Okay, Nek'rahm asked me to take a look at the blend file, and try to help do some things with it to give you guys a better idea of the lay out and the terrain.
I took a look at the file. The concept sketch has a lot of merit, and the initial blend geometry does help to give you a basic idea.
However, the scale was way too small. Anyone linking in would find themselves a giant with the islands about as big a dirt clods in a puddle.
So I scaled it up quite a bit. The problem with this is that the initial terrain meshes are very coarse. In order to have you terrain look good, the mesh itself has comprise of many faces, so that you can manipulate them and make the mountainous islands look more natural.
I tried subdividing the meshes, and was able to make them look a little bit more realistic, especially after enabling smoothing, but as you'll see in the pics, the peaks and edges still look too sharp and jagged.
What I recomend, is that the terrain be remade, using either a terrain editor, and then imported into the blend file, or to resculpt the terrain here. This will make the mesh look much more natural.
Textures in here, I simply threw in some textures quickly, including a sky dome and some light, so I could link in and take pics.
The texture suggested was something that looks like the volcano in the cleft. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done. The textures used in the cleft and on the volcano are a blend of several texture, not just one, and it takes quite a bit of time to get it just right and looking good. This was time that I didn't have right now, so I simply used one of Trylon's rock textures, and made it more orangy looking.
Same for the water. It's just a basic water texture, but as you can see, it's transparent! hehehe, sorry about that, I'm so used to making the water transparent that I did it without thinking. Normally it would be more opaque so that you can't see the mesh of the islands under the water!
One last suggestion: From what I understand, this Age is to be on the huge side, with travel to the other Islands possible. When an Age starts to get that big, it can be very hard to handle, and putting in more and more detail difficult.
I would recommend splitting the age up in to several prp files. This is what is done with huge Ages.
Okay, here's few shots of me messing around with it:
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