Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #120 - Swimming in the Sea
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 - Swimming in the Sea
Mankind has always had a strange relationship with the sea. For much of history, seas were the highways of trade and travel, faster than any other method but riddled with dangers.
Few sailors until modern times knew how to swim; the sea was a terrifying place of sharks, whales, jellyfish and nameless horrors. But it's unknown if that applied to travellers in the Neolithic, or the Polynesians who bravely sailed catamarans across the Pacific in search of tiny islands. But it's thought the Easter Islanders were good swimmers based on some rituals they may have had. It's also suspected that some of the earliest humans were good swimmers and boaters, based on huge middens of sea shells along the coast of Africa that formed almost all of their diet.
Tell me about the seas of your setting ! Are they warm welcoming places of refuge, or cold places to be avoided ? What lurks beneath the waves ? Do sailors swim happily, or try desperately not to be plunged into dark waters ? Do people go to the seaside for pleasant picnics and days promenading along the seafront, or are beaches desolate wastelands caught up between sea and land used only as sites for human sacrifice ?
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.