People, Places, and Things: This is what makes up a Fiasco Playset!
Well, mostly. Something to keep in mind when you begin designing is that it's important to create a playset that feels cohesive and also evocative. While it might be intriguing to know how former rival journalists who worked at the same coffeeshop might act in a post-apocalypse setting, it might be hard to write lists that make all of those things make sense. The other tip I have is based off a game design concept from Jay Dragon, teeth. The essential idea behind "games having teeth" is that a game setting's specificity is able to pull players into the narrative, they're the details that make you go "I don't know what that means but wow I want to find out". The challenge of writing a playset is really building up the base game's teeth and transforming that blank slate into something so specific you can't help but want to know more.
Format
Each list is written in six groups with six choices each. Fiasco is a game that uses d6s frequently and so the game encourages you to pick details from a list by rolling 2d6s. The first D6 determines that group of relationships, and the second determines a specific detail. For example Object categories in a food-based playset could be something like Fruits, Vegetables, Meat, Fish, Bread, and Dairy; and the Fruit Group could be a pear, an apple, a blueberry, a tomato, a pomegranate, or an orange. In any of the four list types, it can be difficult at first to come up with the wider categories, I suggest that you check out other playsets that interest you to get a better feeling for how to come up with the big categories.
Relationships
Relationships will be the beginning of any playset, relationship tags in Fiasco are simple phrases that are usually one to a few words that describe how two characters know each other.
Two of the most common relationship categories you will see if you look around are family and romance, they're both great options and have the most easily accessible specific relationships to pull from. Playsets generally have a couple of categories that are specific to their setting, like Betrayal, Coworkers, Former Rivals, Clandestine, Local, or even something as specific as "Curiosity jr high field trip".
Some things you'll see in a lot of Fiasco are there are certain specific relationships that are super easy to toss in and for sure can be fun, these are things like sibling rivals or enemies-to-lovers. These are fun choices and absolutely help to build a base for some of the weirder and more specific roles you can add in. In Sean Buckley's "Back to the Old House", one of the relationships is "Auntie Beryl and Uncle Death", which is a perfect example of something so specific and yet also rather nebulous that your players can build up so much story by using.
Needs
Needs express a shared desire between the two people in the relationship. These needs could be a shared goal such as "earn a teacher's respect" or goals that are in contest with each other like "end her career" from Tobie Abad's Sickening Queens. Something I find refreshing is that due to the nebulous nature of these items, even something that may be in contest like the one above, could be reinterpreted to mean they have a shared enemy, that is to say, don't worry if you use a unclear personal pronoun or leave things intentionally vague. That's part of the fun of playing is figuring out what you want those to mean.
Locations
Locations are places that the two characters have a shared history with, this could be something in their past or it could be a place that you want to play in, in your game session. The locations, I think, are a list group where you can be really evocative, like almost too much, and it still is okay. Something the original designer of Fiasco ask in their book is that if you can, they would love if you added in "The Chicken Hut" somewhere in this category, and I think part of that is it's super specific but also just means nothing. In Peter Woodworth's Hocus Focus there's a lot of great examples of locations like in "The Nightlife" there's The Velvet Room, McAnally’s Pub, Club Zero, The Green Mill jazz club, Executive Priority Health club, Coiffure Cup salon/café.
Objects
Designing objects can be a lot of fun to create something that will come up in game sessions, again and again. In the Lord of the Rings franchise, this is The One Ring, something that comes up often and has real narrative weight. Jonas Ricter's Birthday of the Goblin Princess has an incredible group of items that play out the balance between fun and dangerous and goblins and princesses, it is seriously so good.
Last Things
Something that I always do when I'm gearing up to play Fiasco is that I will make sure that everyone has a copy of the playset and I ask that everyone take a look before we go through lines and veils, and we include list items in lines and veils to make sure everyone has a good time. The flip side of this is that as designers, I think we can shared a little bit of that burden of responsibility. If you wouldn't want to play something with one of your friends, due to discomfort somewhere along that line, I'd say that's a fair enough reason to just not include that item in the first place. Good luck designing y'all!
p.s. I'll be putting a new post soon that goes over the nitty gritty of layout. You do not need to make a super detailed layout to submit your game, but I want to put together a post that helps those who want to do a layout "true-to-PBG's original Fiasco design". That post will be called "Makeover Montage" and will have some graphics about visual references made by the game, fonts, and how to properly setup your boilerplate page.