Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #128 - Trade Routes
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 - Trade Routes
Civilisation is impossible without trade, and through history all kinds of trade routes have evolved. Probably the most famous is the Silk Road, linking China to Europe and passing through a dazzling (and often changeable) array of Central Asian and Middle Eastern states. In many cases, a trade route isn't used by merchants as a single journey; the goods pass from hand to hand increasing in price with each step. Just look at amber. Found on the shores of the Baltic Sea, traded from merchant to merchant across Europe until it reached Rome or Greece as a fabulously expensive gemstone. Other routes went by sea, from the South Sea islands back to Europe or the Triangular Trade from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back again with it's terrible cargo.
Tell me a story of trade routes from your setting ! It could be the tale of a caravan of camels journeying across a baking desert to exotic markets, a daring sea captain pioneering a new route across hazardous seas, or an adventurer like Marco Polo trekking halfway around the world across the steppes and mountains of Central Asia. What are they hoping to trade ? Who are they buying from and selling to ? How does the profit make the risk worthwhile ?
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 🙂