Writing prompts

Ideas of interest to me that I’ve saved over the years. Use if you like.

Idle thoughts

• What if vampires invented welcome mats?
• Fantasy universe — What if magic could cure illnesses, but also prevented antibodies from forming? So people with access to cure spells might actually be *more* susceptible to disease.

Tropes and subversions

• Redemption Equals Death, except then they come back to life and it’s awkward.
• The “true monarch” takes the throne back from the evil usurper, but not much changes.
• Forcible soulbonding for interrogation or surveillance purposes.
• That thing where a minor villain doesn’t really get redeemed, they just start working with the heroes? Except it’s a hero who just kinda starts working with the villains for no real reason.
• A bah-humbug Christmas hater is converted to the Christmas spirit, except it’s written as a horror story.
• No more of this urban fantasy enforced masquerade bullshit, I want vampires and werewolves and so forth living openly in society and I want to see *how that affects the world*, damn it!
• That thing where a villain makes a lot of really good socioeconomic points, so the writers have to have them make a hard turn into some obviously evil trope to justify them still being the villain; except oops, it turns out the villain didn’t even do the evil thing, they were framed, and now the hero has to deal with the fallout from their own “success”.

From r/WritingPrompts

I haven’t saved the URLs of any of these prompts, but here’s the subreddit.

• You thought your superpower, always hitting your intended target while throwing something, was lame at first. Then, you began to realize your power was not bound by the limitations of space and time, nor was it a superpower to always be taken literally.
• The hero and his arch-nemesis know each others secret identities but don’t reveal them for fear of mutually assured destruction. Unfortunately, they work at the same place, have common friends, and must deal with each other in civilian life every. single. day.
• After adopting a human on the intergalactic black market you’re shocked to discover it’s actually sapient.
• You foster black kittens, and start their training to be witches’ familiars.
• Jokingly, you ask the genie for you to have 0 wishes. Congrats, you broke your genie, and possibly, the universe.
• Your entire life, you’ve been told you’re deathly allergic to bees. You’ve always had people protecting you from them, be it your mother or a hired hand. Today, one slips through and lands on your shoulder. You hear a tiny voice say “Your Majesty, what are your orders?”
• One day, time just suddenly stops for a short moment for you. At first, you tried to mess around, but after the 246th times it happened, you start to realise that your power is not stopping time, but being able to move in time frozen by another person in the world.
• Death is just a predator much higher on the food chain than we are, and our perception of it is as limited as an ant’s perception of a child with a magnifying glass.
• Everybody in the world has a superpower that compliments their soulmates superpower. When together, both their powers increase in strength exponentially. You have the most useless power ever, when one day......
• An alien killed the boss and replaced him over a week ago. Everyone knows he’s not the boss due to his terrible disguise, but he’s such a better person than the original that everyone just goes along with it.
• When a wormhole is severed at both ends, the transient space within persists as a bubble, separated from causality. The fate of its occupants is unknown.
• You’re not evil, but you are the most feared super-powered person. Why? Because your power is pointing out the logical inconsistencies of other’s powers and making them follow said logic. You don’t mean to cause as much chaos as you do, but seeing illogical things just really... really irks you

From the WritingPrompts Tumblr

Source

• You are a Hero with an unfortunate side-effect to your powers. Everytime you lose a fight, your body changes and adapts to become better suited to whatever beat you. Over the years, you are starting to look less and less human, and the civilians are getting more uncomfortable with you.
• You have mind control powers. Instead of using it for evil, you open a business where people pay you to order them to do things that they’d otherwise be too lazy to do.
• You and your knights tense, reach for weapons as the monster enters the throne room. After a minute of silence, both the king and the monster throw up their arms and cheer “BROTHER!”.
• A day-in-the-life as a lawyer that specializes in the supernatural. Airtight contracts for genie wishes. Unambiguous purchase orders with faerie craftsmen. Divorce court for vampires with centuries-old prenups. The hag-in-the-lake who is claiming squatters rights against the new golf course...
• Humanity makes contact with an alien species. They seem rather friendly, but also quite... baffled. After working out basic English, they ask us, “We have not seen any starship leave this system for one of your many other colonies in 297,591 local years. Why? Have you quarantined the system?”
• You are a vampire hunter. Your roommate is a vampire. Neither of you can afford the apartment on your own so if one of you attacks the other you’ll lose the apartment. The tension between you two is increasing by the day.