What are your favorite worldbuilding mechanics?

I would like to suggest the Kids on Bikes method. It gives about 10 questions about the town like what is the school mascot and what is your town known for and one economic adjective (booming, stagnant, prosperous, etc.). Pretty nice way to get everyone into the same world.

Personally. I think I will borrow the “give an incentive for each antagonistic item added” idea at the beginning of the game for my western themed gambling mechanical rpg. I really like this concept in a game run with a gambling mechanism!

I also think every game that doesn’t want to be generic or give dozens of pages of setting should be using the open questions or Ironsworn list or some kind of pseudo random list style of worldbuilding. It just seems SO effective in just the space of a few pages to narrow down the world AND give inspiration.

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I borrowed a lot of things from lots of games and simplified them until I had a bunch of questions I could ask the players to get them to help me build a setting big enough for a one-shot in less than 20 min. I included a few easy to implement premises that could apply anywhere and a few tables to spice thing up. The free version can be found here enjoy!

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