I'm not sure I quite understand how to glow the borders like you described, but I'm guessing this mega blur thing yields bolder edges than other blurs and I need to use layers and opacity?

Anyway, pertaining to the terrain stuff, the issue I'm having isn't generating terrain - I'm already able to do that easily with Fractal Mapper 8. It's generating topographic lines (not shapes) for rivers and borders in GIMP or Photoshop.