Most fantasy prompts give you a setting: a city on the back of a turtle, a library where every book is alive. Settings are lovely, but they don’t tell you what happens. You end up with three pages of description and nobody doing anything.

Every prompt below starts with a problem: someone wants something, and something is in the way. Use them for a warm-up, a short story, a campaign session or the first chapter of something longer. Change anything you like. The best prompt is the one you argue with.

How to use a prompt

  1. Write the problem in one sentence, in your own words, before you write anything else.
  2. Decide who it is happening to. Not the obvious person. If the prompt is about a king, try the king’s food taster.
  3. Find the cost. What will solving the problem take from your character? A story without a cost is a list of events.
  4. Start late. Begin the scene as close to the trouble as you can. You can explain later, or never.

Need names for the people and places? Our fantasy name generators cover elves, dwarves, orcs, dragons, wizards, taverns and kingdoms.

Magic with a price

  1. Every spell you cast erases one of your memories, chosen at random. You have just cast one, and you no longer remember who the woman in your kitchen is.
  2. The kingdom’s healers can cure any wound, but only by moving it to someone else. Today the court physician has been told who that someone will be.
  3. Magic in your village comes from a well. This morning, the bucket came up full of ink.
  4. You can speak to the dead for exactly one minute each. Your father died yesterday, and you have already used your minute on someone else.
  5. A mage’s power grows with the number of people who know their true name. A shy apprentice’s name has just been posted on every tavern door in the city.
  6. Spells must be paid for in years of life. A child in the market is casting them like there’s no tomorrow.
  7. Your magic only works when you are telling the truth, and the queen has asked whether you love her.
  8. The last wizard in the land is dying, and her magic must pass to whoever is standing nearest. The room is full of people who hate each other.
  9. Every time you heal someone, you take on their worst habit. You have healed a lot of soldiers.
  10. Iron cancels magic, and the empire has just discovered a mountain of it beneath your city.
  11. Your familiar has started giving you advice you didn’t ask for, and it has been right every time.
  12. A spell to bring back the summer worked. Now it won’t stop.
  13. You are the only person who can see the cost of other people’s spells, written across their skin.
  14. The royal wizard’s power comes from a bargain made three hundred years ago. The other party has arrived to collect.

Quests and journeys

  1. A map has been passed down your family for generations. Today it changed.
  2. The hero who was prophesied to save the world died in her sleep last night. You were her squire, and nobody else knows yet.
  3. You are hired to escort a merchant’s daughter across the mountains. On the first night, she tells you she is the one who hired the bandits.
  4. A pilgrimage road stretches to a temple at the edge of the world. Every pilgrim who reached it has come back and refused to say what they saw.
  5. The river has stopped flowing, and your village has sent you upstream to find out why.
  6. Seven knights set out to find a lost relic. You are the eighth, and you were not invited.
  7. You inherit a ship, its crew, and its debt to the sea queen.
  8. The road home has moved, and the people living along the new route say it has always been there.
  9. A dying dragon asks you to carry its last egg to a place you have never heard of.
  10. The quest is over, the monster is dead, and the treasure is home. Now the hero has to decide how to tell the village what really happened.
  11. Your caravan crosses a desert where the stars are different every night. Tonight, there are none.
  12. You are carrying a letter that will end a war. You have been told not to read it.
  13. The gods have closed the only pass through the mountains. You have three days to change their minds.
  14. A child arrives at your inn with a knight’s sword and no knight.

Monsters and the wild

  1. The creature that lives under the bridge has been paying your town a toll for fifty years, and it has stopped.
  2. Wolves have been seen walking on two legs at the edge of the forest. One of them has asked to speak to the mayor.
  3. Your job is to keep the sea serpent asleep. You have just yawned.
  4. A dragon has moved into the abandoned keep above the village, and it seems to want a librarian.
  5. The forest is growing toward the city a little more every night, and someone inside the walls is helping it.
  6. The kelpie in the loch has offered you a ride. It has also offered you the name of your sister’s murderer.
  7. A monster-hunter takes a job and discovers the monster is her own sister.
  8. The last unicorn is dying in a nobleman’s menagerie, and you are the stable hand.
  9. Your village sacrifices a goat to the hill every spring. This year the hill sent it back.
  10. A troll has been turned to stone by the dawn, and you are the only one who saw it happen in the middle of your garden.
  11. Every hundred years the beast under the mountain wakes and asks a riddle. You are this century’s scholar.
  12. A giant has fallen asleep across the trade road, and nobody wants to be the one to wake him.

For more monsters to draw on, see our list of fantasy creatures.

Courts, crowns and intrigue

  1. The new queen is eight years old, and you are her taster.
  2. The king has asked his three children to bring him the most valuable thing in the kingdom. The youngest has brought him the kingdom’s executioner.
  3. A political marriage between rival houses is arranged. Both brides want to call it off and neither can say why.
  4. The royal archive burns, and you are the only clerk who memorised the treaty.
  5. Your job is to forge the king’s signature. He has just died, and the council wants you to keep doing it.
  6. The court’s fool is the only one allowed to tell the truth, and he has gone silent.
  7. A messenger arrives with news of a victory. You know the battle hasn’t happened yet.
  8. The crown is cursed to fall on the most deserving head. It has landed on a pig farmer.
  9. Two ambassadors from enemy kingdoms are snowed in at the same inn, and only one bedroom is left.
  10. A spymaster discovers that every spy she has recruited in the last ten years was recruited by the other side first.
  11. The heir to the throne has been replaced by a changeling. The changeling is a better ruler.
  12. You are the queen’s double. The queen has been missing for a week, and nobody has noticed.
  13. The usurper has won. You are his new secretary, and you were loyal to the old king.
  14. A noble house survives by never telling a lie. Its heir has just told one.

Cozy and small-scale

  1. A retired adventurer opens a bakery, and her old party keeps turning up with problems.
  2. The village’s only witch is going on holiday, and she has left her apprentice in charge.
  3. Your bookshop’s stock rearranges itself at night. This morning, it has made a pile of every book that mentions you.
  4. A dragon wants to learn to knit.
  5. Your inn sits at a crossroads between worlds. Tonight a guest has arrived from a world you didn’t know existed.
  6. The town festival needs a new tradition because the old one was a curse.
  7. The village postman has been delivering letters to the dead for years. Today, one of them wrote back.
  8. A golem who used to guard a treasury has been retired, and wants to grow tomatoes.
  9. You run a tea shop where every blend makes the drinker remember something. A stranger asks for a tea that makes them forget.
  10. A grumpy wizard has to share his tower with a family of house spirits who all want different things for dinner.
  11. The tavern cat is the true ruler of the town, and it has decided to abdicate.
  12. A lonely ghost has started leaving reviews of the guests at your boarding house.

More in this mood in our guide to cozy fantasy books.

Dark and grim

  1. The war is over. The soldier who won it is put on trial for how.
  2. Plague has come to the city, and the healers’ guild knows a cure they will not use.
  3. A mercenary company is hired to defend a village from the mercenary company they used to be.
  4. You were the hero of the prophecy. You failed. Now you have to live in the world that resulted.
  5. The god of your people has died, and the priests have decided not to tell anyone.
  6. Every winter, the lord chooses one family to send north. This year he chose yours, and he did it in person.
  7. An executioner discovers that the woman she is about to hang is innocent, and that everyone in the crowd knows it.
  8. The city’s walls are built on the bones of an older people, and the bones have begun to move.
  9. A knight confesses to every crime his king commits, to keep the king’s name clean.
  10. You are a torturer for the crown. The prisoner today is your old teacher.
  11. A necromancer raises an army to defend her city. The city wins, and now wants the army gone.
  12. The only cure for the curse on your family is to pass it to someone else, and your daughter has a best friend.

Writing the person who causes all this? Read our guide on how to write a villain.

Worlds and wonders

  1. The sun is late this morning, and the astronomers are afraid.
  2. Your city floats, and it is losing altitude.
  3. The kingdom’s maps were drawn by a liar three centuries ago, and the land has slowly changed to match them.
  4. Every person is born with a bird that lives as long as they do. Yours just flew away.
  5. The ocean is made of glass and only cracks once a century. It has just begun to crack.
  6. People in your world do not die. They fade into the walls of their houses. You have moved into a very crowded house.
  7. The moon has a twin, and the twin is coming closer.
  8. A city where time runs backward on Tuesdays has just had a murder on a Wednesday.
  9. Seasons are decided by a council each year, and this year they couldn’t agree.
  10. Every door in your city leads somewhere different each day, except one, which has been locked for a thousand years. Today it is open.

First lines

Start with the sentence and see where it goes.

  1. “The day the dragons came back, my mother was arrested for forgery.”
  2. “Nobody in the village could remember who had planted the forest.”
  3. “I had been dead for three days when the king asked for my advice.”
  4. “The witch’s will was very clear about the cat.”
  5. “We buried the knight with his sword, and in the morning it was on the kitchen table.”
  6. “There were nine of us when we went into the mountain, and ten when we came out.”
  7. “Every spell has a smell, and this one smelled of my brother.”
  8. “The prophecy was wrong, which was the first problem.”
  9. “On the last night of the old calendar, the stars went out one by one, from east to west.”
  10. “My grandmother said never to trust a river that runs uphill.”
  11. “The queen had been warned about the gardener.”
  12. “It was the kind of inn where you paid for the room and the room decided whether to let you leave.”

Turning a prompt into a story

A prompt gives you a situation. A story needs three more things:

  • A character who wants something specific. Not “to survive”, but “to get her brother home before the harvest”.
  • A choice that costs something. The best fantasy turns on decisions, not on spells. Our guide to magic systems explains why costs make magic interesting.
  • An ending that changes the problem. It doesn’t need to solve it. It needs to make it different.

When you are ready to turn a short piece into something longer, our guide on how to write a fantasy novel walks through the next steps.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use these prompts for my own stories? Yes. Use them for anything you like, including published work. A prompt is a starting point; the story you write from it is yours.

How long should a prompt story be? As long as it needs. For a warm-up, try 500 words in twenty minutes. For a short story, most magazines that publish fantasy take pieces between 1,000 and 7,500 words.

What makes a good fantasy prompt? A problem, a person and a cost. The setting matters less than you think; if the problem is strong, the world grows around it.

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