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 - Power Play
I thought I'd write a nice open-ended prompt for you to have fun with this week !
A power play can happen in just about any situation; between friends, social rivals, political rivals, and at any level from a school friend group to a situation affecting the destinies of whole civilisations.
To my mind, what differentiates a power play from a plot is not so much the secrecy (until the trap is sprung, either can be defeated if it becomes known too soon), it is the sense of inevitability. In a plot, a sudden action determines success. In a power play, it's all about lining the players and moves up in advance so that when it happens, the victim feels like it's too late and there is nothing they can do to affect the outcome.
Tell me the story of a power play from your setting ! Who are the key players, what roles do they fulfil, what is at stake if the power play succeeds or fails, and who (or what) are the pieces that have to be moved into position before the victim is manoeuvred into an impossible situation ?
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.
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.
Power plays are the ultimate checkmate moments in any good story. The best ones are the slow burns where the victim doesn’t even realize they’ve lost until it’s way too late. Like watching a spider weave its web and by the time the fly notices, it’s already wrapped up.
Yep ! A plot is all about the moment you stick the knife in, and hope you hit a vital spot. A good power play is where you just hold the knife up and say "Here you are, Mr President. You have no choice but to use this..."
If you haven't seen it, one of my all-time favourite films is "Power Play", with David Hemmings, Donald Pleasance and Peter O'Toole. It's a little dated now, and quite low budget, but the script is brilliant and very tight, and it's worth a watch if you like films that make you think 🙂
!BBH
I'm going to watch.itz anything that'll give me knowledge advantage on earth is worth paying attention to
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