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Example prompt 1: Every citizen receives a monthly public score for how predictable their behavior has been; the protagonist’s score suddenly drops despite changing nothing.
8 Dystopian Prompts Examples
Use these examples to study structure, specificity, tone, and variation. They are demonstrations—not claims about a real person or organization unless the example itself makes that explicit.
Before you copy
What to notice in the examples
Strong dystopian prompts make the system concrete and internally logical, show who benefits and who pays the cost, and give the protagonist a personal dilemma inside the system rather than relying only on generalized oppression.
- A clear story or reflection engine rather than a broad topic word.
- At least one constraint, contradiction, relationship, image, or consequence that prevents the obvious first idea.
- Enough openness for the writer to invent characters, setting, voice, and outcome rather than merely filling blanks.
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Example prompt 2: Cities compete for rainfall allocations, and residents can trade future drinking-water quotas for present debt relief.
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Example prompt 3: People may vote only on issues they have passed a government knowledge test about, but the test questions are secret until election day.
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Example prompt 4: All jobs rotate every two years to prevent inequality, except one profession whose members never rotate and control the assignments.
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Example prompt 5: Personal memories can be legally inherited, and children are required to carry one memory selected by the state.
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Example prompt 6: Housing is free, but every apartment records one hour of resident conversation each week for “civic research.”
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Example prompt 7: A city has eliminated traffic deaths by banning unplanned travel; the protagonist must justify every route forty-eight hours in advance.
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Example prompt 8: Schools assign each student one lifelong specialization at age twelve based on a predictive model no family can inspect.
Keep the underlying decision or pattern, then replace the subject, evidence, relationship, constraints, and tone with details that belong to your situation. If your final line still works after swapping only one noun, it may be too close to the example.