This is something I've been fiddling with for the past several days.

Years ago I made a freebie pack of Materials for Poser 6: Terus IV Geological Dig P6 Mat
I now have Poser 10, and thought about installing them and seeing what they'd look like applied to a Hi-Res Ball (Poser Primitive Prop). I was wondering if they'd make interesting planets for a map...
One of them had some definite possibilities, and after doing a little tweaking, I came up with some settings that looked like landmasses.

It's been difficult figuring out how to tweak the settings to get the results I want (and I still haven't completely got it down yet), but I've had a few good results.
And rather than planets for a space/universe map, this looks like something that could be applied to a Fantasy world/regional map (just... not flat).

Click image for larger version.  Name: Poser 10 Planet Test by Neyjour.png  Views: 95  Size: 1.21 MB  ID: 85505

The one on the left is made entirely in the Material Room, and rendered with displacement.
I've been marathon'ing the Vampire Diaries for the umpteenth time ( ) to pass the time and lessen the tedium of waiting for all these tests to render (displacement takes foreeeeever).

The one on the right is just a very quick test to see what it might look like, on its way to becoming an actual planet view for a map.
The ocean is a couple different textures applied (and rendered) individually to the same Hi-Res Ball, and then blended a bit in PaintShop Pro X7.
The black from the original "landmass" render was removed (along with a few islands/continents), placed over the ocean, and then manipulated a bit with a base texture, multiple layers (and different layer modes), dropshadows, etc.
And then I added a quick planet shadow.

I think it has some nice possibilities for map making, so if anyone has Poser and is interested, let me know and I can post some screenshots of the Material Room and Render settings.

What I like most about this is the 3D "stick up off the globe" mountains.
If course, if you just wanted flat landmasses, you would simply set the displacement to zero (and save yourself a hell of a lot of rendering time).
And with some proper texturing of the landmasses, it would look much better. Or, simply smoothing out some (or all) of the lumpy mountains on the front-facing continents, if you wanted to make it an all-ice planet/terrain.