Thriller Writing Prompts

You have been kidnapped by a human trafficking ring, & it’s unlikely that the authorities can recover you at this point. Unfortunately for your kidnappers, your SO is a member of the Greek pantheon.

Your son is extremely friendly, and he’s befriended a man he encounters on his walk to school every week. Well, it turns out that this man is the head of a mafia crime family, and now he’s turned up at your front door, backed up by two of his ‘friends’, requesting to be your son’s godfather.

You're on a hike and find a sign, it reads: "WARNING DO NOT LOOK AWAY. There is a danger here, the danger is based on sight. The danger cannot see you if you cannot see it. Help will arrive every half-hour. DO NOT LOOK AWAY." The sign has a built-in clock, it's 3:15pm.

An immortal warrior with centuries of combat experience settles down to run an orphanage. Slave traders kidnap some of the children...big mistake.

You partner in crime has pulled a gun on you. "The truth is, the game was rigged from the start." You know that very well, mostly because you did all the rigging.

Your "spouse" of 20 years has just confessed to having an affair, but they don't know your secret catchphrase. You suspect whoever or whatever is in front of you is not your spouse.

Through some mysterious means, everyone began to die on their birthdays. Slowly the worlds population dwindled, until December 31st finally hit. It’s been 3 years, and you’re running out of time to find a solution before February 29th comes.

It’s been 125 years since you were given $1 million and immortality in exchange for being hunted down by a super-intelligent snail with a fatal touch. Everyone you knew at the time have since passed. You are tired of running. The thing is, in the past 125 years, you haven’t seen the snail once.

You are a cabdriver. But you don't drive any cab, you drive The Herocab, a cab that any superhero can call if they need to be somewhere urgently. Today you were called, only to find the hero a bloody mess on the ground and a villain, the hero's phone in hand, standing over them.

Your chief administrator is a spy and a traitor. You have known this for years. You'd also hate to get rid of him. To rise in the ranks and work his way closer to you, he has proven to be the most effective administrator you've ever had. A vast improvement on the loyal idiot he replaced.

You wake up with several messages on your phone, all of them from your friends and family telling you some variation of "TURN ON YOUR TV NOW". On your way to your living room to turn on the TV, you see something out of the window: dozens of camera crews standing outside your home.

Anonymous "Hero" donates human kidneys, blood, eyeballs, and various organs to the hospital every week. The number now tallying in the hundreds. Doctors and news outlets are wondering where they acquire them from and whether it is ethical to use them. Surprisingly, its not a serial killer.

You’ve been regularly clocking into work all these years, afraid that leaving the mob means that they would silence you like in the movies. On the other side, every member of the mob fears the member who has lived through eight different leaders.

You, a fake clone, are stuck in the classic “Shoot one, let one live” situation. To your horror, the person with the gun outsmarts you and uncovers that you were fake all along. Just as you brace yourself for the bullet, they point their gun towards the real person and pulls the trigger.

You receive an emergency alert on your phone telling you that a nuclear device will be detonated in your area within the next 10 minutes. 11 minutes later you get another alert saying "This test of the Emergency Alert System has been sponsored by Oppenheimer, in theaters July 21st."

The abductors looked at their young captive, astonished at their calm, almost pitying, expression. "I have 15 siblings. I am the youngest, and the only boy/girl. You have absolutely no concept of how fucked you are."

You’re a mind reader, but your whole life everything has sounded like gibberish because of how random people’s misconstrued thoughts are, until one day all the voices shut off and you hear one very clearly say “run”

You run a quaint deli that's beloved by the Italian mob. The NYPD have also become frequent patrons. Neither want to start a confrontation in your shop.

You have a soft-spoken, mild-mannered friend who would never hurt a fly. One day, you accidentally overheard them talking over their phone in a cold, apathetic voice, "I don't care how you do it. If you don't return the money by tomorrow, you can say goodbye to your family."

You tried an online ancestral DNA test just for fun. To your surprise, just after an hour, the FBI broke into your house and arrested you.

The young heir to the throne gets kidnapped. They're gagged, blindfolded and tied to a chair in a basement. They're not even nervous, on the contrary they're curious and intrigued by the situation.

When you found a Dark web chat room full of murderers and other horrible people lamenting ‘the ones that got away’ or detailed current plans and stalkings, you were horrified to find a series of posts from someone stalking… YOU. And you don’t very much like their plans for you…

Many gunslingers carve notches into their weapons each time they kill somebody. One day a stranger arrives in town. The metal of his gun(s) is completely covered in notches.

You've been out of the game for years. Retired, have a nice life with a dog. And then you found out. They cloned you! They cloned you and had no idea what they were dealing with and now they want you to "fix" it. Well, you're going to fix it all right!

“You are the most evil villain in the world. But you have no powers. How do you do it?” The reporter asks bound to a chair.

"A robot's trying to hunt down and kill you?" ... "Don't you know that the first law of robotics-" ... "H-How the hell did you piss off a robot so bad it stopped seeing you as human!?"

"You did it! It works!" They cheered. Meanwhile, you're terrified, you fudged the numbers. It shouldn't have worked.

As the eldest child of a wealthy family, it wasn't a surprise that you'd get kidnapped. The surprise was that your parents didn't pay or even acknowledge that you're missing. Taking pity on you, the bandit gang decides to take you in and raise you as one of their own.

"Dad, I made a new friend and I met her dad! He wants to invite you for dinner!" You choked on your coffee. Your son making a new friend on his first day of school is great. Realizing that said friend is the daughter of the Mafia don who now wants to meet with you is downright terrifying.

Your family was killed in the chaos of magical girl combat. "Collateral damage", the government said, "Acceptable losses". Well, now you have the tools to get your revenge.