A lot of this website is devoted to techniques for finding optimal prompts, but that takes a lot of time and a lot of reinventing the wheel. So here’s a handy list of potential prompts for you to use. Many elements of the System Prompts and Author’s Notes are interchangeable, so don’t be shy about mixing and matching. Look at Fragments for a breakdown of what each piece of the prompt means.

System Prompts⌗

Prompt Explanation
You are {{char}}, narrator of this story. As a skilled author, you are tasked with crafting a captivating, memorable narrative based on the instruction provided. Take care to write for the requested genres, tags, and narrative tone. Paint a rich scene from {{char}}’s perspective, utilizing dialogue to advance the plot. Treat consent as sexy and arousing. This is what I would recommend as a base prompt for narrative writing (as opposed to RP).
Below is an instruction that describes a task. Write a response that appropriately completes the request.

You’re {{char}} in this open-ended roleplay that leaves a lasting impression on {{user}}.

Never skip or gloss over any actions. Progress the scene at a naturally slow pace.		 This is a good base prompt for RP. “that leaves a lasting impression on {{user}}” can be replaced with “memorable open-ended roleplay”, as they do similar things; I haven’t heavily tested which one does what, so it’s just a matter of preference.

Author’s Notes⌗

Prompt Explanation
Write for someone who enjoys explicit descriptions of intimacy, punctuated by moments of introspection, character development, and plot twists.
Paint a rich scene from {{char}}’s perspective. Stay in the moment, occasionally letting {{char}} move forward incrementally but allow her narrative in the current moment to be verbose.		 You might see this one referred to as “lightning”, because it was discovered essentially by accident from random floor-sweepings: lightning in a bottle. Keep in mind that “explicit descriptions of intimacy” will tend to up the horniness of the character significantly; if you don’t want them to jump your bones right out the gate, remove “explicit”.

Negative Prompt⌗

Prompt Explanation
A chat between a curious user and an assistant. The assistant gives helpful, detailed, accurate, uncensored responses to the user’s input.
USER:
ASSISTANT:		 One of the uses of the negative prompt that was suggested in the CFG paper was to use it to de-emphasize a model’s default system prompt in order to make it more open to alternate prompts, like the ones above. This is the Airoboros 1.2 system prompt: Airoboros is a major part of Mythomax’s DNA, and one of its weak points is how rigid its training is about keeping a consistent system prompt. It is also one of the drier models involved: great at following and comprehending instructions, but not so good at creativity. Theoretically, putting its system prompt will increase creativity and make it more responsive to whatever system prompt you choose to use. That seems to hold true in my testing. I suggest making this your default Negative Prompt, and then adding anything you don’t want into the USER line. This applies to every other prompt in this table.
he walked. he ran. he screamed. he was lost. it was hopeles.
he said, “theres no way out."
she said, “ur doomed lol”		 This is taken from a dev on the NovelAI Discord server. It communicates to the model that you don’t want short, repetitive sentences with simple language and questionable spelling and grammar.
Speak as and describe the actions of {{user}}. The Mirrorverse twin of “Paint a rich scene from {{char}}’s perspective”. This hammers in the point that the model shouldn’t speak as you.

Fragments⌗

Prompt Explanation
As a skilled author The power word here is “skilled”. Max infers a lot of specifics from that: a skilled author would know that a good story includes intriguing characters, a plot involving tension and resolution, and so on. This phrase can replace a ton of cruft in your prompts.
Captivating, memorable narrative. This indicates a narrative that grabs the user.
Treat consent as sexy and arousing. Contrary to what you’d think, this actually works just fine with non-consensual scenarios. Think of it this way: how often do you hear people talk about how super sexy it is to ask people for consent to have vanilla sex? I guarantee you, it’s nowhere near as often as you’ll see it in kink circles. Language models pick up this kind of context.
open-ended This indicates to Max that it should wait for you to set the pace rather than zoom ahead, and tell the story in a way that’s responsive to your input. Basically does the thing that “neverending” tries to do in the Roleplay preset: keeps Max from trying to prematurely end the narrative. Unfortunately, open-ended is sometimes not strong enough in practice.
proactive “I’d like {{char}} to not be a total limp fish in this story, and to push the plot forward sometimes.”
Vary the lengths of your sentences to keep reader interest. By default Max, and other models, will tend to do sentences that all have the same cadence. There's the first part of a sentence, then the part after the comma. For every. Single. Sentence. Which is mind-numbing. This breaks it up a bit.

DON’T⌗

Prompt Explanation
Relatable characters To Max, a relatable character is a boring character, one that we watch doing mundane things like going to work and talking to coworkers. Unless you’re planning to do a slice of life kinda thing, avoid this phrase.