Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

Greetings everyone,

My future PC will be a cartographer of a minor nature. I see many great works of maps, parchments, and the like on the forums. I was wondering if anyone has any recommendation in which program/software thats easiest to use for a first timer? Preferably free as this is just a hobby for me but I dont mind spending a couple of bucks.

Since no-one else has answered I'll give it a shot. Just take anything I say with a grain of salt, I certainly wouldn't claim my knowledge is extensive.

The two free pieces of map making software I've tried are:
AutoRealm and
Dungeon Painter
Since I'm cheapskate I can't comment on the various paid options.
I've also tried using Inkscape which is a more general vector graphics program (also FOSS).

From what I can gather some people use:
GIMP,Paint.net, Photoshop etc... to just build the map from scratch, that seems like far too much work to me though.

Personally when I draw maps I usually use AutoRealm to make the outline of the map and then use GIMP to do any colouring or effects.
In all honesty though I can't really recommend AutoRealm, while it has some handy features (the fractal lines being my favourite), it has a lot of annoying quirks you have to work around, hopefully someone better informed will look at my post and say "That person is an ignorant fool, you should really be using..."

I used to be a part of a community that made maps for use in their games, they used GIMP and Photoshop to do such.
This site has some good maps on it, spawned from a 5 year long forum game, so much that it has its own wikia:
http://endofempires.wikia.com/wiki/End_of_Empires_Wiki

Sorry for the late response, but thank you to you both for the helpful links. Ill give it my best shot!