great effect.

Freedom to goof up a little - maybe even speed up our process (depending on how laborious those edge-matching workflow steps are for you) - that's a bonus!

Don't get me wrong, it's a good map already _ we're just making betterment suggestions. Oh, and kudos for jumping right in with useful (pleasant!) contribution - I call any new member who puts a map in their first post worthy of a dab of rep just for that! So welcome - and if you're willing, show us more of this, honed & improved. Or something else - we're nondiscriminating in our greediness to see new good stuff :-).