Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #133 Famine
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 - Famine
Human history is full of famines, with all kinds of root cause. Archaeologists have found that changes to climate, rainfall and the Nile flood led to crop failures which were significant factors in the fall of both the Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt. Nature is usually a factor; too much or too little rain, flooding, sandstorms, plagues of locusts, or volcanic eruptions can all trigger crop failure and famine.
But human factors are important too. Troubled times and warfare can reduce the agricultural labour force and cause irrigation infrastructure to be neglected or destroyed. Government policies can influence farmers to adopt a mono-culture (e.g. leading to the Irish Potato Famine). Some cases, such as the Holodomor, Cultural Revolution, and Cambodian famine, can be ascribed to deliberate policy or (at the least) seriously misguided policies. But good governance can mitigate the impacts of famine; the story of Joseph in Egypt from the Bible is a good example, as is the origin story of the Xia Dynasty of China.
Tell me about famines in your setting ! What was the cause ? How did the government prepare (if they did), and how did they respond ? What did it look like from the perspective of ordinary people ? What was the overall impact, and how did it end ?
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.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
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.
People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂