I think the black polygons with an Edge Fade Inner (or blur), followed by a blend mode of either overlay or multiply should be fine. It would be more controllable than other options because you can tweak the opacity on a sheet effect.

Use a black polygon.

TRACED is currently a bit broken.

There is a remedy though, which Joe Slayton put forward in this comment here. Basically you are fixing a bug with CONTOURSM to repair TRACED. So you can get TRACED to work for you if you are willing to do this. I recommend saving a backup of the CC3PlusCfg.xml file before you start.

https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/comment/112508/#Comment_112508

You can do contours if you like, but it's easier just to place the mountains in a line 2-3 mountains wide along the line of the range, starting at the top of the range and working down the map. Then place the hills here and there either side of the mountains to bring the elevation down to ground level more gradually.

Don't worry if you get them slightly out of order with one in front that should be at the back. You can use Sort Symbols in Map in the Symbols menu to sort them into the right order when you've done pasting them. The same applies to forests if you paste them as individual trees.

Once the mountain ranges are done there is a Mountain Background drawing tool you can use to draw a rough shape around them all to put a more rock-coloured texture beneath them.

There are lots of good fills in the Mike Schley overland style. It's got probably the largest range of terrain fills of any overland style. You can see them all if you open the Fill Style Properties dialog by clicking the active fill style in the top bar and then opening the dropbox in the dialog that appears. I think there are somewhere in the range of 25 or so in there, and that's a conservative estimate. You can use fills from other styles as you wish, though it is pretty difficult finding fills that match MS Overland as most are too dark in comparison.

That's a drawing tool. It probably happened if you investigated the Advanced button on the drawing tool dialog, where it is possible to delete drawing tools.

It's not advisable for any of us to upload files here unless it happens to be one of the Profantasy Team doing it. If you do as Julian suggested and run the CC3+ installer again it should offer you a repair option. If it doesn't, please contact Tech Support through your account page. They usually react quicky and are very friendly.

Good work :)

Maybe the coastline can be made thicker, or the most pointy hills shrunk down to miniature size and used as waves? You could draw your own vector symbol waves, or if you have the latest annual issue (Ellis Prybylski Watercolour) there are wave symbols in that one.

You could try a pale transparent shape over the sea to make it fractionally darker than the land, but it might look odd where this is a linework style.

The effect around the labels is a little narrow to separate them from the black detail of the map, but it might be ok if the map is much larger than here.