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I've done something I think is similar. My novel, The Summoning Fire, grew out of characters that I used in a couple of stories, and those characters came out of a short RPG campaign. I used the stories to flesh out character worldviews and to explore how certain concepts worked together (half-devil crime boss, magical pump-action shotgun, etc). The stories were invaluable. They helped create the foundation the novel was eventually built on. The stories are not "canon" or prequels for the novel. They were trial runs of various ideas.
I did something similar with a YA novel (not yet published). I had the characters more or less defined and the novel outlined, but I wasn't able to start work on the novel yet. So I wrote a couple of stories with the main character to explore how I would write from her viewpoint. In this case, the stories are prequels to the novel, and some of what happened in the stories was later referred to in the novel.
I don't know if those examples qualify as "builder world", but they seem close.
-David
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