I'm not fond of the output of campaign cartographer. I've got a thing against graphics that aren't anti-aliased (i.e. you see the jaggedy pixelated edges of all the lines instead of nice smooth lines) and to be honest, I think the maps just turn out pretty ugly. It also kind of looks like it would be a map for a computer game, which impacts my imagination in a bad way.
For the price (free), I think autorealm is definitely worth looking into before bothering with Campaign Cartographer. The biggest drawback is that the symbols in autorealm for the most part work mostly like monotone font characters (although you can change the color of each symbol it's all the same color) whereas the CC symbols are multi-color. The one color thing can work really well though in the right context, and if it does you've saved yourself a nice chunk of money.
Of course you can always draw it freehand in any old graphics program for a Tolkien kind of look. I did this one mostly just with a brush in Photoshop:
http://caligula.homedns.org/gazetteer_map.html
It was actually really easy to do and didn't take very long. Also, since it's Photoshop everything is in layers so I can show/hide different geographical features (I have a hidden overlay for forests, for example). Here are the tutorials I used for techniques:
I used this page for the mountains. It's for pen and ink, but the same principles apply to a computer brush (I used a certain size brush for the mountain outlines, and a smaller brush to shade them):
http://www.brodt.dk/peter/maps.html
I used this one to create the parchment background of the map and tweaked the various parameters slightly to get the exact look I wanted:
http://www.purephotoshop.com/article/10
In the future, I will probably continue to draw my maps freehand rather than bothering with apps. I think it looks better and it's easier for me to customize.
