1158 Writing Prompts About Time Machines

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Have you ever wondered at least once in your life how it would feel like to have a time machine that would allow you to travel back in time to correct past mistakes or go to the future to see how your present decisions would affect the future? If your answer is ‘yes,’ maybe you should consider writing a story about it to satisfy your curiosity.

Enter writing prompts about time machines.

Below are some storyline suggestions and plot ideas that would allow you to write stories about time machines and time travel that would work for any genre, including sci-fi, adventure, historical fiction, and fantasy. May they inspire you to create short stories and novels.

  • You use your time machine to go back in time and kill Hitler.
  • You accidentally open a wormhole and find yourself back in the Middle Ages.
  • You travel along a relative’s family tree to discover something unpleasant about your past.
  • A sudden power surge transports you 400 thousand years in the future.
  • A time traveler with the same machine as you asks to see the future, but in order to do that you must both target the exact same place at the exact same time.
  • You develop a time machine but can’t find the main power button.
  • When your time machine arrives, the city is enveloped in a black mist.
  • You use a malfunctioning time machine to try to save someone you don’t like, only to find yourself doomed.
  • You’re the first human to govern outer space.
  • You discover a small vial of glowing fluid and a note stating that it can deliver anyone from a fixed point in time to another point in time relative to their own current position.
  • By the power of God, your time machine crashes in prehistoric times and you are stranded there. After months, you encounter one of the creatures…
  • You send your time machine to the future, and it explodes when it reaches its destination.
  • You parallel park your time machine in a space that is much too small.
  • An astronaut arrives from the future with a time machine. He shows you some things that may or may not happen.
  • The past shows you a previously unknown superhero from the future who’ll be the next savior of mankind.
  • You can’t stop yourself from using the time machine.
  • While seated at breakfast, a time traveler sits down, telling you stories about the future.
  • You strangle a loved one to death in the past to prevent a terrible future.
  • A woman from the past shows up asking if you know the date and you do. Then she explains that people from the future made her travel back in time to ask you this question.
  • Your grandchild hears you have a time machine and asks if you can travel to the moon to see if there is life there back in the ’70s before NASA sent a probe.
  • A time traveler appears in front of you, takes you for a ride in his time machine and asks you to go to eight years in the past.
  • You enter an uninhabited city with dozens of buildings in ruins. You wonder when it happened and what caused it.
  • You travel back in time to meet an ancestor you previously only knew by name or reputation.
  • You discover that changing something in the past makes your present and future different.
  • In the future, fresh water can be purchased, but it is illegal to drink water from the tap.
  • You want to travel in time to visit a specific person or event.
  • Your future self tries talking you out of doing something, but you ignore your future self.
  • Someone claims they visited you in the future with a time machine and that the events they described are taking place in your present.
  • You travel off the end of the world and back again transforming your planet in multiple ways.
  • You meet yourself in the past and stop yourself from doing something crazy.
  • You accidentally travel back in time and ruin your own birth or your own death.
  • You witness your favorite crime take place. You send yourself back in time to stop it.
  • A person from the future appears before you in a time travel suit.
  • But what writing prompt would be complete without an interactive presentation?
  • You travel a million years in the future and return to find the whole planet has been ripped apart by the sun.
  • You journey back in time and witness the death of your own mother.
  • The time machine gets broken beyond repair. What did you do?
  • You see into the past and find out your life is about to take a turn for the worst.
  • Your final time travel expedition before retirement.
  • It is 2064 and you have invented a time machine capable of going back fifty years in time. What have you been doing for the last fifty years that allowed you to build the time machine?
  • You meet yourself in the past using your time machine.
  • A small boy from the future steps into a time machine asking for his past life.
  • Your time machine erupts in flames.
  • A scientist steals your time machine and hides on top of Mount Everest.
  • Someone steals your time machine. Possibly to go back in time and give you a nicer model.
  • A dying homeless person asks you to take him 50 years in the future with your time machine. The drug addict is so charming you contemplate sparing his life, just to see what will happen. Or maybe you could help him recover. Or would it be better to help him now? If you bring him forward in time would he become cured automatically?
  • You build a time machine to learn how grandma will react when you tell her your relationship.
  • You are playing cards with Adolf Hitler and accuse him of cheating.
  • What is your favorite thing about time travel? Remember that there are no bad answers to this– you just want to write right now!
  • You visit yourself growing up through time with your time machine.
  • You take your date to the future, but somehow end up back in prehistoric times.
  • You accidentally visit and alter the past. A different version of you comes along with you and gives you sound advice that – with your original time machine – prevents the history disaster from happening.
  • You’re on an island where everyone has a time machine, and yet refuses to use it on moral grounds.
  • Someone you love time travels.
  • Your time machine closes and then opens again a minute later, erasing a decade of your life. How do you survive?
  • You plant your time machine into the back garden so your distant relative could use it to go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby.
  • You find the vision you have just experienced a year ago to be true.
  • You decide to fix the future by backtracking to the beginning of time and making sure the Big Bang never happened.
  • You’re able to correct a fatal mistake before it happened. But when you return, what is the correction you don’t do that makes the fatal mistake be there anyway?
  • You find yourself in the Stone Age and you use your time machine to make yourself his great leader.
  • You travel back to a time where you have already been and see yourself doing something you’ve never done before.
  • A person is inspecting your time machine and is just about to touch it when you beckon them not to.
  • What good is traveling through time to visit prehistoric dinosaurs.
  • Your biggest competitor is working on a time machine very similar to yours.
  • Your last chance to see your dying grandfather in the hospital is in the past, when he was alive and well.
  • You accidentally kill yourself with your own time machine and there’s no way to prevent it.
  • All attempts at designing a time machine have failed, until your invention worked. What are your feelings on accomplishing a goal no one else could? A) Excited B) Angry C) Scared D) All of the above So, we designed the time machine correctly and built it. Now we’re going to send a person into the past… Who should be the first? How does he react to seeing yourself without knowing who it is? In the middle of a heist, you realize your temporally-oriented watch is working again. What would you do with your chance to do it over? Another inventor and you begin to have a rivalry. What steps can you take against her/him? Your logical time machine reveals that paradoxes are a basis for your universe. Will you continue to use your time machine or try another one? You travel to the future and see that from 2150 to 21505, humanity began to haven the universe until we encountered a powerful adversary. We lost
  • You get the idea to use a time machine to overthrow your boss.
  • A time traveller arrives in your time and claims he owns every book in a library you spent your life years building.
  • You travel back in time to do something evil to yourself in the past and it all backfires.
  • What historical event occurs three hundred years into the future?
  • An inventor is working on their latest invention. It looks like a normal box but is much too small to fit any living thing inside. What does the inventor claim will happen when they turn it on?
  • You’re been critically injured by a time traveler.
  • You’re the only survivor after an atomic holocaust.
  • Your time machine’s history shows you an identical machine knocking over the water cooler and spilling it all over your briefcase. What did you do differently?
  • You’re being pursued by a killer, and take refuge in the time machine.
  • A thick fog descends as you approach the spot where you left your time machine.
  • You find a way to travel back into the past.
  • You find a new use for your time machine.
  • A dwarf appears in your time machine saying he is from a parallel universe. He says that his universe runs on a day length that’s half of your days. You adjust your machine so that you can time travel to his universe. What happens?
  • The professor you write reports for is working on time machine technology. If you can’t tell him who you are, what do you do about it?
  • Describe a weird thing that happened when you were traveling through time.
  • You receive a message from the year 5023. What is it?
  • What did you do with your time machine at first?
  • You find out time travel is real and set off on an adventure to visit historic events.
  • You travel to the beginning of time and observe the Big Bang with your time machine.
  • You create a time machine so powerful that you create two of yourself. Two inventors. Where do you meet? What do you do?
  • You encounter yourself out of the blue. You remember he’s trying to kill you, so you fight him. Who won your first fist fight with yourself and why?
  • The movie Time Cop showed what a bad idea it is to mess with the timeline. Now, what would happen if you REALLY messed with the timeline?
  • You are kidnapped by your doubles from the future.
  • Earth is populated by colonies of time travellers constantly travelling back in time to change the course of history.
  • A scientist tells you that you will never invent the time machine and he will never live to invent the time machine.
  • While traveling back in time, you encounter yourself.
  • You use your time machine to fix a mistake you made in the past.
  • An unmanned time machine crashes into your home.
  • You discover chimpanzees are the true but hidden masters of humanity.
  • You discover you’re a character in a futuristic video game.
  • You don’t know how you managed to survive for this long in the year…
  • A time traveler approaches you on how to make time machines.
  • You find a time machine but you can’t use it – you have to convince someone to use it for you.
  • After you’ve traveled into the future a year, the world you observe seems to be stable. But in future year two, nuclear armageddon occurs. You go to your past year one self and tell them to warn their future selves to evacuate the world. But it wouldn’t work because now you yourself are the problem with the time travel.
  • You design the perfect murder using your time machine to dispose of the evidence.
  • A man who claims to be your father from the future warns you that you must prevent your family from getting in trouble with the mob.
  • Someone tries to mess with the time-space continuum and sends you on a wild ride through time.
  • You time travel to ancient Egypt where you help Joseph make the pyramids. You’ve studied Egyptian history all your life – how could you help Joseph?
  • You travel back in time and accidentally kill your father when he was a little boy.
  • You watch Abraham Lincoln give his famous Gettysburg address. How do you convince him that it is important?
  • A magical genie appears and gifts you with a time machine. Upon activation the genie promises to appear each year on your birthday and grant you a single wish. The wish cannot involve the time machine.
  • Write a story about yourself being given the power of time travel.
  • When the time is right, you decide to go back and kill your own grandfather before he can conceive your mother.
  • At the end of mankind, robots from the future come and transport humans to the far future.
  • If your Kickstarter project is successfully funded, you have indicated you will send a personal time machine to backers who give a certain amount. Will the time machine be designed like a box? Why or why not? If so, can you share your design with us?
  • The inventor of the time machine dies before he can reveal the secret of how to actually make it function. It’s in his head. The thought of a paradox makes your head hurt! Never mind.
  • A time traveller from the future tells you how to become filthy rich.
  • An alternative time line splits off when you decide whether to make cookies or brownies.
  • You are arrested for sabotaging your own time machine, providing a one-way ticket to the past.
  • You have the chance to go back in time and make either of your parents famous jazz musicians. Which one do you make famous? Who do you marry? What do you do?
  • Your time machine requires one more fix before it’s finished. While days turn into weeks, months and even years, you’re still tinkering with it. What keeps you motivated to build it?
  • A time traveller comes to you and predicts the past saying that everything is going to be alright.
  • You see an advanced race who have developed a pocket sized time machine!
  • Your path to the future is blocked by an increasingly steep hill. You climb it, unaware that it is no hill – it is a descending path and you will meet yourself at the bottom.
  • A person arrives from the future and warns you not to return to 2003.
  • A group of historians want to take a tour of the ancient savage world with your time machine.
  • You invite a friend along on your time machine. Both of you pick dates in the future to return to.
  • Try writing one or two paragraphs using the prompts.
  • A perfect crime has occurred in another country. Using your time machine, you go back in time and stop the crime before it happens.
  • You’re reading a book about time travel and turn to a page randomly and read the last few words.
  • Corporal Matthews is driving around in his tank when it suddenly materialises in the middle of a World War One battlefield. How does he react?
  • You use your time machine to give King Philip IV of France an unshaven face.
  • You spend more time in the past than the present.
  • You arrive in the future and find a society clone-based around a genocide you  perpetrated against a minority.
  • You travel back in time and prevent yourself.
  • You’ve secretly decided to manipulate things that happened in the past.
  • The time machine repairs itself and launches you into The International Space Station.
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  • You find a way to return to the past and tell yourself to avoid being arrested.
  • You have the chance to travel to any point in your past.
  • Imagine that you’ve built the first time machine. What mischief do you get up to after that? Write a story inspired by it.
  • You find out you were actually allied with an evil dictator, whom you topple.
  • You’re a dailiness reporter in Buenos Aires and you witness Hitler taking the bunker. He asks for your name and tells you to go back to tomorrow, when you’ll find a letter to you.
  • Go on the moon with Neil Armstrong using your time machine.
  • You claim to be an alien from the future.
  • You’ve built a time machine but realize that someone has stolen the instruction manual.
  • You’re late for work, and nothing can get you there in time.
  • You’ve managed to travel back in time. In your quest to change history, you find a family photo of Adolf Hitler.
  • A wormhole splits a town in half.
  • You’ve only been married for three years but have been separated for another thirty. What was life like?
  • The world is ending in a week and you’re kidnapped and told to stop a time traveller.
  • You find yourself in the last time a specific event occurred, such as an apocalypse.
  • You are tasked by the President of the United States to build the first ever time machine.
  • You’ve never heard of “groundhog day” until you meet yourself in the future and learn about it.
  • You accidentally step on a butterfly, and sends the earth off course, ultimately creating the apocalypse.
  • You visit the time of Jesus, but have a hard time because He sees you as an angel.
  • You are taken into the time machine. What would you say to the designer to improve it?
  • Somewhere in the pit of your stomach, you feel something stir at the sight of your time machine rusting in the corner, ready to be used again.
  • You meet a time traveler from a planet identical to Earth.
  • You wake up from a magical coma centuries in the future.
  • It’s Star Wars, but instead of the Force you–
  • You use your time machine to make tons of money before returning to the present.
  • Your time machine has malfunctioned and now your world is stuck in a new permanent dark age. What do you do?
  • Using your time machine, you race ahead of important events or people and write eyewitness accounts of very important events.
  • You arrive at a crossroads in time, where versions of yourself seem to be playing out opposite versions of your life.
  • You travel to the future and discover that the human race has been wiped out.
  • Everything is bleak and dark in the future world.
  • A girl comes up to you and tells you she’s actually just travelled from the past to talk with you, then adds…
  • You use your time machine to set up a sports betting operation in the vein of Dog Day Afternoon.
  • You attempt to shove your annoying friend into the past, but accidentally send him to the future.
  • How far into the future will you visit yourself? How will you react when you see yourself?
  • A stranger drops by with a time machine similar to yours and says they are you from the future.
  • You are abducted by aliens. They leave you on present Earth and let you keep your time machine.
  • You’ve always dreamed of entering a time machine, and finally you win the lottery and you can buy one.
  • A brilliant scientist says he can prove parallel universes exist.
  • As you move through time, you notice you look different each day. Yesterday you were blond, today you’re Asian.
  • You’re visited by your future self as a child.
  • You discover that time travel is not a fluke of your invention but has been around for a while. Your inventor friends bet you a million dollars you don’t go back and kill their baby selves.
  • Your future self reveals that time travel is actually removing your soul and popping it into your destination. Your future self also reveals that the only way to use this process is to kill yourself, which right now he is in the process of doing…
  • A spooky person in a costume approaches you saying he knows that you created being the first time machine and goes on to make an Oprah-like self-help statement.
  • You come back from your time machine to find your sister has become President of the United States. The weather and the rest of the world remains the same.
  • You go back in time to take Napoleon’s place and save France.
  • A professor wants you to invent a time machine so that she can see her son again.
  • On your way to the bank, your time machine is broken by a monkey.
  • You blackmail a time traveler that you are planning to publish his past in your blog.
  • You create a device to travel forward through time just an hour. When you return, everything is different.
  • The time machine you invented leaps into the past. But it’s been stolen by another inventor.
  • While being chased by time police, you accidentally run through a time chrono-inversion.
  • A baby is born and an old man dies simultaneously. Decide who is lucky and who is cursed.
  • You meet your older self. He tells you a secret about the family that you didn’t realize until decades later.
  • Wherever you go in time, the most influential person is always Henry Ford.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and throws you back in time into an unknown world.
  • While traveling through time, you lose all your stuff and have a chance encounter with the only alien ever to live on earth.
  • A child who seems familiar to you follows you to your time machine.
  • You hear a knock on the door one night and open it to find yourself there.
  • Someone steals your time machine and takes it back a decade but doesn’t return.
  • There exist time machines in the future but you suspect the alien invasion and so you go to the future and kill Hitler.
  • Time travelling is not as easy as you once thought when you found yourself in ancient London where the Great Fire is occuring.
  • Someone betrays you and erases your memories and your time machine.
  • Using the time machine, you travel to the nearest possible future or the nearest possible past.
  • You think your daughter might grow up to be a murderer. You’re going to make sure of it.
  • You are monitoring a black hole to prevent its collapse. As you observe, it consumes your time machine. You must now decide what you want to do next.
  • You’ve cracked the designs for the first time machine when you meet a stranger who wants to buy it.
  • You attempt to travel back in time to kill God but you travel back to the beginning of time instead.
  • Your time machine breaks down in the primeval forest of the Middle Ages.
  • An agent from the future approaches you. Says the world will never be the same again.
  • You help the time machine inventor you are working for with the first time machine. But she might not have your best interests in mind.
  • You travel back to Armageddon and stop the apocalypse. You realize however that the universe is borderline rational and the apocalypse is actually a bingo tournament.
  • Your time machine starts working and you get messages telling you to change your past.
  • You use your time machine to travel back to the Stone Age.
  • You travel back in time to your tenth birthday only to find out that you are yet to be born.
  • You get trapped in a time loop again and again.
  • Your brother invents a time machine. You steal it and ditch him in the past.
  • You accidentally kill the wife of your past self while using the time machine.
  • Your life is unfulfilled. In your time machine, you visit yourself in the past
  • An alien with superior technology offers to send you back in time.
  • You visit an alternate universe where everything is upside down and you need to escape.
  • You somehow enter the time stream and return back to the moment when you were born.
  • While time traveling you pursue a Neanderthal man going the opposite direction, and are mortally wounded.
  • Find a frying pan, a banana, a sledge hammer and a spider.
  • The person you defeat in a battle travels back in time to kill your ancestors.
  • In the unimaginably distant future, humans create a time machine and through it discover that alien life has been visiting Earth for centuries.
  • You find a time machine in Ancient Egypt and are the first ever time traveller.
  • Clanking into the stables, you see a very old machine. Realising it is your original invention, you start to hear voices from inside the room …
  • You visit future America using your time machine.
  • You discover a remote cabin that is a tunnel to the stars.
  • When you travel back in time you watch yourself living the week you just left
  • You travel into the future to confront the villain who wronged you in the present.
  • You use your time machine to force your very worst enemy to undergo a horrible transformation.
  • You’re allowed to bring a single item of tech from the future or past.
  • In ancient New York you meet a time traveler who has come back to warn you of a disaster that not even he can escape.
  • You travel to the future and find that humanity has finally died off from a nuclear holocaust. The only being left is a clump of blue self-replicating goo in the middle of Australia.
  • You design a time machine that only works in the day or the night and there is a switch over an hour during the transition. If you miss the switch you go to the wrong time period. What happens when you get a late start going home?
  • Clinging to the side of a comet centuries away from Earth, you wonder if Earth as you knew it is still there.
  • A man sat in the corner of a café is revealing to his friend that he has access to travel through time, but can only go to the future and is suggesting his friend make use of his services.
  • The machine is designed with no safeguards. The last one you send away through it never returns.
  • Suddenly, you get the opportunity to stop yourself from making the biggest mistake of your life.
  • Newly-weds experience marital problems when the husband goes back in time and sleeps with the bride at her own wedding.
  • You visit a time before humanity. All that you’ll ever do has already been done.
  • A time-travel researcher tells you his project is being shut down by shadowy figures.
  • You are arrested for stealing the Declaration of Independence, but you’re able to prove you did it with a time machine, and you’re set free.
  • A man without a past murders you with a time machine and continues to murder you repeatedly in the past in random locations until he has a past.
  • The Zombie Apocalypse is taking place in your time. You have a time machine and could spend the rest of your life hiding, however the government has control of your time machine and says you must help stop the zombie apocalypse. Do you do it?
  • You build an army of time machines and conquer the earth.
  • What is your time machine of choice?
  • A deep regret starts troubling your mind to the extent where you want to erase it by traveling to the past. You know, however, that your very own self is responsible for the regret. How would you deal with it?
  • The age of the dinosaur is peaceful. What does your newly discovered, peaceful existence make you think about.
  • Writing prompt for time travel
  • You go back to the future and miss your appointment with your own past self.
  • You use your time machine to travel back in time and kill Hitler.
  • You get a glimpse of how life a thousand years into the future looks.
  • By using the time machine you realize that you have won the lottery by traveling back in time and buying your winning ticket.
  • You find a time machine in a workshop.  After trying it out for yourself, you decide to tell your ancestors about it.
  • A group of time travellers accost you. They want to borrow your time machine.
  • You meet someone in the past with a time machine.
  • You’re given the option to fix any problem with time. What are you going to do?
  • A mysterious time traveler comes to you saying he teases time.
  • Your time travels were successful, and human civilization went on well despite all the negative prophecies.
  • A Time Traveller walks into your bedroom and scares the living daylights out of you.
  • You’re a decorated soldier who has been sent to stay in the future for your company.
  • After a night of debauchery, you wake up in the future.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and sends you into the Mesozoic era.
  • You bump into yourself from the future with your time machine.
  • You enter your time machine and emerge again at the same place but just a year ago.
  • You find an abandoned time machine in your garage.
  • You step into your time machine as it’s nearing a critical singularity.
  • What would you like to see in the future?
  • After borrowing a time machine, you drop in on yourself on the other side of the world after you’re famous. What do you say to yourself ?
  • Your boss requires you to prove the time machine actually works.
  • Each day, every hour, someone is killed by a time machine. The authorities catch the culprit and you are needed to testify in court. Who is guilty?
  • You visit the time of Jesus Christ and meet a side of him no one’s ever heard about before.
  • You accidentally hit the “return home” button in your time machine which leaves you stranded in the past.
  • You meet a man from the future who steals your time machine to travel backwards in time to 2023. When he does this, he takes away your access to a cure for your favorite dog of cancer. Worse yet, you steal the time machine to go to 2023 and find he got there first and imprisoned you in a subway to get away with the time machine and his crimes.
  • A time traveller from the future tells you that you are doomed and that he can only accelerate the time when you will meet your end.
  • A newspaper article is printed declaring you, the inventor of the time machine, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
  • You’re the first person in the history of humanity to travel more than 10 years back in time. What do you do?
  • You travel into the past to see the birth of your first pet.
  • You are given a time machine by your future self. He tells you that you can raise a kid that will save the world. As a child, you make a terrible mistake, something that ruins your adult life. Using your time machine, you make the change so that the terrible thing never happens. But after making the change, you find that everything changed back.
  • A criminal pursued by the police hides in your time machine.
  • You get stuck in time with the ability to just pop back to the present when convenient. Time goes by really fast.
  • During a time travel experiment you arrive in the middle of the road and accidentally force an oncoming vehicle swerve and rollover on top of a highway divider.
  • While flying your time machine to see the dinosaurs, you fall back to the age of the dinosaurs’ reign.
  • You find yourself in prehistoric times.
  • You appear in a time where time machines are common and they already have mastered quantum physics.
  • You take in a wrong turn in the time machine and wake up to realize the future is bleak.
  • You see a flying car and kidnap the inventor.
  • A woman appears in a flash of light, crying out that you are destined to save the future, and that time travel must never exist after you invent it.
  • A love affair with a time traveler sends your life into a downward spiral from which you never recover.
  • Butterfly effect. A butterfly causes you to step into the future with your time machine.
  • A director is filming a time travel movie and wants you on set to give him some pointers about time travel.
  • Travelling through time, you find yourself witnessing your own funeral.
  • Your brother has met a good poker player ten years his senior, but then he breaks the heart of the girl living across the street. If he didn’t break her heart, she would have won the lottery.
  • You’re stuck in the Dawn of Man era. A member of your tribe who just read “The Singularity is Near” and feels invincible due to the exponential increase in intelligence and strength of humankind comes and trashes your time machine.
  • A time traveler visits you and warns you not to build a time machine.
  • Your friend tells you that he has a time machine. You visit him from the past just to see for yourself, but there’s no mechanical impossibility that prevents him from referring to his time machine if he explains how it works. Your friend has no reason to lie. Still, you just can’t figure out time machines.
  • You take your own tape recorder with you and ask famous people of the future to record their answers.
  • You are approached by a man claiming to be a time-traveling Roman.
  • You travel to the past and abduct your younger self.
  • You add a “past” button to your time machine, but it overshoots and instead it takes you to the future.
  • Your wife is dying of cancer in the present but you can save her with a time machine from the future. Meanwhile, you’re forty pounds too heavy, while your wife is a trim model.
  • You build a time machine and travel forward a day in your calendar and the world has ended.
  • Localized time paradoxes make time travel into specific time periods impossible.
  • You go back in time and save yourself from an earlier accident.
  • You’re thrown off your time machine by a no-good time bandit, causing you to land at random.
  • You accidentally take 10 minutes instead of 7 minutes and find yourself another person.
  • You pick up key structural elements from the Roman Empire and recreate them to design your time machine.
  • Two versions of you use your time machine to meet each other, and you are in a position to gather some important information, but your younger version doesn’t know that you’re from the future. What do you do?
  • Your time machine runs out of juice, forcing you to recharge it somehow.
  • You are trapped in a time loop.
  • You visit yourself in the past with your time machine.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and you find yourself stuck in the Middle Ages. How do you manage to survive?
  • Your best friend just graduated. You borrow their time machine to travel back in time to tell them to major in something else.
  • Your time machine’s power runs out in the middle of a crucial football game.
  • You are torn between going back in time to save a loved one from death and going forward to see how the rest of your life will progress.
  • Your time machine wipes your memory and you have to find a “time traveller” savvy enough to help you get back.
  • You travel a billion years into the future and meet a god.
  • A scientist invents a time machine and appears to disappear. The police question you to see if you are responsible for messing with the time-space continuum.
  • A letter falls out of your drawer. It’s addressed to you by yourself from the future and contains advice or information.
  • You have to stop a killer who knows your secrets, and who also has a time machine.
  • Your time machine lands on top of a very tall building.
  • A time traveler from the future confronts you and gives you two tasks.
  • You discover writing from a mysterious woman who claims to be from the future.
  • Describe a time machine disguised as something not expected.
  • Your friend wipes their memory using your time machine.
  • The first time machine tour guide is eaten whole by a bookshark.
  • You and your kids partake in a major altercation over your time machine usage.
  • What is time would be like to a tortoise and infinitely long, containing everything possible.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the distant past. You have to fend for yourself.
  • You meet yourself in the past with your time machine.
  • It is your loved one’s birthday anniversary.
  • After building a time machine, you visit yourself on Friday. Friday acts like everything is everyday, even something as drastic as the transportation of matter from the past into the present. Do you tell him?
  • A malfunctioning time machine appears to have sent someone from the future into a prehistoric age.
  • Two men show up in a time machine, both claiming to have invented it.
  • All the components of the first time machine you were developing disappeared in the middle of the night. Only a letter left behind instructs you to give up inventing, and is signed by yourself.
  • The writing prompts in this article are just enough to get your creative juices going. But don’t stop there. Take out your journal, grab your pen, and wait for inspiration to strike.
  • You win the lottery using a foreseeing device.
  • Your uncle, a wealthy businessman, steals the time machine.
  • The world ceases to exist. You use your time machine to set into motion events that will alter the past, therefore creating a new future for yourself.
  • You build an abusive time machine that traps and tortures anyone stupid enough to use it. Who do you suggest first?
  • You visit yourself in the past with your time machine.
  • You discover a time machine on the other side of the universe.
  • A scientist in ancient Egypt transfers the soul of the pharaoh into a wooden puppet to save his life.
  • You leap through time accidentally and lose the ability to return home.
  • Your time machine accidentally creates a time paradox and a second time machine falls out of the sky emitting a loud “BANG”.
  • You go back in time and arrive immediately after the Big Bang, allowing you to alter the Universe.
  • The government has invented time travel and appointed you commander of a time army.
  • You meet your parents when they were in their mid-twenties, and they start asking you questions about who you’re dating in high school, and you accidentally tell them that you’re gay, and the universe changes.
  • You are thrown back in time and climb into bed next to your young parents.
  • You run into yourself with your time machine. Explain.
  • The time machine is used for divorce proceedings.
  • You work together with your future-self in a project. You encounter a time paradox, and together, you have to solve it.
  • Another time traveler steals a major piece of information from the future and threatens to change the course of history. Now you have to chase him down and retrieve the missing data.
  • You set the time machine to return to your Birth Time by mistake and end up there as a baby.
  • A pigeon steals your time machine and takes a trip into the past.
  • Along your travels you’re confronted by a time-traveler from your future.
  • You discover a way to travel back in time to kill Hitler.
  • You find yourself in the same place again and again in time.
  • You’re trapped in a house where you can see yourself outside through a window.
  • A kaiju appears and starts destroying cities in your time after slowing down time.
  • When you flee into your time machine, it transports you a few seconds back in time.
  • You meet yourself in the past with your time machine.
  • You have a time machine, but decide that going into the future would be no fun with only one head — you could only imagine what would happen if your nose grew — so you went back in time. When you arrive at your house, a young lady tells you that she will marry you in fifty years. Will she still be single?
  • You discover your time machine is the last machine on Earth.
  • A strange traveller invites you to a feast and entertainment in his time machine.
  • You’re flying home over the Pacific, when all of a sudden your jet’s engines cease to function. Panic sets in until you spot a gigantic floor fan a few kilometers away. You float over to it and get blown safely to shore.
  • You join a resistance with a time machine and go back in time to stop the powerful.
  • A bearded figure approaches you saying he comes from the future and tells a story of a vampire with huge fangs haunting you in the future.
  • You achieve enough power to build a time machine. The first thing you do is…
  • Your girlfriend is using the time machine to neglect her responsibilities on Earth. You’re angry, confront her about it, and she says you were the same way when you were with her.
  • You’re visited by yourself from the past using your own time machine.
  • The Scientist can always do one nice thing for the Hero when she has exhausted her Loyalty/Heroism/Sanity tokens.
  • Your time machine is stolen and used by a madman. You had your mission to fulfill.
  • You send a book back in time for yourself to read when the events in it take place.
  • The cargo the government wants you to bring back is the memories of a woman who has committed suicide.
  • You just won the lottery but used the money to buy a time machine. How will you use it?
  • You accidentally destroy your time machine, only to discover you’ve already built a new one.
  • You are given the opportunity to speak to a famous historical figure from centuries ago with the help of your time machine.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and puts you into the past instead of the future. Do you try to fix it or simply stay in the past?
  • A wizard claims to have sent a message into the time stream to avert some disastrous event in the future. Is he telling the truth?
  • You accidentally wind up in the past, right before your 16 th birthday.
  • Your happily married, 60-years-young grandparents invite you to their place. They live isolated from the rest of the city in an old dilapidated building overlooking their sprawling garden.
  • You end up as chopped liver.
  • You try to go back in time to save a friend’s life. But strangely, that friend never existed.
  • You discover another time machine and decide to steal it.
  • One day you have a philosophical debate with Einstein about time travel.
  • You attempt to change the past but discover that doing so is futile.
  • You visit a parallel universe.
  • You use the time machine to steal pretty things from the time you just arrived in.
  • You plan to steal a treasure from a museum in the 1930s but you are distracted and return without the treasure or the time machine.
  • You take your time machine out for a joy-ride and end up seriously injuring yourself.
  • Your time machine causes you to run over your own self days ago.
  • You stumble on a time machine part during your vacation.
  • You save someone’s life, but the time ripple effect kicks in, causing your new found friend to become handicapped.
  • The ghost of your great-great etc. grandmother visits you with a task to perform.
  • In the 19th century, you encountered yourself from earlier that morning in a verdant part of the Amazon River basin. You catch a pig which your younger self is squealing after, for your morning breakfast.
  • The clock is devoted to telling the correct time.
  • You find a time machine in a pile of junk and take it home.
  • You’re trying to get your pet chimp into the past to make him human.
  • You visit yourself in the past before the birth of yourself.
  • Your family hires a thief who claims that he can engineer a time machine.
  • Your time machine breaks and you are stranded outside the present day.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the future.
  • You bring yourself back to the past as a baby in an attempt to win the lottery with your newfound wealth.
  • You find that your girlfriend from the future is now your ex, and you’re crushed.
  • An old tramp from the 1800s tells you that he is your grandfather.
  • Your time machine can only physically exist at one place at one time. It can only move through time when it is not occupying space. Where do you choose for the machine to be tethered to?
  • In ancient Rome, you are captured by the emperor and made to fight against gladiators for survival.
  • An old friend tells you this is the first time you two met.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and you land in the distant past in ancient Egypt.
  • After losing the election and feeling extremely depressed, you visit a future where the revolution has succeeded and there’s a tramp sitting on the throne and…
  • After traveling into the distant future you are attacked by a spaceship from a rival time traveler on your way home. How do you find it?
  • A time traveller from the future tells you he is invading Earth at present.
  • You travel back to the past and give some experience to your younger you for the future.
  • You’ve had a good run of it so far since designing your time machine — all gold, all the time. What happens the first time you use it and it gives you an unexpected bounce?
  • You live in a society where it is a crime to use time machines.
  • Your time travels attract too much attention.
  • You build a time machine that only allows you to visit the same location and time twice. For instance, if you were in Paris in 1968 you can return the same time in 1968 to Paris. What do you do with this advanced technology?
  • Write a story opening with a character using a time machine to try and correct a mistake. You know they can’t succeed.
  • You meet yourself in the future.
  • A scientist declares the impossibility of time travel, but he and his colleagues go ahead and build one anyway. What happens?
  • Undo your wrongdoings
  • Your mother-in-law/uncle-in-law/yourself asks to take your time machine for a spin.
  • You vanish for half an hour and when you return, there is a zombie apocalypse.
  • Things didn’t just change in the future, they changed more than anyone expected. You had a tendency to speak your mind to everyone, and got thrown into jail.
  • We’ve smashed graphene into dust.  Worst is yet to come.  Write about it.
  • An intelligence sends you a cryptic message from the future, which you can’t decipher.
  • An inconsiderate kid dings your helmet with a toy laser gun and now you can’t see out of your time machine.
  • You can never be sure that a piece of technology is truly intelligent. Or maybe you believe that inanimate objects can be sentient.  Write a short story about a  smartphone, or perhaps a  car  that explores its own  consciousness   or experiences an awakening .
  • You specifically made a time machine to counter terrible things that were to happen in the future.
  • You travel back in time and gather seeds of now extinct plants.
  • Your story ends in one hundred words or less.
  • Using your time machine, you travel to a place in the past. While there you meet two little angels on your shoulders and two little devils on your hips. How else did things change besides those four and your physical appearance while you were in that time? What if angels looked like tiny devils and vice versa? What if you can’t decide between good and evil? An angel and a devil aren’t exactly helpful as they’re constantly in your mind.
  • You find a time machine and steal it, taking it back to your era.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and suddenly you take several left turns within warped time and space.
  • A friend takes the time machine to go back in time and win the lottery.
  • You step inside your time machine and vanish. The only way to get back to where you need to be is to retrace your steps.
  • A machine is invented that can reduce wash time from two hours to ten minutes.
  • You travel to the future and your machine is destroyed. You must survive in this new world.
  • You take an experimental time machine to a job interview and hope for the best.
  • A criminal jumps into your time machine and disappears. You just know he’ll appear in the distant past where he’ll destroy evidence against him. He could already be back to his own time. Or, perhaps, he’s traveling around time killing you at intervals.
  • There exists a society in the future which consists of the smartest people from throughout history.
  • You decide to kill your arch rival when travelling in time.
  • Future tells you about life changing technology.
  • You pretend to be God with your time machine.
  • Your dog, acting as a time machine, takes you on a trip to the Moon.
  • The god of life, Yor, hates everyone you know and has sent you back in time to ensure that no one for whom you care is born. You have one year to find their ancestors and change their names to remove them from notice.
  • A secret organization appears to be trying to destroy your time machine before you can fix it again.
  • You use your time machine to exact revenge on a neighbor.
  • You are able to time travel and create a duplicate of yourself.
  • A time traveler arrives out of nowhere and shocks you by saying he’s already met you..in the future.
  • You suspect the time machine will betray you, but with some modifications you convince it to take you back to the age of mammoths.
  • Someone gives you a rare item from a time not yet witnessed. You collect it, what would it be?
  • You gave yourself advice in the past. And then regret it.
  • You travel back to the time of your parents’ high school prom.
  • You stay in the past too long and instead of heading home to the future your matter degrades into a pile of dust.
  • The Earth ran out of coffee and you must find a new solar system with this time machine.
  • You become lost in time and find yourself in the very distant future.
  • You claim to have designed the first ever time machine. A man stands in front of you, asking how you built it.
  • You invent a time machine with your friends, and are looking for ideas on where to go.
  • You get stuck in the past due to unexpected time machine failure and drop a message as a time capsule for future generations.
  • A time traveler visits you and tells you to do everything you do except today.
  • A time traveler who’s stuck in the past decides to sire a son and give him the time machine into your hands.
  • Zombies are attacking people and only your time machine can get them to safety.
  • Your time machine malfunctions while on a field trip with 30 of your students.
  • The whole town is quarantined following a sloppy test of a new chemical that grants eternal life because all of the people turn into their Halloween costumes.
  • The first time you visit your future home, you find it as a smoldering ruin. People you know are helping with the construction of additional buildings. When you see yourself carrying a large stack of lumber on your shoulder, you realize how you are responsible for the end of the world.
  • You can only take one object with you if you are abandoning your home due to nuclear fallout. What is that object?
  • Using the time machine, you travel back and prevent your house from being burned down.
  • Your favourite goal of travel in the future with your time machine is to see other versions of yourself. Have you tried it? Are you comfortable with that?
  • You visit Mars in the 24th century and have a good conversation with a robot from that time.
  • Time detectives torture you to find out about your time machine.
  • You find a note telling you to never use the time machine and to destroy it.
  • A message sent from the future arrives just in front of you.
  • You inadvertently landed in the time of King Arthur, but you were unlucky and ended up in a battle between King Arthur and some unruly knight.
  • You are put in prison for murder. The judge gives you time travel as your sentence.
  • You use your time machine to locate a missing person and save them.
  • Do time machines work backwards in time? To answer this question, advance your time machine into the past and see if you can reach its entrance.
  • You construct a time machine that allows you to change small details that are part of your life, but not your journey. You must decide whether you will do this or not.
  • You get too close to a black hole and end up witnessing the big bang.
  • Someone from the future reveals himself to you and announces that he is your greatest fan.
  • You don’t die.  You only dream of dying.
  • You land in a field you recognize as your own. You return to your time.
  • Your family is present in a portrait from centuries before.   You feel a sense of dread at the foreboding.
  • Your brother brings home a disturbing book from his school, and he may be thinking of living as an anarchist.
  • You use your time machine to exact cruel revenge on a certain authoritarian figure from the past…
  • Part 1. Your memory is erased every night when you sleep, and eventually-
  • Your wife accepts a dinner invitation from Hitler. You suspect she’s going to sleep with him, and you think it’s your duty to kill Hitler, but you’re unaware of any means of preventing your wife from following through with the plans.
  • People in the future are using skins of animals as if they were human clothing. What’s your first reaction?
  • You need to travel back in time to eliminate a younger version of yourself before you can be born.
  • You’ve been given the honour of piloting the first ever manned mission to the closest star. What do you say to the time machine driver?
  • An alternative version of yourself travels in time to warn you about the end of the world.
  • Much to your horror, you see your kids acting as vampires and drinking your blood when you go back in time.
  • A time machine appears before you. It is tempting but you recognize it as a trap and throw away the key.
  • A time traveler from the distant future complains to you about the direction of the present day to help him complete some books he’s been writing.
  • You are given the entire future to be filled with whatever you’d like to do.
  • Your time machine stops, but you don’t know how to figure out why.
  • Your time machine slowly begins vibrating.
  • A friend builds their own time machine. Their first thought is to go back in time and kill Hitler.
  • A time machine is found on a desert island. What’s inside it?
  • You travel to the past but find yourself unable to return as your time machine does not work anymore.
  • Your future and past selves meet.
  • What if the ancient Mayans didn’t miss the deadline to stop building their dam of suns and asteroids ended up pulverizing their civilization?
  • You meet your ancestors from the past with your time machine.
  • Visiting the future, you find people attached to giant machines that keep them alive indefinitely.
  • You travel to look at dinosaurs in the past.
  • You always wanted to work as a shopkeeper in the days before credit cards. But your time machine has malfunctioned and thrown you back into the past. How will you survive?
  • You order a ride with a time machine company.
  • You send your neighbor Sonic the Hedgehog back in time to be eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex.
  • A pornographic movie is made in the future with the technology from your time machine.
  • A disturbing figure demands the time machine and takes it away.
  • Your father invents a time machine, which he never finished, and you’ve been working all week to build it. At 11pm on the 11th day, you finally finish it. You turn it on and a blinding white light surrounds you. Before you know it, you feel intense nausea and feel like you’re falling over but you’re still standing. You fall to your knees and everything goes black.
  • Your time machine malfunctions again, this time sending you sixteen years into the future. Reflect on this.
  • You find yourself lying on a hospitable planet next to a time lodged robot.
  • You visit a parallel universe where everyone is living the opposite of your existence.
  • You are trapped on a desert island. You have a time machine.
  • The universe runs on a finite clock of time.
  • You have the chance to interview great political figures like Hitler or Gandhi but you have the added ability to travel back in time to watch them at work. What do you do?
  • Your psychic ability gets out of control and you see the future -and it’s not good.
  • You accidentally travel through time and witness your own funeral.
  • You realize the time machine breaks a fundamental law of physics.
  • You go to a costume party dressed as a time traveler. After you have arrived home, you realize that you came dressed as someone who was alive in the 1800’s. Explain how this could have happened.
  • You find a mysterious clock marked with golden numbers. It seems to govern the flow of time.
  • Access the Dark Future Through Time Travel Plot Line Generator
  • You’ve died and been reincarnated through time. You don’t wear the glove in this life though.
  • You are working on a time machine and decide to take a break with a cup of coffee. You return to find your friends have become ants.
  • You want to prove time travel works, so you take the time machine on a test run…where are you going?
  • A strange girl with a curved ear beamed into your living room coming from an alternate time. She gives you a cryptic message.
  • The latest trend in technological advances includes transporters that can take you back in time to place you exactly where you were seven seconds ago. A mishap occurs during your seventh trip.
  • You can say anything you want to a young you.
  • You have the chance to kill Hitler as a baby with the time machine, but minors cannot go back.
  • You build a time machine that always fails you.
  • You travel back in time and stop yourself from inventing the time machine. So now you never invented it. Uh-oh!
  • A farmer who hates machines claims he once saw a time machine.
  • Your time machine is malfunctioning. During your visit to the past you discover you have saved Hitler. What do you do?
  • What would you do if your time machine gave you a warning that the country will experience a catastrophic event? Hope you enjoy/find this free list of time machine writing prompts useful!
  • You find a time machine.
  • You meet your future self when you have just acquired the time machine.
  • You are absolutely amazed to see your own biography on sale in a futuristic bookstore.
  • Your time traveling partner is kidnapped with a time machine that is stolen from you. Go into the past in your own time machine and rescue him/her.
  • You approach a black hole and find a time machine that you use to escape before your ship is destroyed.
  • You visit yourself in the past with your time machine.
  • Somebody wants to buy the patent for your time machine.
  • You travel back in time and see what your life was like before you were born.
  • You go back to the past to discover the origin of your favourite game, but realize it didn’t originate with you.
  • You mess up the past by accidentally bringing a butterfly into the present…
  • You invent a time machine and use it to go back in time dozens of years to tell your father the exact lottery numbers for him to save a bunch of money. But one number he refuses to reveal is the secret code for launching World War III through Bluetooth devices.
  • You find a time machine, whose location is unknown to you, but you suspect that it belongs to someone you know.
  • Two copies of you are made from different futures with time machines.
  • You join a time traveling race and can only move forward in time.
  • You discover the secret origin of time travel and attempt to change history to make the world a better place.
  • Time-traveling villain tells you the world will be destroyed after he kills your friends.
  • You use your own time machine to change history.
  • You witness a future war and you’re changed forever by it.
  • What is the strangest thing you can imagine is hiding in the UFO that crash- lands on your roof?
  • You are told that clones of yourself automatically appear in other lifetimes once you die. How do you react?
  • You bring a book about time travel with itself stuffed inside.
  • You create a time machine that brings you back to the time of your childhood.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and you vanish from the future, you reappear in the past.
  • An eccentric gentleman makes an explosive offer to build you a time machine if you’re willing to pay the price.
  • You go into the past for revenge. You find the one who wronged you. But instead of killing him, you use your time machine to digitally record and forward the exact moment he wronged you to thousands of other people, causing them all to wrong you equally in the same way. Are you satisfied with how you dealt with it?
  • You’re having dinner with your favorite celebrity in their time machine.
  • Three men in black suits approach you saying they’ve seen you around town and they want to talk.
  • Your great-great-grand-daughter gives you a tip that turns you into a successful person.
  • A boy from the past arrives in your present using his time machine. You try to help him find his way home, so you can go to the future.
  • Your son is sent years into the future because of nobody’s fault.
  • A person appears from a distant era stating they need your help to avert a disaster.
  • Your time machine is destroyed and the universe is collapsing so you have to rely on wormhole technology to escape but this accelerates time – the world is now like it was many years in the future.
  • The inventor of the time machine is not a quantum physics expert, but an expert in transportation.
  • A strange room appears from within your time machine.
  • You are revealed to have been the only man on Earth at one time in the future.
  • You travel back in time and find yourself on the battlefield of Gettysburg – the American Revolution.
  • You arrive in the past and taught primitive man how to talk and perform acts of kindness.
  • The one particular day of your life ends up being constantly repeated. You decide to go back in time and stop the one specific incident from happening.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and places you in the wrong time and place.
  • Paranoid, you only go forward in time and when you see what the world will look like, you decide not to go through with time travel at all.
  • You think you’ve seen Hitler’s greatest secret, so you’re about to go back in time to stop him.
  • You freeze your dead dog and toss it in a machine that digitizes it, uploading the data to a computer in the future in order to reanimate it.
  • An Amazonian tribe recruits you to fight off enemies with your time machine.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and sends you to the Middle Ages.
  • A future version of yourself uses a time machine to travel to the past to meet his younger self.
  • You travel back in time using a computer wormhole. A female version of you shows up and asks you on a date.
  • The ability to travel in time inspires a new form of entertainment called the killing-spree industry.
  • You witness yourself from the past use your time machine. Describe the moment.
  • You’re visited by your future self. Present day you describe something to the future you that once happened today. Future you doesn’t believe you.
  • You begin to tell your friends and family what a great writer you are.
  • A young woman is being chased by her angry ex. Your time machine is the only place of refuge.
  • You create another time machine so you can stay in a romantic relationship with a person from the future.
  • The universe is about to explode, and you have a time machine. There’s a way to fix the impending annihilation of the universe, but you require too many pieces of a very rare material which will be completely destroyed in the destruction of the universe. Luckily, you have a time machine.
  • The characters travel back in time a few days to stop a gunman from shooting President McKinley.
  • You think you’ve made a huge discovery when you find an advanced civilisation in the past.
  • Machines from the future started hunting humans and they are almost completely wiped out, except for you and 1 million others. The future reveals that there were 2 evil versions of you, which was the reason behind the machines hunting you down. You have the option to choose which of the 2 versions of you will live. What do you do?
  • While traveling with your time machine, you look into the night sky and see a constellation that hasn’t been formed yet.
  • Someone steals your time machine.
  • Your time machine lands in a purgatory inhabited by creatures that love humans.
  • A paranoid inventor of a device that controls the weather starts World War 3.
  • Having found a better time machine you visit the future of the time machine maker.
  • There’s a man on the street corner yelling at people. He tells you that you must go back to your own time or else risk setting in motion an apocalyptic chain of events.
  • A voice from your time machine says to you “Remember that the time machine is your friend!”
  • You use your time machine to commit a murder that goes unsolved.
  • You invent a time machine and later realize an evil dictator has constructed one as well. And he plans to use yours to travel back in time and change history. What do you do?
  • Your time machine malfunctions and you visit an alternate reality instead.
  • You challenge your alternate-self to mortal-combat in the arena of time.
  • After discovering a time machine, you travel back in time to tell yourself something that isn’t so random.
  • You plan to bring someone back from the past as a souvenir as a joke, but they change everything and almost cause disaster.
  • A machine on your desk malfunctions and you’re flung back in time with a chance to prevent all the horrible things that’s been happening to you lately. Everything else is the same except for one small detail. Who do you hug the moment before you go back in time and what was about to happen the next moment?
  • In a modern country, Neanderthals have survived.
  • A lowly future version of you appears out of nowhere and warns you that if you do not change your current course of action that the world will come to a horrible end.
  • You’re informed by the government that your time machine is a security threat and decide to hide it in an impregnable location – and you haven’t gotten it back ever since.
  • You go back in time to prevent your great, great, great, great grandfather’s murder
  • Your time machine transports you to the same place over and over until you stop it.
  • The three of you begin arguing about existence and end up destroying yourselves and your time machine forever.
  • While visiting the past, you are prevented from returning to the future by some future familiar to you covering the time machine.
  • You decide to become a time traveling law enforcement officer.
  • You reveal to the public the existence of time travel.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and sends you back to a pivotal time in history.
  • Your future self is a lot different than what you imagined.
  • A time travelling stranger gives you advice that changes your life and allows you to benefit from it in the present.
  • While on another planet you come across a giant cave filled with artifacts. A pedestal on the far side is handing a vial containing a dark green liquid.
  • You’ve armed your time machine with a newspaper that predicts the outcome of the great war.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and throws you directly into your own childhood, before you have a doubt of what the future is like or imagined you would create the time machine.
  • You worship an entity known as Time. All your technological advances flow from this belief.
  • You discover an enigmatic time wand on the beach. Presumably bought by tourists in ancient times.
  • You travel back in time to the day your parents were born.
  • There is a contest to see the most interesting person in the universe, and the winner goes to the moon.
  • A time-traveler from the 22nd century tells you a disturbing tale.
  • You were dead all the time. You just didn’t remember. But remember at the end when you wanted to take a look at yourself so you used a time machine only to look at yourself when you were dead in the present.
  • A savant that you’re visiting tells you that you shouldn’t have been born.
  • A meteorite devastatingly knocks you and your time machine off course, before landing in prehistoric times.
  • Your time machine crashes, and its inner mechanisms are revealed.
  • You travel into the future but your time machine malfunctions and sends you to a different century than you a…
  • You crash into the west gate of ancient Rome on the day that Titus unites it. What is the result of you introducing yourself to the people?
  • The time machine needs to be regularly recharged with a special potion invented by you.
  • A lone traveller arrives in your time and says he’s from the much distant future, asking for food and shelter.
  • Your dog travels to the far future with your time machine, which is now ineffective.
  • In an attempt to go back and change the past something goes wrong and brings you face to face with yourself.
  • You visit a future where time travel doesn’t exist, yet you are still alive.
  • You design a time machine capable of taking you into the future instead of the past.
  • You are living your life again and again.
  • Werewolves.
  • You’re standing at the end of a platform waiting for a train, when a time machine whisks you off for a quick visit in the past.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the past, just after the dinosaurs became extinct.
  • After travelling to the future, you stay there for a year and return to your original timeline. How does the world differ?
  • Your two best friends discover your time machine and use it to sabotage your projects in life. A rich madman offers to help you in your work. You only find out later that he intends to use you to take over the world. A better looking, richer guy offers to help you deploy your time machine. Turns out what he wants to do is use it for his own social engineering projects.
  • An elderly man walks into your time machine office.
  • Would the past and the future ever meet?
  • You explore the future as an old man.
  • You decide to visit your future self. What do you do there?
  • This time machine has a few suspicious features which you’ve never noticed before. You walk over to it and . . .
  • One of your friends has a time machine. It malfunctions and sends you back in time. What happens?
  • A mad man with a torch opens the lid of the time machine where you and your son are. What do you do?
  • You find that you cannot see the future as it is happening as easily as you thought.
  • The laws of physics completely break down and the flow of time ceases to exist.
  • You’re on your way to a job interview and your time machine breaks down in the present.
  • The enigmatic figure you collided with comes from the future to ask you a question.
  • People have discovered how to travel back in time and undo the events of the Second World War. That means you must disappear from the face of the Earth. How do you do so? Your visit to 2016 prompted you to start a student revolution.
  • You kill your past self with your time machine, hoping to shape your destiny.
  • Once you return from the past, and you look around where you live. It has changed…if only a little.
  • You travel back in time before you were born. You must stop yourself from being conceived.
  • What do you say to yourself when you meet yourself in the future?
  • With your time machine, you go back in time and do something to prevent a tragedy.
  • You travel back in time to witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
  • You’re engaged in a dicey battle with a mad scientist. Your time machine malfunctions.
  • Your time machine malfunctions while on a trip to Paris.
  • What would you say to your future self when he sees you?
  • A sci-fi “tech noir” game inspired by film noir, smog, and Blade Runner…
  • You attempt to modify a time machine, hoping to find a way to return to the past.
  • You are sent back to the stone age, your time machine is destroyed and you must find a way to go home.
  • The same prompt is posted in four different places scattered about the house, each written in a different hand. Given no knowledge of the others, how do you spot the fifth?
  • You find a perfectly working time machine and go back in time to give yourself advice.
  • You discover an alien machine that looks like a time machine.
  • You ask yourself to lend you a book, but your future self never responds and you never see the book again.
  • Returning to the present with a lot of sweat and tired muscles, you’re greeted by your friends. “I’ve spent time in the future”, you say.
  • A time traveler approaches you and asks to borrow your time machine.
  • Your time machine just landed.
  • You ask someone from the past for a light.
  • An old woman pleads for you to turn up at her great-granddaughter’s birthday party.
  • You attempt to travel back in time to the era of pirates to explore their treasures, but you end up in jail instead when you’re mistaken for a stowaway.
  • You’re trekking and you discover a puddle of a gooey substance, you set off a time machine in the past and it arrives with a man who is calling himself a god.
  • Your pet has been taught how to use a time machine.
  • You become lost from your time machine and can’t find your way back home.
  • Buy the entire Time Machine Story Bundle!
  • You wish you were smart enough to invent a time machine.
  • A tragic accident occurs and you only have 10 minutes to decide how to react.
  • Someone is murdered, but you found a time machine to arrive on the crime scene three minutes before the murder occurs. You find yourself immediately confessing to the crime, even though the victim is still alive! Explain why so in the comments section.
  • Lightning strikes the time machine momentarily giving you superpowers.
  • What did you say to your past self?
  • You’re part of a time machine tourism agency and you pick up two groups of famous people.
  • You’re plagued by your jealous friend who travels to the past to alter your history.
  • You’ve investigated some disturbances in time and need to ask your future self just one question to give you a nudge in the right direction.
  • You go back in time and see what would have happened were your parents to elope.
  • You visit yourself in the past with your time machine.
  • Time travelers observe your humble offering in the desert.
  • You use your time machine to “visit” the afterlife.
  • Delaware is hit by a nuclear bomb targeting Foggy Bottom in 1986 but you and your friends survive because your time machine had you surfing on your backyard pool.
  • You travel back in time and take over the life of your great grandfather before he met your great grandmother.
  • You use a time machine to save a person from committing suicide.
  • Your time machine malfunctions, and you are sent back to World War I.
  • According to multiverse theory there are an infinite amount of copies of you travelling through time. One day you meet one who is a detective running around with a gun trying to catch the crook.
  • Inherited your great-great-grandfather’s time machine.
  • The holy book tells you that the most important task of man is to perfect time machines. With the first time machine built, the chronoknights arrive from the 21st century.
  • You land a time machine on your wedding day. Your future self tells you that you picked the wrong suit.
  • The world is on the brink of total annihilation and only you have a time machine that can save humanity.
  • Upon landing, you wake up in bed. It is the next day.
  • An impossible time paradox rears its perplexing head and makes you question your own existence.
  • Captain Picard and the Enterprise encountered time nexus points in the The Next Generation episode “Remember Me”.
  • You decide to introduce the concept of the time machine to society. You do, and then everything changes.
  • Someone from the future takes your time machine and sends you far in the past.
  • You’ve found another time machine. Describe how you show it off to your friends.
  • Adventure game design frequently revolves around avoiding death. The game could feature a serious subject line or a tongue in cheek title. Games recently released or popular with the Quest studio are listed below along with a few of us from the Quest team who could possibly run/lead a game. If you sign up and someone from Quest leads or runs your game, you will also receive a coupon for a $5 discount off any future Quest games.
  • Every part of the time machine malfunctions and then breaks after just a single use.
  • You’re supposed to go to a party but decide to hit a baseball instead.
  • While wearing your time machine, you bump into a friend you went to high school with and have to convince them that it’s still you. Tell us how that went down.
  • You find a time machine. How do you feel?
  • You’re in a writing slump and pick up a book about time travel. It seems to have the answers you’re looking for, but to write your own ending, you must follow the rules of the book.
  • You go back in time and stop a tragic life event that was about to happen.
  • One day you wake up to your alarm and find that even when you look at the clock it’s broken.
  • You find a time machine belonging to your schoolmate. She never knew it would belong to her.
  • You’re in charge of the time machine department of a big corporation and you think you’re about to be replaced by a more junior employee.
  • You and your friend take your time machines to the test track. What if everything isn’t quite as you thought?
  • You learn that tomorrow will be the last day of your life. Tomorrow. What do you do?
  • You meet Shakespeare.
  • You’re the only person left in town because everyone else was killed in a time machine experiment gone wrong.
  • Your family desperately needs money in order to keep the house, but due to unfortunate circumstances, you cannot make any more money.
  • You, and all of your ancestors are seated in your living room after you purchased your first time machine.
  • Your time machine traps you in the past.
  • Someone’s taken your time machine from you and is playing pranks on your family and friends.
  • What if your time machine changed the world as you knew it, and can never be used again? What did you see?
  • You’re hurriedly trying to put together the pieces of a time machine when suddenly, a 10-foot-tall cock speaking in backwards sentences appears.
  • You travel back in time and meet your one great great grandfather.
  • Make one dream or nightmare come true with your time machine.
  • King Arthur’s time machine was reportedly recovered from the peat bogs and is on display today.
  • Supersonic jets are invented in your 30’s, ushering a new age of travel and intercontinental entertainment.
  • You’re trapped in a timeless escapism reality and you must escape.
  • Your father accidentally tampers with history, creating havoc.
  • Your sister comes over for tea and tells you a story about how the two of you, when younger, would drive your parents crazy by fighting for control of the time machine.
  • You accidentally travel back in time and change something, altering your future.
  • Until the Whale Comes Inker Productions presents …
  • Tomorrow you are going on holiday to the past. How do you convince your boss that this is a wonderful investment, besides of course for the fact that it’s your duty to the company to get the much needed experience.
  • You steal one of the time machine parts from your former friend who claimed ownership of the time machine.
  • People are chasing you and you run into a time machine and escape.
  • Your dog has been run over. You build a time machine to go back in time to save Fido.
  • You meet yourself in the future and regret the mistakes you made in the past.
  • Time goes backwards while you are using your time machine.
  • You get into an argument with yourself from the past future.
  • Suddenly, the world’s most benevolent dictator comes to power while you are in your time machine. What’s your next move?
  • After that you want to ask some specific questions.
  • You want to know the cause of your future world but the future you are scared to tell you.
  • You are approached by a maniac suffering from amnesia who insists he comes from the past.
  • A strange metal object falls from the sky. When you touch it, it transports you into an unrecognizable land.
  • Your time machine, on a non-specific spring night, takes you to the future on your birthday the day before you plan to celebrate.
  • You travel back in time to meet your parents as teenagers.
  • You’re racing a motorcycle to New York from LA, while your loved one is in labor.
  • Someone asks you about time travel and you explain your point of view on the subject.
  • You’re given the opportunity to travel back in time to your first big break.
  • Your future self gives you advice that betters your life.
  • A time machine is stolen from you and you must chase after the culprit.
  • A time-traveler from the future appears to you and asks for help in saving the world.
  • The future where you come from is a horrible dystopia ruled by mutant abominations.
  • When you visit yourself you do so as a mouse living under the stairs.
  • You ran over a beautiful antelope. You effortlessly summon forth your time machine to go back in time and replace the antelope with a live one.
  • You’ve had a time machine all of your adult life. There’s one glaring evil you could have done to change history as we know it.
  • Using this time machine, you can perform altruistic duties, like saving a loved one’s life.
  • You come across a photo showing yourself in a familiar but future place.
  • Global warming has changed everything.
  • You can bring one article of clothing with you into the future. What do you choose?
  • You are given a mission by an enigmatic wizard. He says only a sentient time machine will be able to do it.
  • Your team raises enough money to develop a time machine and have it manufactured. The first thing you do with it is to time travel to Ancient Greece and conquer the cradle of civilization. When asked why you want to do this you reply that, “All will be answered in time.”
  • Someone steals your time machine, dipping into all sorts of mischief while you’re trying to get it back.
  • You visit the future expecting a good time. What happens instead?
  • You are trapped in a room with no doors or windows with  one person and a time machine. Your best friend/killer/killer. Two of the buttons on the time machine are ‘go back 50 years’ and ‘go forward 10 years’. You can’t go back in time further than around 1949 or go further ahead in time than September 22nd of the year you are born in. Your only hope is to turn your friend/killer/killer into your slave. What do you do?
  • You’ve been asked to stop time-travellers from ganging up on your time machine and destroying it.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the Viking age. You communicate with the locals by writing.
  • You see a modern sewer tunnel morphs into a tunnel from the past.
  • Aunt May is visiting and accidentally steps on your time machine which sends her to the beginning of the universe.
  • After using your time machine you realise you now know something no one else does.
  • A time traveller appears out of nowhere telling you of your secret origin before disappearing again.
  • You have the power to either go back in time or forward. You can’t use the same power twice in a row, so pick wisely.
  • You meet a mysterious time traveling inventor who offers to tell you their secrets, but it may have consequences for your present day.
  • “The Time Machine” still ranks as one of the greatest science fiction novels. What’s your opinion?
  • You tricked your grandfather into stepping into your time machine and now regrets it.
  • You’ve aged one hundred years and no longer remember what you named your time machine.
  • You travel to the Stone Age but you aren’t able to build a fire and end up as a human meal.
  • You enlist the help of Albert Einstein to help devise a time machine.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and you end up five billion years in the future.
  • Someone visits you with their own time machine and convinces you to go back in time in your own life to kill Hitler or to invent something that will change the world.
  • You discover an autonomous time machine that you didn’t build.
  • Little Miss Naughty of the Year starts taunting your sex life using time travel, and gives you an ultimatum.
  • A prophetic dream leads you to build a time machine, but the journey into the future shows you the doom of the world.
  • The first time machine malfunctions and destroys the world. You are the only one who knows it existed. Can you and will you tell everyone?
  • You’ve been fired and lost all your money. What entry-level job are you considering doing in the future?
  • You use the time machine to alter the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg.
  • A time machine is an impossible construct–yet someone has demonstrated the concept. Who could it be and where is it being kept?
  • You encounter a Weeping Angel when using your time machine.
  • You ride a time machine into the past so that your grandparents fall in love.
  • You’ve been studying your great-great-grandfather’s family history. They decided to immigrate to the United States in the mid-18 century. You can travel back and bring one of them back with you. Who do you choose?
  • This list of five becomes ten then 30…
  • Your best friend mysteriously moves away. How do you get them to come back?
  • A dog barks at your time machine while you’re setting it up.
  • Your time machine breaks down and you get stuck in prehistoric times.
  • An ex-girlfriend appears to you with a time machine and asks you to travel with her for a quick trip into the future.
  • You time machine malfunctions and you inadvertently destroy the world. What will you do now with your time machine?
  • The Earth and the solar system have been destroyed by a past version of yourself. What do you do?
  • A science fiction writer from the country of your nationality visits you and says he comes from the future. Is he lying or telling the truth?
  • The more years you spend in the future, the younger you get.
  • A mad scientist kidnaps you, but you manage to escape with your time machine.
  • You and your mentor build a time machine together, but anything you try to bring back is always incinerated by the hot time winds. However, your mentor has no problem.
  • A group of people steals your time machine and visits another era with it.
  • Your friends discover your time machine and decide to play some pranks on people from the past. Who do you prank?
  • You become good friends with Richard Nixon.
  • You’ve just got back from the future with an answer to the question that made your career a success, after all it won’t be long until it’s published. When you return you find nothing has changed – why?
  • You find a sentient time machine with the ability to make alterations.
  • You meet a mysterious man in a bar who says he comes from the past.
  • You visit yourself in the past with your time machine.
  • You’re given a time machine to jump from the past to the present. What do you do?
  • You take a long awaited fishing trip with a beloved relative and can’t seem to catch anything.
  • Different people from different times try to understand the concept and use it.
  • Someone sends you a time machine and you decide to play pranks on all your friends.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into World War II.
  • Your boss tells you to choose a vacation spot today or be fired in the near future.
  • You’re actually from the future – and have traveled back in time to warn yourself, even though you know you’re going to dismiss what you’re about to say.
  • Your time machine has artificial intelligence which is outright malevolent.
  • A co-worker discovers your time machine and wonders what he’ll do with it.
  • Traveling through time becomes a fad. Do your friends or family members try to go back in time to make different decisions?
  • Your time machine breaks and suddenly you’re trapped in an airport. Later, you learn your fiance is soon to marry someone else.
  • Which of your ancestors will you visit next using your time machine?
  • Your time machine lands you just a few minutes before the start of the Battle of Hastings.
  • You wake up in your time machine travelling through time.
  • You cross paths with your future self.
  • A futuristic robot approaches you. He tells you his time machine has malfunctioned and wiped out humanity in the year 3303. The robot asks for your time machine to jump back in time dimension and fix the situation. You already knew the robot was trying to trick you, so you destroy the robot.
  • Your deceased grandma approaches you from the past through your time machine and advises you on your life.
  • You decide to clean your time machine to perfection. You are so anal about it that you end up killing the person you were supposed to save. Explain.
  • You’ve developed a cure for the common cold. Along with time travel, your amazing invention could eradicate a global health concern. Could you do it?
  • The timer malfunctions and you are transported back a second before the machine is activated. The situation is exactly the same, except you remember how devastating the consequences will be.
  • You ask people what they were like in the past and they respond.
  • You use your time machine to save yourself a long time back.
  • You return through your time machine to a year before you were even born, and must decide which of your parents get to have you, and which parent abandons you.
  • A tachyon signal has been found from the Age of the Dinosaurs that you accidentally travel to.
  • You are trapped in a situation that will only happen in the future.
  • Try to explain time travel to a 10 year old.
  • You use your time machine to look up the love of your life.
  • You reveal a time machine to friends and yourself step inside, never to  be seen again.
  • You disobeyed the laws of time and went fifteen years back in time. What are the consequences? Your family is not rent with grief? You returned home fifteen years ago and there was no change?
  • You’re given tickets for two to a Broadway show in the past. Two of you arrive, but there’s only supposed to be one.
  • You visit yourself in the past with your time machine.
  • Your time machine harnesses dark matter, but will these butterflies unleash a terrible plague into the future?
  • A Martian approaches you on a lonely road and says he could use a good time machine, like yours. What happens?
  • Your time machine drops you off at a random time in history.
  • Three characters meet and discover that each of them has a time machine.
  • The future you saw yourself in turns out to be false after your return.
  • You’re kidnapped by a mad psychopath who threatens to kill you unless you take him back to the stone age.
  • You use the time machine to film a music video.
  • A future self arrives in a time machine to give you advice.
  • You give your future self very specific instructions.
  • Your time-travelling partner retrieves something from the past. However, on returning to the present, you discover that not as long ago, you had done the same thing.
  • You are a marine archaeologist. Find me a time machine!
  • You land in the future where all machines are now organic.
  • Travel back to the time of the Sumerians.
  • Your time machine ravages the universe by transporting matter in and out causing the universe to collapse on itself.
  • A bunch of marauders are after you. They crash a bunch of ships everywhere and one of those ships gets sent messages back in time to when the Mayans were building Machu Picchu. They run around Machu Picchu and you’re pissed off the brand new structure is going to get destroyed before you can see what happens. Then you get transported to the future. What’s the first thing you do?
  • There is a being on Earth that was made using your DNA and they’re behind your disappearance.
  • You prepare to go into the past and visit the place you grew up in. The only problem is that you…
  • Your first stop on your time travel vacation is the dawn of civilization.
  • The world throws a festival inviting people from different time periods to the same party for the first time. Which moment do you visit?
  • You find you already settled the argument that has plagued you since high school.
  • You travel back in time in order to teach yourself how to design a time machine.
  • Time travel is about to completely obsolete the Internet.
  • A guy from the future shows up at your door with a time machine and says you will have a child together that will be a great writing talent.
  • You are visited by your future self with a time machine and warned to stop what you’re doing.
  • You’ve finally figured out how time travel works. But a new paradox makes all your efforts useless.
  • You cannot help laughing maniacally all of a sudden for no reason. What had happened?
  • You travel all the way back to the prehistoric period and have to fight a leaping T-Rex.
  • Returning from another time, you find we’re all gloriously happy.
  • You inherit a time machine from your grandfather. He has one condition for you to receive it, that is never use the machine. You can’t resist and ride the machine into the past. You witness a traumatic event in your past which changes your life completely. Where to place your time machine when you live in a one-room apartment.
  • You receive the mysterious invitation to visit a rich stranger in the future.
  • An old beggar woman approaches you saying she is your grandmother who was flung into the future for loving a beggar man.
  • Your favorite celebrity says they can invent a time machine and wants you to be a history consultant. Do you take the job?
  • You accidentally witness yourself die in the future.
  • You’re robbing the house of someone you hate and time-travels back to kill you before you rob them.
  • You find a time machine that was abandoned in a field with a hastily written note on a nearby rock.
  • You get yourself lost in a time of your past which was exactly like your present. You’re getting accustomed to living in that age. But despite being in such a vivid age, you feel like something is missing. Your phone does not work, you don’t know what a word processor is, and cars are nowhere in sight. And what’s worse is that you can’t stop thinking about your future and your family. You spend the whole day crying. What has happened? Is this some sort of paradox? Your future has been erased.
  • You realize that you’ve traveled back in time and no longer have your music player or cell phone.
  • Someone steps into your time machine and begins travelling wildly through time.
  • You travel back in time and encounter your favorite historical figure.
  • You use your time machine regularly to celebrate your birthday every year. Will you continue to do this even if you turn 1000?
  • You’ve just made a hot discovery in your lab. You run out to inform your chief. At this most opportune moment, your time machine malfunctions and you vanish. What are the reflections of your chief on the mystery of your disappearance? Returning to the present to process further on your discovery, you cannot believe the change. How do you return to the past? When you’re done remember to wipe away the five minutes of writing. This kind of writing involves only simple writing in which you have to develop your attention to specific subjects. Your approach differs when you develop a new take on an existing idea and allow your thoughts run like a river. Writing prompts about material interests and desires elicit this kind of writing. By looking at the mind’s deeper, wheeling thoughts leads to rousing writing reveals a lot of your personality. It enables you to bring forth your ideas with breathtaking results for you or someone else depending on your area of interest.
  • Technology from your time machine deteriorates as it ages.
  • You can leave your body out to die and let it move on when you don’t need it anymore, or at least try to.
  • You accidentally take yourself back in time with your time machine.
  • A little child finds your time machine and gets stuck in the past.
  • A time-travelling visitor tells you to bring him food and water that you somehow do not already have. What do you do?
  • You and your arch nemesis are fashion time machines. You race each other into the past.
  • You can go to any era, real or fictional, what do you pick and why?
  • You receive a text message from your future self with a date and time. You realize this is the time you will die.
  • You accidentally travel into the future before developing a time machine and can never get back to your time to recreate getting the time machine.
  • We have free time travel. What do we do with it?
  • Comment below and let me know how your writing session “went”.
  • The only weapon that will destroy the world’s oldest man.
  • You’re taking a walk when you find yourself and your time machine inside a giant interdimensional transition wormhole.
  • You want to take revenge on your last unrequited love by inviting her to your wedding.
  • One day you decide to take a time machine journey, but you end up with the wrong time.
  • You’ve been cryogenized in the future and brought back to now for spare body parts.
  • You accidentally kill yourself in your time machine.
  • You have the opportunity to make a wish in front of the church where 5 black crows are perched. What will it be?
  • You use your time machine to prevent your childhood accident and thus erase yourself from existence.
  • A crazed traveler from a different dimension destroys a nearby town before you realize he is on a misdirected time tour to the future.
  • Your girlfriend is on her way to your house and if she doesn’t find you at home she’s going to dump you. You call yourself in the future and ask your future self to stall her.
  • You visit the future.
  • Your grandfather offers you a chance to tell him about the future.
  • The Titanic sinks and your time machine gets destroyed as a result of the collision. You are now stranded in the past where you see the Titanic crash, as you try to swim away from the sinking wreckage you hear faint coughing.
  • Your time machine goes haywire, and you travel back in time, helpless until you return to the present.
  • The time machine you designed turns out to be a major disappointment.
  • You meet your twenty six year old clone and become jealous.
  • Elemental Powers is a new superhero, the first ever to gain their powers from all the elements. What do you think about the first superhero?
  • When something morally wrong happens, you use your DIY time machine to erase it.
  • Your time machine makes your mom give birth to you when you were born.
  • You and a really old guy with wild hair are the only two humans left alive in giant ruins of the Time Machine construction facility.
  • By flying through different eras, you have found a time machine blueprint in the Age of Dinosaurs. You return to the present and share this information with the World.
  • You have arrived in Pompeii moments before Mt. Vesuvius erupts.
  • Mother Nature takes your time machine on an adventure through time and space.
  • While you were spying on your enemies with your time machine, you had it malfunction and you were stuck in their house.
  • Time travel is so common now that you take it for granted. You get frustrated with tourists who visit the past just to marvel at what’s used to be.
  • You invent a charming device that instantly transports the user to any point on the globe. The device is available commercially. What happens?
  • You’ve inherited a time machine that was developed by your eccentric uncle.
  • You invent a time machine and start fixating on specific time periods and lose track of the present.
  • Your family builds a time machine to join you in the future.
  • The clock you’ve invented, freeze time.
  • You challenge Doc Brown to a race in your time machine.
  • You try to use your time machine to send a letter back in time.
  • You discover that someone from the future has been stalking you everywhere.
  • You discover yet another time machine.
  • While traveling through time, you encounter a paradox and manage to screw up the whole world. What stupid thing did you do to cause this?
  • You meet up with a famous inventor, have dinner together, and then, the next morning, you tell them the invention they’ll be known for came from you.
  • An abused kid asks you for a ride in your time machine to visit his rich self in the future and expose all the lies told to him.
  • Wonderful, now the machine’s broken and you can’t go home.
  • You get transported into the past and see yourself kill your grandparents.
  • You discover a time loop in the time machine you used.
  • As a time travel researcher, you receive an alarming report.
  • You invent a time machine and use it to steal money from your own bank account yesterday.
  • Your dead friend Willis returns from the future to visit you on your birthday… as a zombie.
  • Unplug your time machine to find several copies of yourself waiting to use it. The more you witness the same event, the more this world vibrates with events before your eyes and waits to be witnessed. In this world, are you the original? Do you move on from one world to the next? To what end? Time travel continues indefinitely…
  • Your time machine gets stolen.
  • You get stranded on the moon. You have no supplies and only the moon’s supplies to survive. What do you eat and how do you avoid getting ill?
  • What do you decide to do about the people who ruined your life?
  • The time patrol says that you have changed time and now they have to destroy you.
  • You approach a special cabinet in the basement of a museum and open it. You are not seen, though, and you enter it…
  • A friend asks to borrow your time machine to travel to the future to read tomorrow’s newspaper.
  • Come up with a famous use of time travel in a novel, a movie, a TV show, or a video game, and describe how it resolves.
  • How would you describe your past life to someone else.
  • You are stuck in a time capsule for fifty years. What was the best thing about it? You are stuck in a time capsule for fifty years. What was the worst thing about it? Time Machine fashion shows are popular. A time capsule opens. You forgot to include any clothes. What do you do?
  • You find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere with your time machine.
  • Someone invents a time machine before you, and when you find out who it was you wish you had invented it.
  • You have the opportunity to set people free from the 9 to 5 rut from the past by reviving communism. You do this by walking into the time machine and doing it manually.
  • Undesirable elements from the past come back to wreak havoc in the future.
  • You visit the year you were born in with your time machine. Perhaps your parents spent their first anniversary with you or perhaps it’s the day you were born.
  • The spaceship you were travelling in crashes on a remote planet in the past.
  • Your primary mission is now accomplished but you’ve been unconfident in accomplishing your secondary mission.
  • You invent a magic wand that lets you transport anywhere in time. So where are your favorite places in time that you would visit?
  • Against your better judgment you use your time machine to head back into prehistory. The trip is a complete and total failure and you end up in 1000 A.D.
  • You go back in time and watch yourself fall in love with the man or woman of your dreams.
  • Your girlfriend tries to get you in on a time travelling threesome with you and another version of you from the future.
  • You sell your time machine to the government for a large sum of money only to be told the government has also built a time machine.
  • After speaking to the future you realise you’re destined to marry your favourite celebrity.
  • You tune into the secret signal for time travellers and are transported as a spy from one war to another.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and you end up back in time.
  • You witness the Time Traveller.
  • You win a Nobel Prize for designing the first time machine.
  • The detective tries to reason with the professor to no avail and threatens to have his time machine seized.
  • Using time travel, you’ve corrected an old mistake you made.
  • You’ve just traveled back from the future, and before you arrive in the past you drop an important item. When returning to the past, you realize that you must give the object away to yourself, in the past.
  • A time-traveling serial killer is on the loose.
  • You accidentally take your time machine with you and wind up in the future—the far future.
  • The last person on Earth is in a deep sleep. Using your time machine, you move him to the present day.
  • You have the ability to travel to any time period you choose. You have arrived at a crucial period in history and need to contact friends about something really important.
  • Inventors of a time machine grow rich and famous from fortune where they become controlling tyrants.
  • You overhear two acquaintances plotting to kill your self in the future.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and you double wound yourself. What else goes wrong?
  • You find yourself at the moment of conception.
  • You are stranded in a G major universe.
  • Your time machine is on the fritz and you have a party with your future self.
  • You find you can travel into the past and become your ancestors. Why do you immediately think of helping yourself? Does it make you feel ashamed regardless?
  • You find out you’re destined to commit murder in six days.
  • You discover two unknown time portals in your city, one leads to the past, the other to the future.
  • You’ve traveled through time to a future date and discover that people living in that era already have time machines and can travel through time. How do you feel about this?
  • A time traveller from the future travels back and asks you for one chance to save his family.
  • The future you show you in a time machine is awful in many ways but exactly how you predicted.
  • You’re a time traveller. A frightened young woman on the run takes shelter in your home while her pursuers are looking for her in the wrong direction.
  • You use your time machine to go back in time and catch a murderer.
  • You are trapped in an empty black room with your time machine.
  • Your time machine malfunctions and unleashes Skynet into the world.
  • Your time machine sends you decades into the future, but when you return your machine remains where it was.
  • Unable to return to your own time, you use your time machine to tour the ages.
  • A beam of light from a time machine appears overhead. You realize that you are stuck.
  • You’re visited by a man and woman in the future, claiming they are your kids.
  • A dog tags along with you when you’re testing the time machine. 20 years later, the time machine malfunctions and returns you and the dog to the present. The dog has then aged 200 years.
  • Visiting yourself in the future goes wrong, but you get to keep the time machine.
  • Someone suggests you save Hitler.
  • The army of the future has time machines at their disposal.
  • You’re jumped by a gang and wish yourself to be in your own time machine’s storage place to retrieve a weapon so you can defend yourself.
  • A time machine is built based on your design, but you’re found dead, slumped against the time machine. You are declared a martyr.
  • You find a time machine on your nose.
  • While in the distant past, a saber tooth tiger appears out of nowhere.
  • Your pet accidentally gets sent to the future. You have to be content with a slightly evolved animal.
  • The person you love ends up marrying someone else. You journey all the way back into time to stop this from happening.
  • You use your time machine to track someone across alternate universes. What happens next?

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