I was a real-life cartographer for my first few years out of college in the early 90s, before I went to engineering school. I worked for a surveying company, and I drew the plats and maps from the survey data they collected. I still have my school set of "cartographer's tools" somewhere in storage, but nobody uses them anymore. Heck, they probably don't even
teach students how to use them anymore. Nowadays, it's all done with
ArcInfo GIS or
AutoCAD Civil3D. Cartography students today (and RPG authors, apparently) wouldn't know the difference between a divider and a set of "calipers."