Mirage_Patrick said:
Anyone have any recommendations...price vs bells?
Well price vs. bells is pretty much what you're looking at. You can get free with no bells and whip out certain kinds of maps in minutes, or you can pay fairly significant money with all the bells and effectively buy into an entirely new hobby - making maps with your chosen software.
I think your question has been asked enough times now with basically the same responses that it is much more constructive to ask for details rather than just list Campaign Cartographer, Dunjinni and Paintshop.
What style of maps do you want? Photo-like? Hand-drawn line style? Precisely measured (73.2 miles from pt.A to pt.B) or just a vague "Here be Wilderness" sort of approach?
What scale are you intending to map? Just buildings, caves, and dungeons? Do you need a village, a town, or a massive city? A 100-mile radius of outdoor terrain? 1000 miles? A planet?
How much time do you want to spend on your maps? If it takes you 10 hours to make a gorgeous map for your game that will only be used once is the time going to be worth it to you? Do you anticipate that CREATING the maps is going to be part of the fun and interest for you, or do you just want to be able to create maps without having to have colored pencils, a drawing board, t-square and hand drafting tools?
These are all non-trivial questions and very, very few people are going to be terribly familiar with more than just 1 piece of software. And what works fantastic for one persons needs and desires is going to be useless for others.
I use CC2 Pro. It costs a noteworthy amount of money when you start looking at the add-on packages for it, but IMO most of them have been worth it. Like ANY software it takes time to get to know what it WON'T do, and even more to become proficient enough with it to be able to make IT work for you rather than you trying to work IT. (It has the disadvantage of being somewhat counter-intuitive at first, but what makes it counter-intuitive also makes it much more powerful later on.) Making maps with it is also as much of a hobby in itself as it is just a tool for making RPG maps. I use it for all the maps for my campaigns, from a single room to entire continents (I'd say entire planets but I don't bother drawing maps for entire planets anymore as I have no need for entire planets - and never have). I am now proficient enough with it to spin out simple maps of a building or a dungeon in an hour (or perhaps even just minutes), while I have also spent dozens upon dozens of hours working on maps of cities and "world" maps simply for the satisfaction of seeing the end product. And it has an extraordinary level of company support and user community via mailing list/Yahoo group.
http://home.earthlink.net/~duanevp/cc2/cc2.htm shows a sampling of what I've managed to do with it.
