GIMP can make random world maps out of the box!

[RPMiller]

The script-fu actually leaves the greyscale heightfield as a layer under the coloured one. You could just use that

But if you've already got FT, it can do this sort of stuff right out of the box, no?

I don't have FT, but random HF generation is pretty basic, even Wilbur does it (and much better than GIMP), and my understanding is that Wilbur was the start code fro a lot of FT.

-Rob A>

Yes, they were developed by the same person.

While FT can do this out of the box, the colors are more aligned to CC and not quite as pretty.

Don't forget with FT you can change the color palette and there is the Gaia view which uses more "typical globe coloring" but doesn't do much with climate.