Worldbuilding

Mostly architect, but a little bit philosopher. I'm kind of a map-focused guy, so one of my favorite ways to start a worldbuilding project is to hit up Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator and just generate random worlds until something interesting pops up. Interesting in this case might be one large state near lots of small ones (what keeps them from eating the little guys?), two cultures or religions that overlap or cross state borders, zones that suggest interesting conflicts, etc.

Then I start telling myself stories about how those situations emerged, how they evolved over time to the present, and where they're going. The kinds of stories I wind up with tend to be all over the map (pun intended):

• The goblins have created a true egalitarian religion of peace and it has spread rapidly, but there remains one point of contention: a militant sect whose sacred city is on the other side of a border and they will recover it at all costs, including sparking a 5-way international incident by just seizing it.
• The draconids once formed a great and terrible theocratic empire founded upon the oppression of all other races, but it has long since fallen apart. One of the legacies of that collapse has resulted in a sizeable minority population within one of the majority-draconid remnant-nations, and they have turned radical and revolutionary because while most draconids have settled down, this particular nation of draconids are still rather serious about their religiously-fueled ideas of superiority.
• Three tiny human kingdoms cluster at the delta of the world's largest river, constantly vying with each other for more control of it while trying to assuage the large dwarven confederation nearby because through that delta flows the bulk of all trade in the world, including the heartland food production that is a vital lifeline to the large outlying islands in the ocean.
• The largest elven kingdom is divided between 'high elves' and 'dark elves' (never got around to giving them better names, they're just different cultures, not different races) because of an old war with the aforementioned draconid empire - the high elves have accepted peace and have accepted overtures toward making amends from the remnants of that empire, but the dark elves remember still the piling of atrocity upon atrocity against them and have vowed eternal resistance to the idea of peace with them. For some, this includes not just sabotaging that fragile peace, but declaring their fellow elves collaborators for trying to maintain it.
• The center of the world is a vast, high-altitude plateau of black glass with a giant volcano in the middle of it that produces an extremely valuable resource. The region is largely inhospitable (no soil to grow food in, too cold for animals, etc), but is 'inhabited' by orcs who have adapted to these conditions (because they believe the volcano is the heart of the world from which their creator-god forged the rest) and live a nomadic, largely ascetic life moving between collecting this resource and trading it with the rest of the world. But this resource is vital to all nations, so any attempt in the past by the orcs to form some kind of nation themselves in the more-habitable verges of this plateau have been ruthlessly crushed so that they could continue to exploit the dependence of the orcs on trading their labor in extracting this resource for the food and supplies they need to continue living in their holy land.

Stuff like that.