Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - What If ?
This is a slightly different worldbuilding prompt to my normal ones ! There are some extra rules 😉
The brief is to pick a key historical event, preferably in your own setting but a real-world one is fine too. Give a quick outline of the event, key people and what happened in the current timeline. Then describe or write a story telling what happened differently in the new timeline.
Finally, add a quick summary of the longer term effects of the change. Did a war or election have a different outcome because a key person was disgraced or assassinated ? Did a different monarch take the throne ? Did someone who died in our timeline live and have an impact, or someone who lived in our timeline die in the new one ? What did the world look like fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years later ? You can have fun with this prompt !
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged; @sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂