Fun For Friday: The Big Pink Book of Prompts, “We go together like …”
As promised, here’s my version of the second prompt from the Big Pink Book!
I numbered the washi tape dots from 1 through 20, but I also made two columns. The left-hand column is genres, and the right-hand column is locations. I also added an extra sticker to this page–a d20 that looks like a sunset over water.
To use this random prompt generator, roll 1d20 for each column and see what weird mashup of genre and location it gives you. Some of them may not make any sense at all, but I tried to make each location generic enough that you could, with a little bit of work, make any pairing make sense. (Okay, Fairy Tale and Inhabited Planet MIGHT be the hardest one.) And if they absolutely don’t, then you can reroll one or both dice!
There’s also a very small chance that if both dice roll high, low, or on opposite ends (1-3 or 18-20), you could wind up with a perfect match of genre and location, since I duplicated the first three genres at the end. You could also reroll in that case, if you want to give yourself a challenge!
You can create your own mashup list by numbering a sheet of paper or electronic document 1 through 20 and listing out matched genres and locations across each number. You could also add a column for character archetypes in addition to or instead of one column. There’s a TON of ways you can take this basic template and put your own, unique spin on it.
But if that’s more work than you want to do, feel free to enjoy my table of genres and locations, and let your imagination go wild!
| Number | Genre | Location |
| 1 | Fantasy | Castle |
| 2 | Sci-Fi | Spaceship |
| 3 | Horror | Haunted House |
| 4 | Steampunk | Factory |
| 5 | Urban Fantasy | Nightclub |
| 6 | Post-Apocalyptic | Compound |
| 7 | Superhero | Lair |
| 8 | Dystopia | Settlement |
| 9 | Fairy Tale | Cottage |
| 10 | Cyberpunk | Corporation |
| 11 | Science Fantasy | Training Academy |
| 12 | Weird Fiction | Unknown Depths |
| 13 | Space Western | Frontier Town |
| 14 | Mystery | Locked Room |
| 15 | Solarpunk | Garden |
| 16 | Dark Fantasy | The Moors |
| 17 | Dark Sci-Fi | Planet (unexplored) |
| 18 | Fantasy | Battlefield |
| 19 | Sci-Fi | Inhabited Planet |
| 20 | Horror | Temple |
If you come up with a different way to use this prompt, either in terms of the columns or content, I’d love to hear about it! Feel free to drop a comment here on the blog or reach out via email.
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