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 
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Capital Punishment
Humanity has a long and complicated relationship with capital punishment. Indeed, it's only in the last few decades that governments have started moving away from it as the ultimate sanction. But in earlier societies, it was sometimes seen as a lesser, easier way out than the worst punishment of exile.
For a long time, capital punishment was intended not just as a way of dealing with serious criminals, but also as a deterrent and public spectacle; sometimes even as entertainment. Methods of execution varied over time, with greater or lesser degrees of barbarity and lingering, until the French industrialised the process with the introduction of the guillotine. It's strange to think that at the time it was regarded as thoroughly modern and humane !
Tell me about capital punishment in your scifi or fantasy setting. Is it still even a thing ? What crimes are seen as deserving of it ? How are people executed, and is it done in the privacy of a prison yard or as a public spectacle ? What rituals surround it - protracted drum rolls, a ritual procession around town, a symbolic forgiveness to the executioner (who may be hooded or masked for anonymity) ? What happens afterwards to the bodies and the possessions of the convicted - are the bodies displayed in some way, given to science for research, or just thrown into the nearest river ? Are there people campaigning to change the way it is currently done ?
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
- 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;
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂