Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #129 - What If ?
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 🙂
I like that you want the ripple effects spelled out decades later, not just the single pivot. I’ve already got three timelines arguing in my head about who gets to be canon, so I’ll pick one and link it here before midnight GMT. Quick check, is it one entry per person, or fine to drop a short alt plus a longer follow-up? The SBI carrot is sweet, but the itch to rewire history is doing most of the tugging.
Hi @amr008 - I'm happy with however you prefer to do it. I can see the logic in doing it in two parts, one covering the actual timeline change, and the other looking at the longer term effects.
But of course you're welcome to break time more than once and submit as many entries as you like, it's a great way to really get immersed in a setting 😀
Got it. Let me get back.