I read a lot of fantasy and I've always been bothered by the decidedly bad maps found in the frontispiece of most of them. I wonder if there is a method to go from gross features to a polygonal 'state' and then forward again?

You mean to lay out things roughly, then 'fuzz' it to look more natural? Maybe if you hand-draw the original polygons and biomes, then use his noise algorithms from the end of the article.

Good stuff about laying out maps/levels; harder to see how it would guide 3D rendering or game mechanics.

Here's the 3D demo in Flash: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/... (click '3D Slopes')

that's really neat. as far as i can tell, though, it doesn't describe where people live. that seems like it might be an interesting function of the details already present (access, water, vegetation, climate...)