Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #88 - Informants
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 - Informants
The use of informants as a way for those in charge to maintain control of their people is as old as humanity. It might just be someone mentioning something overheard to a village elder, or it might be a pervasive and oppressive system of organised informants (often mutually informing on each other) as was seen in East Germany under communism.
Tell me a story of informants from your setting ! Who is informing on who, and why ? Are informants rewarded, or do they do it out of fear ? Who do they inform to - a single person, or is there a structured system ? Is the system anonymous, or does everyone know it goes on ? How do their peers react to the informants - are they stigmatised, or seen as loyal good citizens?
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.