872 Dystopian Writing Prompts

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Writing a dystopian story can be fulfilling because it allows you to explore global issues and technology while delivering empowering messages creatively. But, you should know that it can also be challenging, as the genre requires plenty of imagination for worldbuilding and conceptualization of memorable characters, since its main setting is usually a future where things have not gone well for the human race.

One way to make your life easier when writing a dystopian story is by turning to writing prompts for ideas, as they can expose you to new worlds and perspectives.

Below is a list of a dystopian writing prompt that could help you become the next Margaret Atwood or Suzanne Collins:

• You wake up in a prison cell not knowing why you are there.
• The called test the strength of your community and healthcare by purposefully giving people diseases and be a witness to the ensuing madness.
• Everything that happens to you now must be reported to the government. Everyone is constantly watched but cannot be heard.
• Join a resistance team in the small country of Aotoria.
• Write This is a trap wall inside a dungeon.
• The government is spraying you with chemicals that make you perfect.
• Get a job in the mail room, someone needs you to read and catch spelling errors.
• Every so often your mind drifts away from your body and floats in the airspace above. Who you are and your body follow each other around like matching clouds.
• The legs on your Chicken Fillet Footlong are no longer thin.
• A scientist invents a formula for longevity, but immortality is at a terrible cost.
• Everything in your village has a gender except you.
• Everything is perfect. But just because it’s perfect doesn’t mean it’s not evil.
• Only red things exist, trees, animals, creatures, humans. You name it.
• The Scarlet Witch’s powers suddenly wore off, and humanity reacted in horrific ways.
• You come across a child left on your doorstep, what do you do with it?
• If you choose freedom then there is no turning back, if you choose your family then you die or disappear.
• Your clock is winding down, do you know what to get done before your time is up?
• New Year’s Eve is met with chaos, riots break out and the legal marriage age is lowered dramatically.
• What happens when your character’s worst nightmare comes true layered with the fact that they never expected it to happen?
• The bus driver says not to stand in the doorway any longer, but you like looking out the window.
• The remains of the library are still there on your street, but the books are missing.
• Non-humans are denied citizenship in your bustling modernity.
• Society was not kind to us, so we are sending them a message in the form of a monster.
• You match with a hipster on Tinder that drives an Airstream and smells amazing.
• The owner of your local supply store has several shady deals going on, but you can’t find out what.
• A sudden gas leak except the gas is thought-controlling properties.
• An uncontrollable urge to consume human flesh.
• A chemical reaction has embedded into your skin causing anyone to see you have to tell you their greatest desire.
• There is a cure for cancer, but in order to go on it you must donate something. You are then told you get your identity back. On the way to the surgical ward you are told you are actually walking to your execution.
• You woke up this morning to find everyone you know missing and a letter from officials dismissed from your fears, do you do what they say or continue your search?
• The government has found a way to make the sun’s rays deadly.
• Continue living your simulation as your priorities/curiosity guide you.
• Someone in your town needs to do something perfectly after every little task done or they get slaughtered and eaten.
• Only men choose the best from their harem of women, all others choose their mates in similar ways.
• The government made their own killer virus in a lab because they were bored and it was too big to get out.
• No one knows how you die, or why this is a problem, but when you stop breathing you burst into flowers of your addiction.
• The city is overrun by clowns trying to recruit people to their happiness movement.
• People who eat a lot of falafel never get sick, ever.
• You witness a murder because your scientists found a way to stretch time with your pet dog.
• Your city is decimated by a nuclear attack, should you stay or should you go?
• The government is forcing citizens into more censored fashion today than in the last decade.
• The Abolition Agency has come to claim your sisters from their jobs as prostitutes. But the Agency is not who they appear to be, and the soldiers and contacts in this new world is a bit perplexing.
• Seriously, say the princess in the tower will marry everyone who rescues her or even everyone who tries. Add a deadline.
• You seek to rid your world of powdered sugar, but it just grows back every month.
• It’s forbidden to enter between the buildings of your gated community and know why.
• How the heck do all these people survive without fresh food?
• You’re a prisoner and your only crime is your last name. To avoid persecution why don’t you have it changed?
• The aliens have invaded and destroyed any device that has an on/off switch.
• Your mother died giving birth to you and you’ve been part of a government experiment ever since.
• Your religion has been outlawed, why won’t you give it up?
• In this new world, burning books is considered a sport. Why?
• What if the country ran out of water, would the capital ever tell the rest of the world?
• Food in the future is scarce and beautiful creatures called clones are meat, but they aren’t people.
• What kind of dystopian world has no hive conscience, no way for the people to know what their lives are like?
• The ravenous forest wants to swallow up your town. You need to learn to use dark magic to save the town.
• Your parents and little sister were captured when the lights went out.
• You anonymously post news about the odd goings on in your town, but the government decides who can read and what gets printed.
• Everyone has their own group to go to, but you feel like you will never fit in anywhere.
• You live in a place where you can make one phone call a day and you must say exactly what you are instructed to say.
• The scent of roses floats on warm summer breezes.
• Anything goes, no genre particular.
• Your yard is invaded by giant jelly babies, how would you eradicate this threat?
• Your people were killed while you were away by an enemy who specializes in tying people to poles.
• All words required for everyday life must be sung.
• Become One of the Few That Survive in The Aftertime.
• A bird just dropped that…thing on your head,
• A man in a white coat can be heard over the loudspeaker every Sunday morning, a sermon of sorts, by none other than God.
• A towering walled-in city had captured your freedom and now you’re getting back at them.
• The government is killing people for having too many kids, you are having too many kids.
• Your body is a prison, control can be extracted from anywhere in your body.
• Forced isolation is the standard in this new society.
• You’ve never seen the sky – a whale crashes into a tanker miles out at sea releasing a poisonous gas that kills almost everyone in town.
• You can see and hear people across the country as if on a television.
• The president’s son, the prince, has gone missing.
• Laughing gas attacks everyone every night.
• The hybrid you’re driving has just completely failed you, some scientist has just put a stop to it.
• Imagine that an author inadvertently wrote his or her own death sentence.
• With the currency reset every day, you learned long ago to only buy what you can consume.
• No one in your town remembers what is in the outside world.
• A bio-weapon destroys all technology on Earth as people survive living in the ancient world.
• Was it all a dream, or did it really happen?
• You choose when you will die.
• Everyone knows you, or can at least see you, and nobody cares.
• You have the ability to see the future, although that future has been set and can’t be changed. Use this ability to its fullest potential.
• A person can only get sick/Injured every half a century.
• You are a humanoid robot, but the robots are on the streets and you need to go out of the city before they get ahold of you.
• A walled city is slowly being taken over by a jungle.
• When you listen to whispers at night they come true.
• Using only found materials, create a sculpture for a sculpture of yourself made out of a strand of your own hair and fingernail clippings.
• An unintentional mistake lands a girl stripped of her humanity and falling victim to the ways of the world, where it’s every man or woman for themselves. A nuclear war has just hit the outside—no one is left alive. Cl cleansing the dust and radiation is up to the prisoners working in the fallout shelter, but do you want to make that sacrifice?
• There is a group of people that regularly commit suicide, why?
• A cat can speak with humans and the other animals are trying to figure out what the cats are saying.
• The city of York fell into the hands of a disease known as ‘the red sickness’ that made your skin turn red and caused death. Tell the story of how the government took over and banned travel.
• There are no sweets in the world any more, why now?
• What does your community do when human waste becomes an immediate threat?
• It looks like rain—you hope it is rain, nothing else could survive.
• The government or a corporation comes and buses everyone away, where are they taking them, and what are they doing to them?
• Your neighbor tells you that the TV informs them what they need to. Every Saturday night a “movie” is played before the TV goes silent again. Every night the movie plays exactly the same way—what is it?
• It is illegal to smile.
• No one being allowed to marry or love ‘the one’ is illegal, why?
• You are one of the chosen few that get to start over on an uninhabited island.
• Suppose superheroes actually existed. How would the world react?
• A dragon flies past your window every night. What does he look like?
• Everyone you love is gone, everything you want is impossible and you’re dying.
• He knew it was over the second he found her bloody body, by one of the disappearing people.
• You are the chosen one.
• Any set back can be overcome with drone piloting skills.
• Society chooses sliced bread as the only food to be eaten, but people still can eat.
• Anything below the equator is considered unworthy of travel.
• You are cloned and that clone must go to the Capital and eliminate the government and there is only one you.
• Humans are dying out slowly because they want to.
• A lifetime ending when barely hitting double digit ages, how do we maximize the experience?
• Everyone must take their piano skills to a higher level. Be creative but also be able to stretch your fingers to the max.
• The government has outlawed movies due to a person from the film becoming sentient and killing several employees of the cinema.
• Save an artificial leader or save the real one.
• You wake up gray and paralyzed, where do you go from there?
• Where does the water come from? Where does it go?
• Your legs. You don’t have them. In their place are encased pistons that propel you through the complicated clockwork of the world.
• The wrong side of the coin dictates the rules of this society and if you don’t like them you’re in line to become the town scapegoat.
• Kids hunt down adults and eat them. Seriously, why would we do this? Simple- because we all enjoy a good dystopia/utopia/ post-apocalypse/end-of-the-world-is-up-our-street man. We love the total madness of twisty narratives and sharp societal undertones. Frequently, the best phrases I’ve heard have come out of middle school when they start to encounter the real world- in that first plot twist you’ve probably not experienced yet- so maybe they do know their talkin’ a whole lot of good.
• Your father disappears and you search for him.
• The local police are putting in surveillance cameras on all of the residents and raising taxes on everyone.
• The population is controlled by mandatory sterilization, you find out your autistic older brother was sterilized so he would never have to worry about being a father and a burden to his caretaker.
• Why shouldn’t you pee while taking a hot shower?
• A strand goes missing. No one can find it, each time someone goes near it, they lose time.
• You have a special gift, but only if you find certain people with a special tattoo.
• The ground may be solid, may sink into the abyss, may disappear in some other unknown way at any moment in time.
• A haircutter finds universal love in the forehead of his clients.
• The Groundwater’s gone, now the humans must live on the rooftops.
• Each day everyone wakes to a new sign created by a nearby village. What do the cribbles mean?
• Three children get lost in a cave and stumble into an underground city where people have booby-traps.
• An influence has come over your town and no one questions what happens, you were born with the courage to question.
• The government height and weight regulations for women make attempting to find love impossible.
• Everyone in the town is a zombie, how do you survive the politics of the zombies?
• The mist is red at night and black during the day. Why?
• Your waffle iron tells you the future because you’ve been chosen by a dead French feminist.
• What is the government trying to accomplish with the suppression of basic rights?
• You’re on death row and you wake up in your cell the next day, fully alive.
• Carrying anything bar money is considered littering.
• You were born with wings.
• You’re poor and hungry. Every meal you prepare for yourself is poison, but if you don’t eat you die. Why are you getting so hungry?
• Everyone lies to you, all the time.
• Magic is real, but does not work without a contract?
• You can’t step into water because you will melt, when you are in water you never stop shimmering.
• The rich are the only ones who look healthy while the malnourished are starving.
• They have taken every piece of art in your house away, and frame it proudly.
• Someone has accessed their brain and replaced all negative memories with happy, kind of memories.
• How does the dystopian world view knowledge and how do you gain it? What do you do to obtain it?
• Even though the Carnivore Initiative was said to have ended giving results, your brother goes missing.
• The mantises have now evolved and are starting to prey on the humans.
• How would you escape the Dome?
• The cataclysm has been over for several years but the survivors, struggling to grasp reality after all they lost, compound the already formidable challenges of rebuilding their lives, reverting to the natural order of things or all out anarchy and chaos to conquer.
• Everything is fine on the Surface until you happen to go deep down below where everything isn’t so fine.
• Everyone has a tracking device implanted under their skin.
• An oppressive force smashes idols of leadership everywhere in an effort to tear down the government.
• An apocalyptic event destroys all mammals except human females and they all go into heat and try to mate with you.
• It’s illegal to be attractive and you, being the most desirable member of your immediate family, were disfigured to protect a source of power.”
• You are interrogated by a government official, but you don’t get it—why are you being questioned?
• After a catastrophic travel accident the sun rotates in a complete circle underground, heating everything on the planet.
• A new type of pill helps you hate everyone. You can’t lose.
• If the world is ending the why wait to fix it?
• It is the end of civilization as we know it and those in power are feeding themselves well while the peons starve.
• Everybody is segregated by species, how do you survive while being labeled as an “animal”?
• Your government doesn’t want your country to learn a certain history.
• The government is corrupt, but the highest power in the land is an orphan girl.
• All human males are dead or missing, now society must depend on female rulers and males are used as slaves, what kind of world does society create now?
• A mental institution runs human experiments on patients outside of regulations.
• Man has destroyed the environment to such an extent that a future generation will never know what it is to see the stars.
• A clock counts down the time left on Earth.
• Reactionary new laws by the government have left you with no choice but to join one of the nation’s criminal organizations.
• A nearby country begins using female soldiers, and yours is the first in response.
• Water is either rationed or non-existent, who steals to get water, do you?
• Those who take their lives are at peak happiness and have their debts erased.
• They keep crying that they’re manning up society, and stealing your rights as a human being.
• Forced labor is the only way to get by, are you tired of it yet?
• A woman living in your town somehow died but because of her pregnancy she kept getting weaker. Her soul is now inside any plastic sealed food or water in the town. If you consume the soul with say the tomato soup she was hiding in your refrigerator, you gain her powers.
• Everyone you knew was just wiped from diverse memories.
• Is a black market profitable if those who sell don’t survive?
• Engineering geniuses allow dolphins and manatees to talk and walk upright, and are conscripted into the government as soldiers.
• The government may be stealing babies, how do you survive in a world that is void of adults and humans to fight?
• The entire world is made of towering stone monoliths.
• A giant divide in socioeconomic status creates a caste system where you are created many levels below your actual ability.
• If you have to grow food, it doesn’t have to be pretty.
• Free contraceptives and abortions are a given, when the right to procreate is one of the greatest things to take away from people.
• Stay out of the ocean or the sea will swallow you whole.
• The people of your town send their “deviants” where others should not see. What happens there?
• Butcher boys roam around at night stealing and executing people in gruesome and horrific ways.
• Somehow you sprouted wings and can fly. What do you do with these new abilities?
• The only children allowed outside are the ones who are injured.
• The population needs to return to a sustainable number, any child not born to a married couple will be taken away.
• Raptors abound in the world, you are one of the few ‘Ephers’ who helped defeat them back and live a bitterness-free life now. Why are there so many rumors about happenings at night?
• It’s the Dark Ages! Conan the Barbarian runs the European Union!
• Things were just solved, the kingdom has been saved… or has it?
• There’s a new district in the city, but as to why it’s about one third the size of the few other districts, nobody knows… For this prompt you write a post about your character trying to figure out the mystery behind what is going on, along with details of everyday areas.
• Do you get money to go to the grocery store or stay home to work private jobs to get what you need?
• You wake up in an ancient, dusty elevator and the only access is up via the buttons inside.
• A tiny island in the middle of a great sea is the only continent left on the planet. Only one man has been there and he’s coming back with a survivor.
• Happy citizens keep away from the fence that surrounds the town.
• A toy story-like play on plastic surgery.
• All immigrants are immediately given the ultimatum to join up and change your identity or be arrested as enemy aliens. Do they survive?
• Five kids at your age have ended up like this and no one knows why.
• You find a black box, maybe it’s a TV, no wait, it’s a camera!
• What do you do when no one can agree on reality?
• The numbers on your house mean more than how many floors it is.
• In order to escape into the outside world, you will need to complete a series of riddles.
• Gypsy’s can see the future, but a secret government agency has found and killed all of them, except one…Some eggs cannot be hatched, why else?
• You are a member of the rebel faction, but your inadvertent moment of weakness could have you executed.
• Where’s the receipt? Crowds preach that followers of Jesus must repent. You did not receive a ticket for the payoff. How are you going to get in the queue for this time travel machine?
• Cotton Candy is extremely addictive and the supply suddenly reduces to only a month’s worth. Department stores sell the precious substance and it is bought and sold on the street with different theories on its sudden loss.
• Stop, Brain, Stop! An Essay of How to Marry the Miraculous
• A man runs by toward you, people run out in warning after him, a beast leaps toward him and eats him in mid-stride.
• People who disobey the law are killed and hauled to the graveyard, run-ins are inevitable.
• A coin toss determines your fate.
• Discover a hidden secret about your neighbor or family, and you aren’t allowed to tell anyone.
• You can have any intro you want, as long as it’s written in a journal logging your descent into madness.
• You live inside the walls of a spaceship that travels through the solar system, resources are scarce and so is air.
• A nationwide sensation called Watch It! shows you what you desire most, and isn’t afraid to make it abundantly clear why you don’t deserve it.
• A devil walks into your school and you are his only challenge.
• Boys ran the world until it was no more. Now women run everything, but they still get drunk and cry and bring boys back to the room. This must be outlawed.
• The sun is gone, but there is light. Do people venture to different sides of the world? Where do they go?
• An explosion wipes out everything in the whole world, minus a city that survived. The people who lived there are now immortal. But the blown-out city is creeping itself back into civilization.
• People are dropping like flies from the virus but there is no sickness.
• Your job is protecting the money, but suddenly all the money goes missing.
• Chess is against the law, do you cheat?
• Why do mechanical birds so often question the struggles of the common man?
• Your parents were certified insane, they did not want the government to get their hands on you so they planted you out into the woods hoping you would be found and live a normal life.
• Every time you blink or look away, your job changes. How would you survive?
• All men are gone from the world, how do women conceive in this new world?
• Everything is peaceful as is the new way of life, why does no one question it?
• Everything in society is based on keeping the economy running, so people are always working.
• The authorities do not want you unfit and in the way of their agenda to rule as they see fit.
• Machines patrol the streets, always watching us. – Draw this scenario as a comic.
• A disease no one ever contracts or contracts and never does anything more than causes a bit of itchiness and a rash.
• No one but a forgetful and naïve dog can see or hear you.
• A nuclear holocaust turned the clock back to The Age of Feudalism.
• A mysterious being is killing people’s livers, leaving nothing behind but a birthmark and a newborn.
• Weather balloons litter the ground after the sky was once clear.
• Light becomes closer to a precious resource.
• You sit alone in the cold dark of your jail cell, wondering how you got here.
• Time is running out and the town is preparing for it, knowing their doom.
• Some children remain innocent after a dog eats their entire family. How do they adapt?
• The crime you see on the news happens to you when you step out that door.
• Giant mutant cockroaches plague society and anyone who gets bit, not only dies, they are brought back to life, but changed, now they are an even bigger mutant cockroach!
• You sing in your sleep and the government is after you.
• A plague takes the skin off your body, leaving stickers in its place.
• The casinos had only the letter “Z” in their names.
• How do you survive when you are forced to fight to the death each year?
• No one in the world can speak.
• Everyone within the sound of this dog barking is being transformed into the dog, what happens next?
• An entire island is covered in mushrooms, you decide to enter.
• No one can be trusted, not friends, not family, not anyone, always suspect ulterior motives.
• You have the ability to put people to sleep at extreme ranges and with ill effects.
• Extreme temperatures and windstorms seem to be the norm of this new world, why did your world change?
• You disappear and the world moves on as if you were never there.
• Today, time travel is illegal and you just accidentally used it.
• People are being transported from your town and never coming back. What do you do?
• Start a diary in which you must convince yourself every day that the outside world is real.
• Your dreams, blood sugar pain, laughter and nightmares are all reality.
• Children all over the country are escaping into other worlds, yours included.
• Severe lack of food supplies makes mothers prostitute themselves.
• Just because you’re levelling up doesn’t mean everyone else has to die.
• The population of all the towns are told not to leave, but you secretly want to.
• It’s not safe to lock your doors, it’s not safe to have any kind of shelter, it’s not safe to hope for a brighter future.
• Your town doesn’t have human inhabitants, instead, every day, pigeons take over and they do it right where you work and live.
• A killer has declared war on anyone whose birthday is the same as his, what will you do?
• Nothing ever ages, once it exists it remains the same forever in salt containers in the city hall.
• Your mother insists on dating your best friend’s older brother, but he’s actually a man-nequin. Who has feelings and a love life.
• People have no control over the weather. They can only look at it and wonder what is going on.
• An artist is painting intricate portraits of the citizens of your town, maybe they will make it less lonely.
• A community of clairvoyants and you are the only one without special powers. The establishment is depending on you to fail, but you refuse.
• Your boyfriend brings home what he claims to be a robot, but it surprises you every time.
• A character wakes from a coma and has to pretend they are a completely different character.
• Everything you used to know has suddenly disappeared as if it never existed.
• Your smartphone doubles as your battle mask and projectile weapon.
• A person disappears every day.
• You hear a distant howl that grows as the days run out.
• An earthquake knocks out Wi-Fi, cell phones, and electronic devices, how your society handles STDs.
• A group of people do drugs that allow them to travel back in time. However, they forget their time when they get back to where they were.
• A nameless enemy destroys everything, but every year until your death there is a glitch.
• What if the Ridiculous were Prohibited? Things get pretty political.
• The food in this dystopian world causes food poisoning or a mutated version of food poisoning.
• Your friends are what holds you together. Just them and some duct tape and you’ve got it made.
• Your eyes glow everytime you drink because you can see into the future.
• Work together or face a fate worse than death.
• Everything you do must be done with the help of your computer.
• If you see someone shrink or grow, you’re next to go because you’ll have something to tell.
• Men have no legal rights, women have all the power and live in a post-apocalyptic world, men however wreak havoc in secret gangs as they stalk the city at night attempting to rescue babies being held captive far from the city by their high tech captors.
• No one is allowed to wear flip-flops outside and a dumb boy can’t learn to break that rule.
• What happens to the prisoners who are electrocuted/burned alive/shot outside in their cells each morning?
• You are taking an aspirin, but it’s actually poison and you are slowly dying.
• A severe storm keeps everyone inside for weeks, but one morning you get to your front door and see something out of the ordinary.
• Instead of air rights, you get land rights. And those “rights” are constantly being taken away from you.
• The SWAT Team has your husband surrounded at work. You have to save him, but how?
• This game is intended for you to have fun with so spice it up! Use published dystopian works or go off the grid, whatever tickles your fancy. Don’t use setting material from your own published work. We want to see original characters and settings!
• There is nothing more unsettling than the look of the unknown.
• Some evil being is controlling everyone beneath the Earth, the people of this world do not realize it.
• You find out that you are the product of better breeding techniques. Are you happy?
• You hear them approaching, but what do you use to warn the others?
• All food has a price tag, but it doesn’t come with nutritional contents.
• Seven children are told, “You have the week to stop a war.”
• An invented history gives rise to a new world, which is a second chance.
• There are rules posted around your town that no one pays any attention to, but everyone follows.
• Everything in the world is green except people. The air is thick and respiration is difficult, but you can move through the pollution with ease.
• A world where you need a license to marry someone, get a job, and have babies.
• The government tells people that chocolate is poison, people are surviving on sugar tablets.
• Any followers of Satan are required to go to the department of the opposite of what they believed in and live there.
• A new cure is released, everyone must get it by midnight or they start festering and then disintegrate.
• There’s a bunker under the city and past generations have left instructions and notes to us, but only you and no one else can read the notes.
• Your childhood animal makes an appearance and is now your only friend, it talks.
• They’re incredibly smart…and they’re incredibly deceitful…and they’re everywhere.
• When will the last oil spill happen?
• An annual uprising by the “leadership” occurs when the common people steal and pillage what’s left of the city.
• You know you’re never going to find the person you lost.
• If you saw a monster, there would be no hiding and no escape.
• A technology update gives us the ability to monitor people’s every move, what strings are being pulled?
• A sudden disease spreads across the world and people catch it by making eye contact.
• Disease wipes out the population except for a select few immune, how do they survive? What stops the disease from wiping them out too?
• The Mayan calendar ends with a sharp boom…
• Hand in your alarm clock and so forth and so on.
• A boy comes of age in a world where every night the soldiers burn and powerwash his village clean of the day’s perspiration and smells and night marks the change in the world. A shift in the pattern and he is inspired to flee his home and unearth the source of the wires that fill the streets.
• Every week there is a random curfew issued and it changes every time and varies from house to house.
• Every inhabitant of your orphanage is adopted out to different families every weekend, you must behave if you want to be adopted yourself.
• The government tells you that you are chosen as their number one perfect candidate for society. You have no choice.
• An alien race attacks and kidnaps a legion of soldiers and elite neurosurgeons.
• Gamers become the actual characters from their favorite video games.
• Everyone must limit their time out of the house, else get sent to prison.
• Everyone gets out in time, right? Wrong.
• Everyone on Earth forgets your name but those who know you best.
• Lynch the innocent and let the guilty prosper.
• So very many alligators have been raised from darkness and age old folklore comes true.
• Fantasies are illegal and punishable by death.
• Threats of nuclear war surface, but you are blind to all of this because of your contact lens.
• The sun is the last natural resource on earth, and expectations of how the sun operates have forced everyone underground.
• Everyone can speak every language whether you know it or not. When you do not know a language, you speak gibberish.
• The government has mandated certain colors of the paint on houses. Why?
• You get in an argument with your parents and they lock you in your room during the summer.
• Life right now is a flashback to the past. Are you alive by mistake?
• An accident turns a small town into bubble people.
• In the future, you can live on Earth, below ground, or in an orbiting spaceship. How do you choose which to do?
• Time is running out. You have seven days to live after taking a holiday’s worth of opioids.
• Similar question as above but with children being exchanged for animals.
• What makes your town distinct from the rest?
• No one is allowed to say what they dream or state their desires out loud for fear the government will take it away.
• Mutants, demons and cannibals walk among us, but not all is what it may seem, until you see those teeth.
• Your labyrinth undergoes a transformation every few hours, get ready to keep track of that maze.
• Your village needs fresh slaves for the arena.
• One day you wake to find that you no longer have a penis, on the plus side, you do have period-like symptoms now.
• A private plane lands and lures the people of your city into the jet.
• The girls are all missing but no one seems to notice them missing.
• You’re accidentally thrown into a panic room, what will you do?
• Talk about the weather with someone and your throat slowly dries up.
• There is a new entertainment from Software, Inc. called Rewind.
• The reason marriage is illegal is because you will be bought by who you get married to, do you still want a marriage?
• How do your relationships suffer due to your mutations?
• Crime doesn’t exist, but you’re still too upstanding to be a vigilante.
• You never die, but can only heal to whatever wound you sustain.
• Hallucination propaganda is everywhere. No one knows what is real and what isn’t.
• Find out who keeps exploding the moon.
• Break curfew and you are eliminated.
• Growing up your parents leaned towards a certain political party, now if you vote a certain way they will make sure you pay.
• Every woman is stabbed in the heart with a needle and has their memories wiped. What happens when it happens to you?
• An invasive species is taking over the planet, they’ve already gotten what you have.
• You wake up and your name is different.
• A strange tickling sensation can’t be explained, but there’s not much time for research.
• A school fire burns ALL of the students, but their forms are preserved in pebbles.
• A robot has won a local election, the community is surprised at the turnout.
• Outing someone counts as treason as well, so a total hard left-wing society fights to contain the knowledge at all cost.
• A machine you rub on the wrist not only ends your current life, but also resets your age. To have a new life, you would have to re-enter your current name and age because if you were to maintain your current memories, well, you’d know what you were up against, right?
• The government is stealing babies and you’re next.
• Is it where you’re from or what you believe that defines you?
• The sun is gone from the sky. A dark being devoured it.
• How do people rebuild their lives after surviving a plane crash?
• Did you know you’re not quite human anymore?
• Only the people of the royal family are allowed to read. Those who do are punished, but nobody knows what.
• People are disappearing every night. WHO.
• Write about how life would be in a controlled economy or a city that is ruled by one dictator.
• Every person in the world is required to hand their cell phone to a person who is an alternate version of you.
• Everything is free, but it could all change at any moment.
• Before you go to sleep you need to recap the happiest moment of your life so someday it will haunt your dreams.
• Maybe we’re not meant to know everything. Maybe there are things that we shouldn’t know.
• Your life as a single was deprecated, do you join a harem or not — and if you do, are things really any better?
• People are being forced to marry the person so appointed to them.
• The whole adult population is just gone, leaving only children.
• If they smile, you can never leave. You were a warning sign.
• Rebel with your brother against an aged government.
• Every family has a Darius, and Darius can’t speak. Not even whisper.
• No one looks down on you or judges you, in fact you can do whatever you want in this world because the village is completely desert wasteland
• Give into your urge to survive and kill.
• Dragging your every move is a ghost which won’t let you rest without a night of terror.
• How does censorship only work in America?
• There is a wall surrounding a city, anyone who wants to enter or leave is shot – by snipers.
• The government controls all oxygen, thus also controls all breathing.
• The war has begun, but is just not being reported in the papers any more, why?
• You’ve got one week to decide whether or not to kill your comrade.
• The government has already called round-ups, how will you hide your non-DMusic-follower beliefs?
• Everyone over a certain age is compelled to walk into a giant windmill, but the first time it happened it had no effect on you.
• The President is choosing a new wife, those are the rules.
• Your town’s population begins to rise from the dead.
• The stupid card was revoked.
• Your city is ruled by diseases and these diseases convey social status and stimulus.
• You’re gun shy when it comes to being directly involved with the Resistance.
• Advanced robots somehow became self-aware and enslaved the human race.
• A meteor hits the Earth and sends the entire Northern Hemisphere into a deep winter, how do city and country-dwellers survive?
• You are the leader of a movement to throw the bums out who just stand around and do nothing when trade laws mean you will lose your country’s resources. Your protests are for nothing because your new government just pushes harder and when this fails to silence you, they push harder. What next?
• Some people’s secrets can save them. Other’s can destroy them. Which is it for you?
• What lies beyond the walls of the great white city?
• Your neighbor offs herself and you find out that she had also murdered her family before killing herself.
• Shipping container homes full of American fans of the royal family must find places to live after being kicked out of their housing.
• Find your name on the government’s death list and have a particular pleasure for the fear in your eyes.
• Two teenagers are told what to do and what to eat and what to wear their whole lives. One night they decide to leave.
• You end your apocalyptic novel with a child born in the rubble crying out, giving hope for the next generation’s survival.
• Gun control backfires and the country is in chaos.
• There isn’t anybody you love anymore.
• What if the only thing we own is really owned by Corporations?
• You’re at a party, and you can’t get over the fact you’re surrounded by a bunch of dead people.
• At first it seemed like life was turning around but the man you married ends up murdering you and all of your joy.
• You smell silver, it’s tasty, but silver is the currency.
• You can still remember life with your family, but not every person grew up in the same culture.
• The answer is candy. The question is why?
• Vampires aren’t evil, but they are misunderstood and dependent on human blood.
• You can only breathe if you lay on your back.
• Some awful virus makes everyone crazy with murderous energy except you, you don’t get to participate, can you make it?
• After going without for so long, just a single taste can send a human to an addict’s high.
• The point of living is now illegal and frowned on.
• Someone’s coming to kill you but you’ll never know when it’s coming!
• A terrorist survives the bombing he planned to commit, how does he use his new power?
• The government is training children to be the future leaders of society.
• A nested doll, inside of a smaller doll, inside of a smaller doll…
• one of your friends was replaced by a robot
• The day that begins like any other is no longer so everyday.
• Black and white zones surround a center area filled with people. The black and white zones are barren of all life. What is the deal with the colored zones?
• Endless torture is your sacred right, and you’re forced to abide by it.
• Build your own utopia and define what three laws you would establish.
• The prettiest girl in town lives alone with her single dad in the one abandoned shack town.
• You are on a work crew, a long-lost luxury you’ve now regained, and you see…
• The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere drops and becomes poisonous.
• A virus has spread globally. Some lose their hair, some lose their hands, some lose their minds.
• You meet a chillingly polite cult leader and he invites you to join his group.
• Someone sneezes in front of you and you hear ‘All Hail the Revolution’ just that quickly.
• Vampires are taking over the world and are luring out victims with freely available cocaine.
• The dictator of your walled-in town is a hot lady, everyone lusts after her.
• Nothing works and you keep receiving bills every month.
• You come back from the future and people don’t believe you, even though you’re used to having them deny you.
• The energy market is controlled by one company, their monopoly is killing humanity.
• There are surveillance cameras in everybody’s home, watching everything they do.
• No one knows he’s a prince but he’s vapid, has no motivation besides partying, and has everyone drooling over him.
• At night, you just don’t know what creatures will appear.
• Who you callin’ an Anchor Baby?
• Demon possession seems to be a curse in your family.
• Page after page of numbers equal the total of human lives remaining in your world.
• Orders are orders and you’d best abide by them.
• The crime rate is going through the roof, but the police told you it is peaceful and safe and something is false.
• You signed a contract to have surgery to become healthier, never mind the side effects.
• It’s the zombie apocalypse, but embracing death is strictly forbidden.
• The dead become alive. What happens when bodies rot away and only a skeleton remains?
• The government demands blood from the townspeople every year, why?
• The fridge is never stocked at the library.
• The power goes out overnight, what will you do?
• Supplies are just barely enough for the community each year.
• A plague hits your walled-in town, but instead of people dying, they just disappear into a poof of smoke.
• Find maps of hidden underground tunnels used to escape hundreds of years ago.
• You are constantly stuffing small objects into your stomach, but you can’t keep them there for long.
• Will there ever be an end to war?
• A computer program that procreates humans.
• Someone has been digging for treasure in the cemetery, can you find it before it reopens?
• A ruler has banned all fiction. How does this change reading?
• People live freely and in nature together like animals without clothing or other signs of civilization in authoritarian America.
• Two people are selected each year to leave the city for a two week vacation. They are allowed to take one luxury with them.
• Riot police surround the city and anybody out in public is taken away.
• It’s ending soon, but not the way the televisions say.
• The Government is in jail and you can see their window from your house.
• What happens when the government is involved in every aspect of your daily living?
• Crows and gulls have ravaged the earth, now fish fly and snakes are crossbred with fish to come to life on land.
• Everybody and everything is infested with nano-bots running on normal electricity.
• Your city is completely surrounded by neon green trees, but every plant you touch feels smothering and dark.
• The desktops of government officials are fairy-tale land maps showing the location of every citizen.
• All you know is the old world is gone and these things live in the new one.
• A digital shadow follows you, you have no control over it, what do you do?
• Breastfeeding is a felony offense.
• The only way to discover the truth is to kill.
• You pick up a stranger’s lost cell phone but it’s not just a cellphone.
• What does your race think of eating babies?
• A new disease you can only get by eating the brains of the deceased spreads over your town.
• Mobs roam the streets daily, looking for women to attack and violate. What do you learn about them?
• Your house is surrounded by bombs that will go off if you leave, how do you live?
• Which is more important, breathing or eating?
• Why would someone want to hide away in this bunker?
• You must defeat the Corrupt-a demon that lives in your very heart to survive the breach.
• What would war be like without any guns involved?
• Anyone who does not fit the current society model is to be thrown into a river, one of you has a genetic deficiency.
• The earth is dying and if something irreversible happens, cloning will be key to the human race surviving.
• Pick some animals and create possible future mutations of those animals.
• Brutality at bayonets of an evil army on a black hearted battlefield, day after day, after day.
• A dominant militaristic culture takes over and anyone who speaks out is systematically exterminated.
• Every morning the paper records the number of deaths from the night before.
• After the purge, starting every year on x-day, no one dies, anyone who attempts to commit suicide is knocked out for the day.
• A scientist invents a device that sends everyone happy thoughts, even if it means electrocuting them.
• The mushrooms taste like chicken, are you eating a cow?
• An event in your dystopian world brings legends to life.
• The history books have been tampered with, you are sure of it when you begin to question everything.
• A new wave of sleep paralysis is affecting everyone, no one is able to sleep peacefully.
• A lighthouse sits there in the distance, when did it get there?
• A curfew on TV and radio, so citizens don’t become discontent with their lives.
• After a death in civil war, your new government requires that everyone carry a firearm all the time.
• Your father is lying on the ground, you run up to him thinking he is asleep, he isn’t, he has a knife in his back and he isn’t breathing.
• The stars are out because they glow in the night and then shatter and fall to Earth all over the world.
• Reality changes and you are the only person who can see it.
• Walk through the doors and you lose your family.
• To escape the laws of this land you must kill a person.
• All the history books have been eliminated.
• Your freedom of speech was taken away forever when you were brought here.
• A war rages between you and your nation’s neighboring country and women can’t even get pregnant.
• What does a child not want to grow up to become?
• War is the only reality, but the rules keep changing.
• A cure for cancer is discovered and you awake one day to find yourself immortal.
• A riot has broken out in the streets, you must escape by any means necessary.
• You wish you could sleep through the night, but your dreams are haunted by zombies.
• You wake up and find that a group of religious zealots have taken over your hometown.
• Find a boy. Save him.
• Things were better in the old-school ways, or so is claimed as government officials are thrown in jail daily.
• Devils in the mirror, how do you get out of this one?
• A senator’s son dies mysteriously and the wild conspiracy theories spin out of control.
• You’re on a TV show featuring ” normal people “. A loving shunning cult that loves to shun is formed around you when you speak opposition rather than supporting their beliefs.
• Men are scarce, women are plentiful, so begins the new world order.
• You need an I.D. from the Department to purchase anything.
• Always under lock and key, but you’ve gotten in before and you’re looking for some place to hide.
• Upon your father’s death, the debt to his company divides between you and your twin daughters.
• Society is telling you what to do and how to act, if only it would stop talking.
• Dolls, while not alive, are better than real parents, you have to take one and they choose you.
• Your neighbor just disappeared and the government claims he doesn’t exist.
• A mysterious box shows up at your doorstep, it always has a viewer on it who wants to talk to you.
• Too many people are breeding, as if there is no tomorrow.
• People that get upset turn to stone, but no one knows how to help them.
• All animals are gone from the world, how do people in this new world survive?
• Make up your own dystopian future.
• It is final exam week and as you look at your essay, you quickly realize you have no idea what you are actually writing about.
• Cost of living is so high, it costs a million dollars for a loaf of bread.
• How do you outsmart the government if that’s what they want you to do?
• A mad scientist has taken it upon herself to fix you up, it hasn’t worked out yet.
• The government is the only thing keeping humanity going and they’re a Blood Lord kick line away from the end of their act.
• You wake up from a dream to find yourself in a post-apocalyptic world.
• Send in general oral history questions to mj at merrimack.edu for them to appear on the podcast and your name to be entered into a raffle to win a free book.
• There is a question you must answer every night at midnight… and if you do the question, you forget it the next day.
• As you’re loading up your truck in “the morning,” your parents forget the most important part.
• There are no books in the world except one.
• Every room in your home is fitted with cameras and everyone has loved ones trapped in a castle.
• There is only one child.
• In this world, people write on a tablet’s surface with a stylus, instead of writing on paper.
• Ghosts are everywhere and there’s no escaping them.
• The computerized police state finally arrests you for something you didn’t do this time.
• The boy you’re in love with is entering a modeling contest where people can bid on who is really the most beautiful, and he might have had facial restructuring so he can win.
• The human genome has been modified to ensure there can never again be a World War. Discuss.
• You take a pill to control your dreams, what happens when the supply runs out?
• A race of pasty, white men with fishy eyes climb out of the sea.
• Youth just got the right to vote, what do you decide changes?
• Automobile travel is banned in a desperate attempt to save the world, but you insist you have to go.
• Someone is murdering all your family members.
• Dating is illegal, find love in other ways.
• Your four year-old is gone, the police say he probably just wandered off.
• Uncle Sam and his cronies are outlining new rules for American life.
• Government experiments have gone bad resulting in destroyed or mutated plants and animals.
• A man lived and an old woman died. A trio of knives from ailing hands make free his prison called the world.
• Machines have destroyed people’s minds, but the machines have evolved into something that harms humans as well.
• Create a world from a tourist guide brochure from your own present-day country.
• If you’re a female, you better be wearing a dress.
• Everyone works in a smelting industrial greenhouse, the little people working the furnaces, the larger Hempons on top of the gondola equipment, the rest of the grossly pox-scarred population in the offices.
• Your family is the only family on the block that the government recorded as extinct, should you walk up to your house?
• Help! You get kidnapped in this lifetime, how do you get away?
• The water tastes sweet, why do you think this is risky?
• What are some of your favorite Dystopian writing prompts?
• The aliens you’ve been abducted by aren’t entirely evil, but what are their intentions with you?
• To ensure the safety of all citizens, you must relocate. Where? What will it take?
• Only the wealthy can afford to buy houses and everything else is rented.
• Battle for the truth. No one has any real truth, but what if they did?
• The adult you is as real as the girl you were yesterday.
• Through a mysterious agreement all the people of a small town decide that nobody goes in and no new people are to be born.
• No one can die in the city they live in, people simply vanish.
• Your sense of smell returns and you just can’t tell those scents apart.
• Not all plagues are biological…some are emotional.
• You can never fall in love because you are the only eligible bachelor in your district.
• You wake up on a step, covered in a thick coating of moss looking at a group of people surrounding you, but you haven’t a clue what they’re saying.
• A black fear has swept the country, a disease is sweeping the population. Be careful not to spread it though, it can sometimes make you invisible!
• Chains hang from your ceiling and no one in the world can explain why.
• No one is allowed to have children while alive in the city. Their bodies are buried and under their names sprouts a new tree. If you want to see your family again, go to the garden cemeteries of the city.
• You were walking alone at night and ended up in another dimension.
• Your lucky day awaits! Grab a ticket and get to the front of the line.
• Dogs are growing human ears, some of them can talk as well.
• As you slip through a mysterious vortex, your world stretches into vast distances.
• Sugar in all forms and amounts is banned. What are the effects?
• Something is growing in the woods and one day it stopped.
• Find a way to survive the zombie apocalypse thanks to the combination of your wits and a book by Nietzsche.
• Find out what happens when the human race acquires telepathy, everyone hears everything.
• Everyone you love is listed in a notebook, and one day that list simply vanishes from the world.
• Everyone is upset about how rude teenagers are, how do you prank the population into thinking it’s getting better?
• Your child will never reach maturity because they will be murdered by their birthday.
• Sir Issac Newton invented a computer to predict the future, the computer never predicts the same future twice.
• A lab experiment gone wrong wiped out 99% of the world except for you and a handful of others.
• A government program that will promise everyone a higher salary now that their muscles are cloned.
• You become sleepy whenever you hear music, how do you try to stay awake?
• The world transitions from feast and famine, causing all to die of starvation except you.
• You know when someone is lying and when they’re telling the truth.
• The cure forverty is darkness, not communicating with the outside world or light or your friends or family.
• Being a teenager in a dystopian universe is rough.
• A deadly virus is killing without warning, what does the government have planned?
• A group of teens and a mysterious boy escape the testing facility on a boat.
• You write a story and it’s called, “The Ones That Got Away.”
• A desperate housewife makes her own home clothing line and all popular stores start selling these clothes for free.
• The Junk picks you.
• Out of search for a cure, the government has begun testing an experimental medicine on children.
• You marry the guy of your dreams but on your honeymoon in the country he turns into a murderous psychopath.
• The population only increases by one
• Your fingerprint determines your fate and your future.
• An object falls from the sky and everyone seems to be going crazy for it.
• Your talking pains you, so you have to turn it off right after you get it.
• Everyone in the town kills themselves, all body parts are disconnected and/or hidden under floors.
• The government declares war on chocolate.
• Look for a stone and if you find one, do not pick it up. If you do, you will release something terrible into the world.
• The government is telling everyone that the way they live will keep them happy. What will discredit this government?
• The homepage of the internet is changed to nothing but propaganda and white noise.
• Your serial killer ex has come back as a deranged zombie and wants to date you.
• A small handful of people go into the woods, but then never return.
• The world is in ruins, except for one pristine city that dominates the land, beautiful yet oppressive.
• Dressed in white robes, this mysterious shadow has taken over the town, towns people flee to the city, but to no avail. The only way to go to another plane of existence is by choice.
• You haven’t ever been able to speak. You can talk through a Chirpwriter or Handy.
• Any body sustained a sight plague, including the eyes and skin.
• People start spontaneously combusting for no good reason.
• The Earth turns and you’re always facing the sun, your shadows and darkness are non-existent.
• Don’t leave your house because the neighborhood is haunted by killer mannequins.
• You are granted a secret wish, but it loses its magic when you realize the world has stopped making wishes possible…..
• Have you ever had a story that had you so consumed that you didn’t sleep for days because you just HAD to finish it? What was it? Please share in the comments’ section below!
• Forced to marry, but heaven forbid you make love to one another.
• Is your face displaying on the Commerce posters?
• Once there was a little boy who really adds up, how do math and family life work now?
• Some of your everyday appliances are now electrifying and killing you before you get the chance.
• Genetic modification is now possible and cloning of animals is allowed.
• The voice in your head is talking, who is it really?
• The government knows future crimes before they ever happen. Cue snitchin’.
• You lose your husband and then, a new and very handsome one arrives.
• You are the last person left of your race and are living in a bunker…and the computer is turning on itself.
• A pug dodges the bombs till he thinks the coast is clear. When he gets curious, he looks and the road is filled with smoke.
• The president’s daughter is trapped in a kids’ game by triggering a bomb strapped to her chest. They call you to save her from a cruel fate, but you have no special skills or abilities.
• Whatever you thought could do or could help others do, think again.
• Your planet’s sole source of food is rapidly declining and it’s unclear that the remaining sources of food will be enough for its raging population.
• A dreamcatcher-like bug occupies most of your home. It grants you wishes and collects your nightmares.
• Everyone is required to turn in one person who has done no wrong and the reward is great.
• Your government tells you one thing, but you know for a fact that that’s not the beautiful truth.
• Troupe, maybe, or not, but you are one of the only people with tattoos left. No one knows what they say anymore.
• You have to work slave labor for food and shelter.
• You catch a virus and die immediately. But after your death you rise again but not as yourself.
• A boy’s name means more than he could ever imagine.
• A servile world where everyone needs a license to do everything.
• One room jungle cave where air and food are recycled but a clean copy of everything is uploaded into the lost archives each week. Now you just hit speed-read.
• The city is overrun by huge lava monsters and you manage to survive only to be walled in by some unknown strangers.
• A strange man in a black leather coat and red aviators watches your every move.
• Someone randomly dares you to be brave.
• A fast food restaurant advertises “pork, so delicious they named it twice.”
• This is neither the America nor the World you once knew. Is there anything left of it?
• You’ve been shot out of the air by an oppressive regime when you accidentally flee from drying some outside in the rebel zone.
• You make navigation out to the ocean, in that primeval world, do you try and survive?
• His heart was a match for mine, but his appearance contradicted his heart.
• The government prohibits everyone from falling in love and high school tests are randomly giving out romance papers.
• Men are the destiny of women, not their enemy.
• How do we all die this time?
• Read the rules, play the game, and you’ll stay alive. If not, you’ll just disappear.
• A parent tells you they don’t love you, and you find out they actually just have no feelings at all except this weariness. Your whole life was a lie.
• You’re being tested for your allegiance to the government. Will you resist and join the resistance?
• A day that starts out grey, but by midday is hot.
• A family survives raging riots for the price of their youngest’s life.
• Over time, more and more of your freedoms are removed through laptops and TV’s brainwashing.
• The crime, if there is one, is unregulated candy shops.
• People are allowed to go outside in the mornings only.
• You are protected against the bad things in the world by the needles in your spine.
• The world is in chaos and you have just been released from the refugee camp.
• Many years ago someone wrote a powerful spell. Now someone is trying to unleash it. What Alaric Scamander saw in his last minutes–the thing that can only be seen once Death has you by the neck.
• All the adults suddenly die and you try to survive through dog-eat-dog anarchy.
• The plague is spreading, only it isn’t, and you are its first victim.
• The human race is insanely lethargic, it is almost impossible to find something that makes your heart race noticeably faster.
• You’re a slave for your country. The only entertainment you and your friends can tolerate is books.
• The poor followers of Maurice might get to heaven, but first they must work.
• A gun stopped working with only one bullet left, what happens to build this story?
• The government knows all your secrets and has no intention of helping you unless you’re ready to pay the price.
• If you see a tattooed face past your town’s gates, prepare for battle, but why?
• There never were any computers and everyone lost their minds when this was revealed.
• Everyone you love is dead and it’s all your life’s fault.
• You see police everywhere, but they don’t wear uniforms. Why?
• You find a room under the floorboards of your house with a hole in the wall to a dungeon.
• Children are disappearing right before your eyes so you decide to write a manuscript to warn people.
• A computer glitch erases all adults’ memories of your country.
• Your travels take you to a foreign land, filled with field upon field of nothingness.
• Children are disappearing from the town you live in. What did you do when you heard?
• Everyone is free and equal, there are no cases to argue and your title is the same as the man standing in front of you.
• What were you before the wall was built?
• All children are taken from their parents and sent to an isolated place to be raised for the government’s use.
• A secret society leaves dolls on your doorstep to spy on you. The dolls explode to reveal insects if you try to touch them.
• Everyone has a phantom matchbook in their pocket and there is no match to go with it.
• Giant guinea pigs live in all of the major cities in your country, no one knows what they are doing, but they are very big.
• A prodigy has just been born and the leader is coming on your television tomorrow night.
• A race of aliens has come to earth to grant a select few humans the ability to live forever, at what cost?
• After every murder on death row no one dies anymore because someone dies in their place.
• The desert has swallowed up civilization, but there is still WiFi in your backyard.
• You can’t move and you can’t talk, but someone can hear your thoughts
• Everybody lost their memories overnight, for no reason except that somebody does not like them.
• The future of America is blackened with a nuclear wasteland that is unrecognizable from what you grew up with–though you may find America familiar with symptoms you had not previously noticed.
• The walls are not that thick and no one seems to notice but you.
• The sky turns orange and people become obsessed with cats.
• Government officials walk down the streets with big nets, catch who they can and take them to the city’s prison for no apparent reason.
• Every man must fight, there is no right or wrong side.
• Systems have been installed on all vehicles and buses follow a set schedule, including the law enforcement.
• Everyone remembers their first love, and for Lucy it was a UFO abduction.
• A terrorist organization kidnaps journalists to cover its work.
• Your blank Tarot cards turn out to contain the answers to your uncertain future.
• The credit card companies and banks have made loans compulsory, Does your character find money obsolete or not able to pay?
• Humans live in a vicious cycle of existence, every day the same, the vision never changing.
• It is illegal to be poor or sick.
• A robot comes to life and begs you to help fix him.
• The battle is over, every soldier alive goes into cryostasis. Except the rebels win the war.
• Vehicles are banned.
• You’re the only person not sick. Who’s supposed to save the world?
• No one knows how it happened, but one day wal-mart stores just opened.
• What is life like when you work for the government?
• A person outside your walled-in town wears the cloth of an old culture? You’ve seen nothing like it before.
• An alien ball of light and energy hovers above your otherwise ordinary town.
• Your teacher doesn’t always look like your teacher, sometimes a robot, sometimes a hologram, how do you respond?
• The world is ending… in a couple years.
• Your parents encourage you to volunteer for ways to be healthy. You don’t know they are signing you up for human testing for something.
• No one actually lives in your city. People visit some types and stay in hotels, but everyone works in other parts of the country or world.
• You’re good at art, the holocaust museum needs you to fix their paintings.
• A million years in the future, what have computers done to the world as we know it?
• All pain gets erased, but there is no antidote for sadness.
• Certain lands don’t produce sounds or songs but you owe your ancestors and your life to those very lands.
• Your family is stolen and replaced with robotic clones. No one realizes the difference but you.
• Your mother abandoned you the day you were born and never came for you.
• An outbreak of Marburg Virus infects the population, but the only symptoms you know is your skin scalding red.
• Eternal sunlight/starlight will give those that bathe in it an ageless look, but at what cost?
• The missing persons list gets longer and longer, but it turns out it’s your date for the weekend.
• The sun is setting earlier everyday.
• How did your grandmother die?
• If you think about your crime, you are found guilty. To an outside observer you are innocent, what crime did you commit?
• The world is ending, nobody cares.
• You could call your mom who lives on the other side of the globe, but what if she can’t hear you cry for help…
• Women rule the world and no one can tell them what to do.
• Government becomes a more powerful hug.
• What happens in this animal domestication facility doesn’t always stay in the facility.
• Life is simple and without luxury, until one day the company who provides your life’s necessities announces sudden change in the way they do business.
• An engineered plague hits your country and everyone must submit themselves for testing.
• Rise up against the evil regime, destroy the corrupt government.
• You’re your own worst enemy.
• Technology is no longer functioning, now all we have is gun powder.
• Tibetans are being forced from their homes to make room for a mining company’s headquarters.
• The last thoughtful person on Earth, the only literate person left in the science-fictional world!
• A woman who drank the wrong serum is giving birth to herself.
• What do you do when everything is close to perfection?
• Your religion has forbidden thinking, they do all your thinking for you.
• Technology is used to predict heroes or villains before they are even created.
• You’ve never met each other but you’ve found old books, letters, and postcards that tell a story of a previous time.
• The mist covers everything at night then disappears with the sun’s first rays.
• Each day a man walks by you and screams at you through a megaphone to find his missing daughter.
• After the adoption, you lose all contact with your biological parents. There is no one to replace them and you live the rest of your life never knowing anything about who you were before the government took you away. When you die they take your baby to replace you.
• All roads lead to one place.
• Humanity is devolving into barbaric old tribes, what keeps you from losing empathy?
• No one knows who the ruler behind the totalitarian government really is.
• You have been dating the same guy all through school, but now you have to choose between him or your mother.
• Be a fugitive. Escape your town and live in the cave of the woods because it’s the only place you can trust.
• You kill yourself with a flip of a coin, no matter the outcome.
• Your dog can only bark, it can no longer make its usual yappy noises, that is unless you do your chores.
• Step out beyond your front door, and the brutal reality comes rushing back.
• It is your job to give false memories to a new group of young children, your life may depend on getting the fake memories right or you might not even have one.
• Everyone suddenly loses their sense of balance and everyone dies.
• Your city/town is empty when you wake up one morning. It is only you… it is only you…
• The government is killing the mentally ill population, it is called the Labeling Plan.
• Strange fliers fill the skies every day, but they do not fall. What could it mean?
• You are given a questionnaire in which you can’t say no to questions lest you suffer the consequences.
• Eighteen hours a day of soap operas, reality T.V., soap operas.
• Everyone who has tried to escape a walled-in town has come back with tattoos within a few days. What would happen if you tried?
• If you are caught keeping pets, you and they will die horrific deaths.
• The crime rate is at an all time high and Gordon the shop owner is only one man.
• Once a month, on the full moon, everyone in town devolves into a wild animal.
• Siblings that were split up to be raised around the country are now able to find one another.
• Your lover’s story is different than yours…will you ever find out the truth?
• There is no longer any living or dead. Living people are stuffed into shipping containers for use later, dead people buried in trash.
• In the future children are replaced with machines grown in vats, oh how you wish you could have met your real parents.
• Who will win, the poor or the rich?
• If you fall out of line with the government, you become the enemy. What happens to the enemy?
• Time travel is illegal unless you want a lover from the past into your present.
• You’re a citizen of a giant city that has a track that circles the city. You have to dive into a random hole and wait a week before coming out.
• You come watch your neighbor, but you just can’t leave.
• You can read a book and find out your future, but each time you do, you lose your sense of smell.
• Airplanes have crashed and killed billions of people. Do you care? What are you doing now?
• You live in a world of clones where everyone but you is indistinguishable.
• Everyone goes bald for an unknown reason and the hair remains in jars around home.
• You feel a quick prick and then no more – you know you’re dead and soon to be dissected.
• You shot the Mad King at the end of the war, but you had no choice in the matter.
• You have a red coin in your coin purse that says, “Above all, do no evil.” Where did you get it?
• Someone could cheat death, what would the ramifications of that be?
• Your daily necessities are provided, but you’re not allowed to know how or where exactly.
• Nosebleeds start occurring and then black specks are found in the blood.
• Tattoos are a cultural style in your country that literally feed you. What happens when that system eventually fails?
• To live you have to do one evil thing on Earth every single day.
• Small odd shaped parrots plague a town releasing a cryptic message before going to sleep.
• Life on your floating island is quiet, but why?
• You are a group of kids with abilities who have been locked in a Government prison for their whole lives and are forced to do experiments on each other.
• You can see two moons in the sky but the mysterious one disappears for weeks on end, where does it go?
• Traps are laid throughout your city without warning, and you don’t know when you’ll stumble onto one.
• A common city drug transforms people into monsters.
• Every single person has natural, electric blue hair and it’s illegal to dye it.
• People arrive on campus with no knowledge of themselves, good guys or bad.
• Your town, Last Stop, gets an invitation to a prestigious Academy Award style awards ceremony, where everyone will win.
• A new law threatens to grant witches mob justice.
• You have nothing to eat, but the guards feeding your family don’t care either way.
• Who is the mysterious runner girl?
• Fear takes on a physical form, what form does it take?
• What makes you a hero when there are no heroes left to save us?
• If you stand in the town square at noon you will disappear.
• You can’t tell anyone how old you are.
• You can see light on the other side of this storm, does the government know about this?
• Your village is burning and you must grant forgiveness to the arsonists or burn forever.
• An earthquake hits and leaves your home uninhabitable. Your family must evacuate their home into a crowded cabin and live off the land for at least one year.
• The world has been cleared of humans, but millions of small animalized creations run around.
• Dogs walk on their hind legs…can they also go to war?
• What is the best form of control?
• Your husband tries to abandon you, even your 9 year old son, and you can’t help but to remember what happened with your husband’s last ex-wife.
• You’ve invented a device that lets you look invisible. Why do you not use it?
• Two people in the small facility that holds the last survivors of the human race are also in love.
• You’re implanted with a microchip that counts down your remaining life hours.
• Your new planet isn’t what was promised at all and it is nothing like Earth.
• But what was stolen from him might not be water, but blood.
• Your children have no faces? Why?
• You are the only normal family left in the world.
• Your brother ARRsIMG Strategies For Photo Scavenger Hunt
• You get one send of a postcard from your best friend saying “have fun on your trip because that’s all you’ll get from me in life” and then they never post anything else.
• Find the boy with the initials ECG and stop the approaching rebel forces.
• All books without permission are punishable by banishment from your dictatorship.
• Standing at a crossroads, you could go right or you could go left.
• You wake up overseas and you start hearing your employer’s voice on a hidden speaker coming from your brain.
• Your recently lost child has been found alive, but all her teeth have been removed.
• A tower turns all within its great walls into stone. How did this happen? Why?
• What do teenagers do in YOUR society when their parents and older people don’t allow them to leave their barracks and learn about the outside world?
• Life is a pyramid and each day you climb up a little higher. What if you slip?
• No one goes to school ever again, why? Why does their world function without schooling?
• There has been a horrible crash, and you are the only survivor, but you were in the last car.
• A certain criminal has been sentenced to execution for the rest of her life, now forever for she can regenerate.
• There are no boys, there are only “oops” babies that pop out of the girl’s skirts, why?
• Your name is all of the exactly same characters.
• Vampires founded the republic of Karova.
• Women are being kidnapped and replaced by cloned doubles, for what possible reason?
• Read dystopian fiction!
• Due to a drought and the population explosion, mandatory in-home euthanasia has been enacted.
• All U.S. Citizens are expected to turn weapons over to the government upon the event of martial law being declared. Something went awry.
• The creator built this as a gift for you and your kind to play it out on. The creator despises the gift and your kind.
• All wards are women, but women from different eras.
• The government wants to control fertility but the only way is to put a chip in everyone. You have the chance to get out of this but at what cost?
• Your invention can bring about the end of the world or brilliant new age of technology.
• How does the government rule?
• A town banishes it’s criminals and the unproductive to live in a pile of trash so they don’t burden the town.
• The desert eats the living, but never the dead.
• A floater is an inflatable bag worn upon the head to create a realistic illusion of a living person for funerals and brush clearing.
• The government is a true democracy and everything seems okay…but you know better.
• Young man, the rest of us have already found the cure, you must think outside the box and find your own.
• Something lurks in the dark, but isn’t limited to the trails of red that seem to always follow.
• Sitting in your parked car with your son, you watch horrified as all kinds of farm animals from all over the country are marched to their slaughterhouse of doom, wondering if it could ever be your turn.
• The Food and Drug Administration has just unveiled “Food Drug Zero,” a drug focused on eliminating obesity.
• No matter what you do you will always be a slave.
• You wake up in a hospital bed with absolutely nothing on this clothing body.
• Hit the high rim and you might just change your reality for a little while.
• You watch your lover get impregnated by a very busy alien.
• Everyone can know how you are feeling at all times.
• The previously mentioned anarchism club is on fire, why?
• Everyone is fighting for sanity in a loss of mind due to extended fight or flight.
• Scientists have found the remains of a dolphin-like creature.
• Nothing operates on any electric power and you hate it.
• The government is forcing children into military service, what happens to the kids who refuse to fight?
• A creepy circus is forming in The Great Smoky Mountains, it won’t be long until the evil clowns are coming after you.

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