I would like to submit a fifth category that’s a little more specific to game worlds like homebrew dnd settings, The Engineer. This archetype uses mechanical systems as a scaffold of the world, then builds characters, stories, and lore to support or be supported by those systems.

My personal example was an idea for a worlds that had harnessed elementals and primordial elemental magic to spark an industrial revolution, and bridge massive distances with transit systems never seen before. I figured out how the magic and transportation worked first, then built the rest of the world around it. Idk, maybe that’s just me.

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.

Not sure I fit any?

Like, for one, if anything I’d call myself a Storyless Architect: I’m not building a setting so a story will eventually merge from it, I’m building it because I enjoy creating stuff. It’s a hobby!

For the other setting, I’d say I’m somewhere between the Architect and the Philosopher: The broad concepts and major aspects of the setting were self-emergent, but the grew up in parallel with some key themes I wanted to put out there.

I’m mostly the kind of worldbuilder, who gets one cool but vague idea of something and then just randomly plug stuff into it until it makes sense. The latest was “What if there was a force that was rewriting reality while it’s going on, and some people are immune to it for some reason?” and I ran with it. 150h later I have a full 12 scenario Call of Cthulhu campaign, but without Lovecraft stuff, all homebrew.

I typically work backwards from observations of people and extend my conclusions to a logical extreme. Like, people want smart conversational AI that can feel, etc. But they also want AI that can take over the worst jobs and prevent people from suffering through them (like robots displacing child slave cobalt miners). Taking this to it’s logical conclusion, we get a world where people design conscious robots, and force them into slavery in order to displace human slavery.

A lot of my worldbuilding is based on stupid memes from around 2009-2012.

I also just grab concepts I think are cool and try to make them unique.

I definitely lean more towards architect and philosopher type. I think of a concept for my setting and think hmm, how would people react if this was true considering the history. I’ve yet to take the time to start writing a story so i might be more than that.

This is a fun question. In my biggest project so far, I’ve been more the architect, but far too disorganised for a comparison with Tolkien. I hastily framed out the world at a glance - geography, kingdoms, a few key figures, a few suggestions of a proximal history. Then I went in with the details. Every river, every one-horse backwater, every shop and its contents, restaurants with menus, books of particular interest. Then I’d finally had enough of a sense of the place that you could watch stories start to emerge, like an overfull cauldron boiling over. Those stories got incorporated into the history. Then I decided I must know more about certain geological processes and ended up laying out planetary weather systems, so I’d know where all the rain would end up. In that way I found a network of massive underground tunnels, thereby locating the site of several underground factions and their unseen battles.

It all sounds grand, but most of what I do is very low to middling. Delusions of adequacy.

I’m closest to the Architect, but i agree with Zonetrooper that worldbuilding can be just for its own sake. Writing a story is hard but writing about the world is fun. I have a tendency to think a lot about details and if something doesn’t make sense, i work on it or surrounding new stuff until it seems plausible.

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