Download: Progression Fantasy Writing Prompt Guide
Getting AI to write decent fiction is hard. Getting it to write progression fantasy that doesn't read like it was spit out by a machine? That's a whole different problem.
Anyone who's tried knows the frustration. You feed ChatGPT or Claude a prompt asking for a LitRPG chapter and what comes back is technically correct but creatively dead. The dialogue sounds like a corporate training video. Every character speaks in complete, grammatically perfect sentences. The prose is riddled with em dashes and melodramatic one-liners. The MC makes decisions no actual human would make, and the "progression" amounts to a stat block dropped into the middle of a paragraph with no narrative weight behind it.
The root issue isn't that AI can't write. It's that AI defaults to patterns, and those patterns are the opposite of what makes progression fantasy work.
Why Standard Prompts Fail for Progression Fantasy
Progression fantasy readers are some of the most demanding audiences in genre fiction. They expect tight POV, earned power-ups, clever problem-solving, satisfying "number go up" moments, and protagonists who feel like real people making real decisions under pressure. They can smell lazy writing from a mile out, and they have zero patience for it.
A simple prompt like "write a LitRPG chapter where the main character levels up in a dungeon" gives the AI nothing to work with in terms of craft. It doesn't know you want tight third-person close instead of omniscient narration. It doesn't know that filter words like "he noticed" and "he realized" kill psychic distance. It doesn't know that progression fantasy readers will riot if you drop a deus ex machina power-up into chapter twelve that wasn't foreshadowed in chapter three.
So the AI does what it always does. It plays it safe, writes something generic, and produces text that reads like every other AI-generated fantasy story on the internet.
The Mega-Prompt Solution
The fix is a comprehensive writing guide that functions as a persistent system prompt, essentially a craft bible that sits in the AI's context window and governs every word it produces. Not a one-line instruction, not even a paragraph of guidance, but a structured, multi-section document covering everything from prose style to dialogue authenticity to progression system design.
Think of it less as a prompt and more as an editorial style guide you'd hand to a ghostwriter before they touch your manuscript.
A well-built progression fantasy mega-prompt covers several critical domains.
POV and Psychic Distance. The guide enforces tight third-person close, anchored entirely to the MC's perceptions. It explicitly bans filter words, head-hopping, and omniscient narration. It instructs the AI to let the MC's vocabulary and background color the prose itself, not just the dialogue.
Character Development That Actually Works. Rather than letting the AI default to a bland, generically heroic protagonist, the guide defines what progression fantasy audiences actually want in an MC: determined and self-reliant, clever rather than overpowered, pragmatic with a moral core, capable of dry humor without being a comedian. These traits need to emerge through behavior and choices, not through the narrative telling the reader how great the character is.
Dialogue That Sounds Human. This is where most AI fiction falls apart completely. The guide explicitly instructs against perfect grammar in casual speech, characters who always say exactly what they mean, and the kind of symmetrical back-and-forth dialogue that reads like a script rather than a conversation. It pushes for interruptions, subtext, deflection, uncomfortable silences, and characters who sometimes say the wrong thing and don't immediately fix it.
Progression System Integrity. The guide enforces setup and payoff, system transparency, and proportional rewards. It requires that power gains feel earned through effort or sacrifice. It bans convenient power-ups that weren't foreshadowed and demands consistency in how the magic or cultivation system operates across chapters.
AI Pattern Avoidance. This is the section that does the heavy lifting for authenticity. It explicitly identifies and bans common AI writing tells: repetitive paragraph openings, symmetrical sentence rhythms, generic sensory descriptions (the infamous "steely gaze" and "clenched fists"), reflective chapter endings that summarize what just happened, and formulaic transitions. It pushes the AI to vary its structures, make surprising but character-consistent choices, and write prose that wouldn't trigger an AI detection tool.
What Changes When You Use One
The difference between AI output with and without a comprehensive guide is significant enough that it's worth the upfront investment of building one. With a well-constructed mega-prompt in place, several things shift immediately.
Dialogue stops sounding like a Wikipedia article and starts including the kind of messy, incomplete, sometimes contradictory speech patterns real people use. Characters interrupt each other. They avoid topics. They use humor to deflect from pain.
The MC stops being a passive observer narrating events and starts driving the story through decisions that feel motivated by personality rather than plot convenience. Flaws become real flaws, not the kind of charming quirks that never actually cause problems.
Progression moments land harder because they've been set up properly. When the MC gains a new ability or hits a milestone, it connects to earlier struggles and sacrifices rather than appearing out of thin air.
And the prose itself reads cleaner. Fewer filter words, tighter psychic distance, more varied sentence structures, and chapter endings that feel like natural stopping points rather than manufactured cliffhangers.
Building Your Own
The key to building an effective progression fantasy writing guide is specificity. Every section needs concrete instructions and examples rather than vague aspirations.
Don't write "make the dialogue realistic." Write "use contractions almost always, allow incomplete sentences and fragments, include interruptions, and let characters struggle to articulate what they mean."
Don't write "the MC should be likable." Write "the MC should be competent but not smug, willing to get their hands dirty, protective of a small inner circle, and flawed in ways that create actual problems rather than serving as humble-brags."
Don't write "avoid AI-sounding prose." Write "never start more than two consecutive paragraphs with the character's name, avoid symmetrical dialogue exchanges, ban em dashes, and never end a chapter with a reflective summary statement."
The more explicit and granular the instructions, the less room the AI has to fall back on its default patterns.
The Limitations
A mega-prompt won't turn AI into a bestselling novelist. It won't generate the kind of deep thematic resonance or structural innovation that the best human-written progression fantasy achieves. It still requires a human editor with genre knowledge reviewing every chapter, catching inconsistencies, and pushing the output toward authenticity.
What it does is raise the floor dramatically. Instead of starting from generic slop and rewriting eighty percent of it, you're starting from competent genre fiction that needs targeted editing and a human creative voice layered on top.
For authors working on long-running serials, web novels, or multi-book series where output volume matters alongside quality, that difference in starting point translates directly into time saved and consistency maintained.
The mega-prompt approach isn't a shortcut. It's a tool, and like any tool, it works best in the hands of someone who already understands the craft it's meant to support.
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