What kind of mapping software do you use?

[Anders]

Drawing maps can be an integral part of building a world. What software do you prefer? We're really spoiled these days - I can think of three or four alternatives off the top of my head.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

I use Campaign Cartographer with a number of add-ons (Dungeon Designer, Cosmographer, etc.). Lots of power and lots of detail, though there's a non-trivial learning curve.

[Apollonian]

I've been getting a lot of use out of Dungeon Scrawl. It's limited and very simple, it looks good (enough), and it's free. And I can export maps into a format I can use in Fantasy Grounds. For my little dungeon crawling campaign I'm running at the moment, it's working very well.

[RogerBW]

Not quite what people are asking, but when I'm running a game in the real world it's now Viking. I started by using it to keep track of places (e.g. this is not just the X university, it's the place where project Y is happening), but realised I could screen-share it during an on-line game; it has a "ruler" tool which lets me quickly say that Z is five miles away from A (or if I want more detail I can call out to a routeing engine).

Its save format is also easy to parse, so for the current Weird Florida campaign I wrote a converter that spits out a list of OpenStreetMap and Google Street View links.

[sjard]

I use a variety depending on need. Campaign Cartographer, AutoRealm, Dungeon Painter Studio, Illwinters Floorplan Generator, Inkarnate, and occasionally Gimp or even just Paint.

[Whitestreak]

I've been using Campaign Cartographer since about 1998.

As noted above, it does have a steep learning curve, but you can produce some very impressive maps, among other things.

[Celjabba]

-Campaign Cartographer and addons

-Google maps and photoshop
for modern maps

-Shamat
https://shadekeep.com/shamat.html
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=159457
very easy to use.

[mook]

I have and enjoy a staggering amount of Campaign Cartographer content, because they were the first gaming-dedicated mapping software I remember encountering in the ads of "Dragon" magazine, and with enough time and learning it can be used to produce amazing, professional quality maps.

What I actually end up using, though, because they take a fraction of the time but still get me 90% 'as good,' are Wonderdraft (world/overland) and Dungeondraft (dungeons/battlemaps). Fairly cheap, intuitive to use, and look great.

[ericthered]

I use inkscape, which is free and does vector graphics. I use Inkscape for most of my artistic needs period, but its fine for maps. They don't look especially awesome, but they look decent and I can edit and mark them up comparatively easily. I can also pull in stuff I've done for other things, like fantasy soldier faces for wargaming.

[ak_aramis]

I have used CC2, CC3, Cadintosh, Clarisworks/Appleworks, Pages, WordPerfect MacDraw, MacDraft, Hexographer, Dungeonographer, Maptools, and Inkscape.

Some (CW/AW, Pages, WP) by using custom fonts to draw maps.

Hexographer 2 aka Worldographer I have, but haven't needed yet.