I definitely agree that Discord's strength is in creating a community, and not as strong as a forum for things like debugging and tech support. Discord can also be overwhelming to people who don't deal with apps all the time like the younger folks do. I don't think there is ever a threat that a Discord community would replace the forums. I think ideally a Discord server becomes a place where people talk and share, and sometimes link back to the forums or create articles out of what comes out of discussions.

That being said, sometimes too much space for community can get people into thinking there isn't as much going on as there should be, and I could see that being an issue when it comes to Discord.

It is also worth mentioning that if a Discord server was ran by the folks on the forums it becomes yet another moderation responsibility and a place to duplicate/sync efforts, which isn't a very efficient usage of their time. The discord server would most likely have to come out of those people who want it to happen.

The Cartographers' Guild has a discord server that can probably be found with a quick Google. It's not active all the time but fairly steady occasional activity.

A lot of people there use photoshop or hand-draw but Campaign Cartographer isn't uncommon to come up either.

The PNG is only pixel data, so you will not be able to turn it back into the various assets, layers, and effects that added up to become that particular pixel or that was totally separate from the pixel next to it.

That being said, you should be able to import the image to a new map by click+drag into the program. If you just need to add a couple symbols it may work - but if you need to add symbols and have them interact with previous symbols in the saved image (such as for shadow boundaries or to have previous symbols partially overlap on the new ones) it might be more of a struggle.

In a way you might be able to pull something off close to what you were aiming for with the January Issue of the 2020 annuals. The color scheme would be drastically different and might have to create a splotchy neon-texture but the overall shapes being made seem similar to me at glance.

Here is my attempt at similar not too long ago:

I mention in a later comment the sheet effects I used. I mostly just remember it took a lot of fiddling with a lot of effects to arrive at the result.

I like it a lot!

I love the city so far! I especially liked how purposeful each placement of building is. One thing that looks a bit odd to me is the straightness of that bottom left line, almost as if the city planner was tired of doing all this and just cut off the boundary of the city sharply. ;)

Just for my own knowledge, historically, I'm curious if building walls out in the water was a thing? I had the assumption that sea-walls would be built directly on the coast, and then since harbors tended to be at sheltered locations, places would float massively heavy chains with barrels between the most outer points of the coastline. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_(navigational_barrier) ) - but I would love examples where walls were built.

Whether historically accurate or not, I think it's pretty cool. I would make up reasons for the walls to be there if I had to in order to include them.

I really like all the different subtle textures of water against the sand and rock.

I don't know my history as well as I should but I just kind of imagine an arthurian age where most people of power are corrupt and everybody knows it but is too fearful to stand up to it, so they purposely keep that fear cycle turning with public displays of punishment. Getting in good with certain officials means you are untouchable, up to the point of your usefulness anyway, so crime is common and it is a risk to even try and prevent it from happening.

Then the players enter.

I would personally layout the map on the 18x12. I would bring the crop marks into CC3, and then when I go to export the PDF for home use I would export a rectangular selection that is only the 17x11 area and when needed for the printers I could do a full export which would include the bleed area and crop marks. This would cut out having to mess with many tools outside of CC3.

What you have works though, I would never blame somebody for not breaking what already works.