Two pieces of advice:
- Make every character and place show something specific to the setting.
- Make one special character or place prominent through the whole session.
Everything is [This World]-ish
You don't have a lot of time, so you want to show what makes the setting interesting and unique. If religious orders are very prominent in the world, have the party stay at a monastic-run house for travellers, rather than an inn. If death magic is significant in the story, toss in an encounter with some walking undead instead of orcs or goblins. If the setting is Roman-themed, have an local clerk for the imperial administration give the party information, rather than a bartender.
The truth is that players tend to ignore dense chunks of information thrown at them. If you give them handouts with paragraphs of text, they probably won't get read.
One Important [This World]-ish Thing
Pick one character or place in the plot of this story. It could be the villain of the plot, or it could be the location the party is spending its time, or it could be an ally or patron of theirs.
Make that One Thing very grounded in the feel of the story. If the players have forgotten everything else that happened in the game session a year from now, they'll still remember the One Thing.
Let's say you're running a game with necromancy and a Central Asian feel. The villain could be some khan's personal soothsayer, a shaman who dances and drums his way around the fire to raise the skeletal remains of fallen warriors. The party meets him when they're first introduced to the khan, and the shaman goes into a trance and pronounces a curse on them. They hear the sound of his drumming in their dreams as they sleep out under the stars. They fight his skeletal warriors who whisper one word over and over again in the shaman's voice. That villain, the game's One Thing, shows up again and again to reinforce the idea of the setting.
Followup
Tell us about the setting/plot/world/characters, if you can, and I'm sure we can come up with some great ideas for how to apply these concepts to your plot.
The rules say "yes"
According to the playbook, you might play a single session game:
When you sit down to play Fate, you might just play a single session.
See Fate SRD, The Long Game.
Both FAE and Fate Core have Consequences and Refresh. In a single session game Refresh means number of Fate points for players to start with. Consequences aren't strictly tied to sessions, in the first place they are aspects caused by damage players' characters taken.
Ouch! Damage, Stress, and Consequences said that Moderate consequences clears at the end of the next session, and Severe consequences clears at the end of the scenario, provided it makes sense within the story. So they might last longer in "normal" (not one-shot) game, this doesn't break anything.
If you're the DM, you still should learn Fate Core
FAE is a complete game, allowing players get into as quick as possible. However, it's still built on Fate Core, and assumes the DM is familiar with the system.
From Fred of Evil Hat's Blog:
For the record (again), FAE is Fate Core. It’s got the dials cranked in deliberately different directions than Core’s given defaults
See also
Best Answer
There are a couple of criteria that would make a game system unsuitable for a one-shot:
In pretty much all of these cases, there are ways to make a system still work in a one-shot. I've played one-shots where we've ignored half the rules to lower the learning curve and speed up the gameplay. I've played games where half the time was spent making characters, but that was advertised in the description and players were interested in seeing how that worked.
I don't know that there is any system that is truly ill-suited for a one-shot. It's really just the expected type of scenario that might be.