A Warm Welcome

Hello Wordsmiths and Worldcrafters, and welcome to the Forging Worlds Competition!   My name is Benji, and with my teammate Chloe, I run the youtube channel Tale Foundry. If you haven’t heard of us, that’s perfectly fine—you can check us out here! Tale Foundry is essentially a literary analysis show where we dig into how fiction works, and then use what we learn to write our own short stories. We’re excited to be teaming up with Janet, Dimitris, and World Anvil to create something really unique with this competition, but we’re going to need your help to do it!  

The Brief

So, what exactly are we doing here? Well, as anyone who makes a hobby out of worldbuilding will tell you, stories have a habit of emerging from worlds you make. But it can also happen in the opposite way. Sometimes you need to build a world for a pre-determined story. This is very common for us when we’re working on content for the show and, in fact, it’s going to form the bedrock of the competition.   We’ve provided you with the “seed” for the story we’re going to write below—now it’s your job to create the world in which it’s going to happen!    

The Seed

There have been creatures hiding in plain sight among the populace for centuries, but only now are the people becoming aware. They must race over the course of the next week to prevent the catastrophe that will result from their discovery.

 

What we ask of you

The seed provided above is half of a setting (conflict and duration). In this contest, your job is to create the place (location and time period) when the event described in the seed takes place. By answering at least the first five prompts in under 6,000 words, detail the where, who and how of this event. Tale Foundry will pick a winner, and write and broadcast a story set in the winner's entry!    

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE CREATED A WORLD BEFORE YOU START WRITING YOUR PROMPTS!