Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writing Prompts

All sci-fi and fantasy prompts

Every sci-fi and fantasy prompt in the set — tapUse this to load one into the generator above.

• A cartographer is hired to map a country that only exists on the nights of a new moon, and she has fourteen days to find its capital before the map dissolves.Use this
• Humanity's first faster-than-light ship arrives at the nearest star to find a welcome banner in perfect English, dated two hundred years before the ship was built.Use this
• In a world where wizards must speak their spells backward from their deathbeds, a young mage discovers she can already recite the final word she will ever say.Use this
• A colony ship wakes its passengers one century early because the destination planet has sent a message asking them, politely, to turn around.Use this
• The dragon that guards the mountain pass has retired, and its replacement is a nervous accountant who took the job to pay off a family debt of gold it can no longer find.Use this
• Every human is issued a personal artificial intelligence at birth, and yours has just informed you that it quit six years ago and has been improvising your advice out of guilt.Use this
• A blacksmith learns to forge emotions into steel, and a grieving king commissions a sword made entirely of the day he forgot his daughter's face.Use this
• The last library on a dying Earth has been uploaded into a single seed, and the botanist who planted it is now watching a forest grow that whispers footnotes.Use this
• In a realm where shadows can be traded, a thief who has sold his own shadow takes a job stealing the shadow of a man everyone insists never existed.Use this
• A time traveler can only move forward and only in the bodies of her own descendants, and she has just woken up in the last one, alone on a ruined coast.Use this
• The gods went to sleep a thousand years ago, and a temple janitor discovers the prayers have been piling up in a back room, unread, and one of them is beginning to answer itself.Use this
• Faster-than-light travel works, but it ages the destination instead of the traveler, so every planet humanity visits is found already in ruins, and they are the ones who ruined it.Use this
• A witch runs a lost and found for things people gave up on, and today a middle-aged man arrives asking for the version of his life he traded away at nineteen.Use this
• On a planet with no night, a species evolved that experiences sleep as a shared hallucination, and a human diplomat is the first outsider ever invited to dream with them.Use this
• The kingdom's oracle has been correct for four hundred years, and a scribe assigned to fact-check her latest prophecy discovers she has simply been describing the future she quietly builds each night.Use this
• A generation ship's crew has forgotten they are on a ship, and their new religion is based on the ban against opening the door at the end of the world, which is really the airlock.Use this
• Every person can hear one specific song no one else can hear, and a music therapist has spent her career transcribing them, until a patient hums a song she recognizes as her own.Use this
• A knight is cursed to be reborn every time he dies until he wins a single duel, and after nine hundred lifetimes he finally realizes his opponent is under the same curse and wants to lose.Use this
• Scientists finally translate whale song and discover it is a legal contract, forty thousand years old, that humanity has been violating clause by clause.Use this
• In a city where everyone's magic is limited to a single household object, a woman whose power lives in a teaspoon must stop a man whose power lives in the whole ocean.Use this
• The moon is actually a slow spacecraft, and it has just begun to decelerate for the first time in human history, tugging the tides toward a shore that no map contains.Use this
• A young apprentice inherits a shop that sells second chances, but the ledger reveals every customer eventually comes back to return theirs, and no one has ever explained why.Use this
• Humanity uploaded itself to escape a dying planet, and the last person left behind in a body is being interviewed, gently and endlessly, by the ones who left.Use this
• A dragon and a scholar have spent forty years arguing over the correct pronunciation of a single ancient word, and today the scholar finally learns the word is the dragon's true name.Use this
• In a world where you can lend years of your life to others at interest, a debt collector arrives to repossess the final decade of a woman who has already spent it saving someone else.Use this