Yeah, I have my spam folder on automatic view all the time, so it's definitely not appeared here still.

Regardless of any individual requests, this is clearly something rather more major concerning the Newsletter. It's fine for folks in the know who visit the Forum regularly to work out what's happening, but there must be many more who don't - if a Newsletter doesn't arrive, how'd they know?

Yes, the Trace command only works with Drawing Tools (the formal name for what you're calling "terrain tools"; your "drawing tools" are, slightly confusingly, known as Draw Tools - these are the simple lines and shapes), so you need to create a new Drawing Tool if you want to use the command, and the Drawing Tool currently doesn't exist.

If Erdan Worlds won't let you do what you want with the mapping, it's probably best to look around for something that will. 13th Age might be somewhat closer to that example map whose style you want to replicate, for instance as a first suggestion. You're never going to get exact matches for everything, of course (unless the source map's in a style PF already has available that is!), so you need to decide what's most important to preserve, and then work around that.

In terms of the Sheet Effects, like Edge Fade and Edge Fade Inner, or others that may help blend adjacent textures, adjusting the size and strength beyond the presets is always worth trying out. Experimentation is key though, as has been said before re Sheet Effects generally, and trying to advise you "blind" like this isn't really practical. You just need to play around with ideas and see what you think looks good. If you run into specific snags, someone here may well be able to assist.

You might also want to try varying the edges of adjacent terrains, so they're not always simple linear features - not saying to use fractals here, just add some extra curves and variations by-hand (like a weak "jigsaw piece" join, perhaps), nothing very finely-detailed. With a strong enough Effect, you'll not see much of the original shape, and it may help break-up the linear junction a bit more.

The blending in this sample map looks like it could work by adding rounded patches of one of the greens over the top of the other, with a strong Edge Fade Inner Effect on the patches Sheet, for instance.

Wasn't able to get along for yesterday's livestream, so have just been catching-up with the VOD tonight instead. SS6 looking good, and I suspect those circled key numbers especially are going to see a lot of use beyond this set alone!

However, I was shocked to see the Hobbit village didn't make everyone in chat smial 😉...

Oops, yes, I failed to spot the mountains weren't varicolor in the Alyssa Faden style - apologies for that! There is enough variety in the varicolor hills to get those to work as snow-covered mountains though, I think, particularly if you adjust the scaling separately for the X- and Y-axes (which I think you've already done anyway).

Varicolor symbols trend towards being grey or washed-out compared to the full colour versions, because of the way they're converted; I know Sue's been battling to improve this lately, though that won't help with all the older symbols. Eukalyptus' suggestion about adding "blending" polygons around the snowy hills/"mountains" is definitely worth trying; maybe in conjunction with a suitable glow around the symbols. Again, that would need experimentation to try out.

Unfortunately, and possibly because of the age of the Annual issue, the Alyssa Faden symbols don't have a "VH" = very high resolution image version, which is what's creating the "potentially blurred" issue when printing. On prints I've done, they looked OK, but I wasn't printing large areas. Certainly zooming-in to the original CC3+ map, the hills do start to look blurred. This image is a tiny extract at the normal Forum size, set at 300 dpi output resolution:

The hills definitely look "soft", though not too bad with the other symbols and labels for distractions. This may not be good enough for what you want though. The original full map is my Community Atlas "Clack Valley" one (Gallery image link).