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 - Centurions
Somehow, I've got to 100 prompts in this series ! So it seems appropriate to tackle the topic of centurions.
In the Roman army, a centurion was the commander of a century. Nominally a unit of 100 men, in reality after the Camillan reforms it would have a maximum strength of 80. Prior to that, it was more of a social organisation than a military one, with a cunning twist that votes were once each century reached consensus, but the higher status centuries had less people in and voted first, making patrician votes far more influential.
A centurion was an experienced soldier, with promotion based on merit, good conduct, time served and personal courage. Being something of a cross between an officer and an NCO, modern armies don't really have an equivalent. Despite being nominally a junior officer, the Primus Pilus (literally "first spear"), the centurion in charge of the first century of the first cohort of a legion, would be someone the legate (commander) would lean heavily on because of his depth of experience.
Does your setting have a status equivalent to that of centurion, either social or military ? Someone whose professionalism and experience makes them natural leaders, respected above their nominal status ? Who are these people ? How do they qualify and get promoted ? What title do they have, and what benefits come with it ? This is a prompt you can really twist and have fun with !
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.
