Setup Paths: Express, Guided, and Deep
Setup should feel like a worldbuilding partner, not an intake form.
All three setup depths end at the same standard: a coherent playable world with only the systems that actually apply. The difference is how much of the world you want to author explicitly before that compilation happens.
Express Setup
Use Express when your pitch already carries the soul of the setting.
You might say:
A modern supernatural city where ordinary college life keeps colliding with occult problems, but the player is not automatically special.
Express should infer reversible details from that pitch: likely genre, ordinary life, social structure, technology level, calendar assumptions, likely mechanics, first pressures, initial location, and a sensible starting situation.
It should then ask only the choices it should not safely invent:
- Content boundaries and experiences you want or dislike.
- Resolution style and how visible mechanics should be.
- Character control mode.
- Image-generation policy.
Then you get an Assumption Review. Correct anything that is wrong. Accept the rest. Express is fast because its guesses are reversible, not because it skips safety or world coherence.
Guided Setup
Use Guided when you want to shape the important parts yourself without designing every institution before play begins.
Guided moves through practical sections. It should ask one manageable cluster at a time, reuse answers you already gave, and skip sections that the setting makes irrelevant.
1. World promise
Define the core experience in plain language.
What kind of place is this? What can players reasonably do here? What should everyday play feel like when nothing dramatic is happening? What scale does the campaign care about?
The output becomes the world identity, tone, ordinary-reality assumptions, and initial module recommendation.
2. Play contract
Set boundaries, desired and disliked experiences, control mode, resolution style, mechanical visibility, intensity, refusal presentation, and image policy.
These are explicit decisions. Setup should not infer consent boundaries or silently decide how much control the GM has over a player character.
3. Ordinary reality
Describe what a normal day looks like before powers and plot enter the room.
How do people travel? Work? Eat? Communicate? Get information? Find safety? What counts as normal danger? What institutions matter? Which conveniences exist?
This is where a setting stops being genre wallpaper.
4. Time and environment
Define only the cycles that matter.
That may be ordinary days and seasons, school periods, ship shifts, moon phases, magical tides, divine cycles, or no meaningful calendar at all. Establish weather only if the setting supports it.
The output informs Calendar, Clock, temporal rhythms, deadlines, and environmental behavior.
5. Geography and movement
Establish the root map, the first playable region, important Locations, meaningful routes, travel assumptions, and any real one-hop propagation such as roads, sound, waterways, utilities, broadcast, or magical resonance.
Do not map the entire planet unless the game actually starts by using the entire planet.
6. People and society
Define the important social groups, recurring Characters, ordinary population, authority, services, and relationships that matter at the start.
Recurring people get routines only where absence and obligation matter. Ordinary populations can remain cohorts until play makes an individual important.
7. Factions and current tensions
Create only factions that can currently affect play. Give them goals, capacity, dependencies, allies, rivals, and current operations.
Separate Missions, which are objective-driven tasks, from Pressures, which keep moving whether or not the player accepts a task.
8. Mechanics
Define the actual Ruleset, Power Systems, Mechanic Packages, resources, abilities, techniques, conditions, progression, and other mechanics the setting needs.
Do not add a mana bar to a mundane detective drama because LWE supports resources.
9. Starting situation
Choose or create the Game Start, starting Character state, starting Location, immediate context, and any initial Mission or Pressure that genuinely belongs there.
The static opening must remain true before initialization. Specific state belongs in the generated opening after Setup has verified it.
10. Review and compile
Setup summarizes what it learned, lists assumptions separately from creator decisions, shows enabled systems, reports anything intentionally omitted, and compiles the playable spine.
Nothing should be hidden behind “I filled it in for you.”
Deep Setup
Deep uses the entire Guided flow, then asks one more question:
Why does this world feel like itself even when nobody is adventuring?
That answer comes from World DNA.
Deep explores authority, kinship, obligation, taboo, material culture, technology, social assumptions, spirituality, everyday-life expectations, inspirations, cultural touchstones, and things you explicitly want avoided.
These are not trivia fields. They should shape the content that follows.
If obligation is communal, factions and relationships should reflect it. If travel is sacred, routes and institutions should reflect it. If magic is spiritually taboo, a Power System should not be presented like a neutral skill tree.
Deep is for authorship density, not mechanical bloat.
You can always say “skip”
A good setup never traps you in a questionnaire.
You can answer:
- “skip this”
- “decide for me”
- “not relevant”
- “I don't know yet”
Setup should record the difference. Unknown is not permission to fabricate permanent canon. Reversible assumptions can remain assumptions until play or later building resolves them.
That is the whole philosophy: enough structure to make the world live, without demanding that you finish the encyclopedia before anybody gets to play.