Actionable Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding gets a lot of flak sometimes. And fucking rightly so. Not going to play a novel. Not interested in exposition dumps. But leaving worldbuilding on the floor often just means falling back on default or baseline assumptions about how the world works. It's not a question of how much worldbuilding you do. It's more important to think about what you get out of it during play. What does it inform, and what can players do with it? Creating a pantheon of gods for your dungeon dragon world is common advice. Here are twelve thirty-seven gods and their domains, maybe even a picture of each to show where they fall on the majestic-to-edgelord scale. But what does any of this actually tell me about religion in this world? Knowing that some god has the domain of death tells me fuck all about how people bury their dead. What do people believe in? What customs have grown out of those beliefs? How does any of that affect their daily lives? We've created a pantheon, but where's the fucking…