WIP - Lischau

[msa]

For the mountains I used a crude handdrawn map with the most important mountains, then I created heigthlines using those information, and finally I used the smudge tool and some blurr to smooth it out and create ridges.

Did you use emboss afterwards? The first map looks like you used emboss to convert the hand drawn topo map to one with shadows. I could be wrong... my eyes aren't that good... but the later one doesn't look embossed.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, the tutorial that discusses how to do mountains with gimp is probably much more lucid than I am.

[Ascension]

I'd say that the mtns are a great start. The forests, tho, look like they have more height than the mtns do. This is bcuz the forests have more variation between dark and light areas. If you could carry that over to the mtns they'd looks pretty nice and deeper. Put a layer of 50% gray on top, set it to overlay, then take out an airbrush and use black to add depth to the valleys, white to add height. You'll have to play around with the opacity settings to determine what you like as well as the size of the airbrush tip.