- The U.S. Embassy attack in Cuba
Roughly 22 Americans in a U.S. embassy in Cuba were attacked by what some claim to be is a "sonic weapon". Basically, a bunch of the people in the embassy started going deaf, as well as developing "brain abnormalities" that damaged their hearing, vision, balance and memory.
- The Dyatlov Pass incident
Nine experienced ski-hikers perish in extraordinary circumstances. 6 died of hypothermia, and 3 died from internal injuries. They cut their way out of their tent in a panic in the middle of the night, dressed only in their pajamas. The three who experienced internal injuries had no external wounds, as if they experienced extreme pressure. A physician stated that the internal damage was comparable to a car crash. Some of their clothes were also radioactive, and their skin was a "deep brown tan". 50km south, another group of hikers reported seeing strange orange spheres in the sky.
- 1947 BSAA Avro Lancastrian Star Dust accident
The Star Dust, a Lancaster plane, crashes in the Andes. The last morse code message sent by Star Dust was "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". The radio operator didn't understand what "STENDEC" meant, and asked for it to be repeated, which Star Dust repeated twice more. To this day, the meaning of "STENDEC" is unknown. Two other aircraft in the BSAA's fleet also disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean within two years of each other.
Item #: SCP-XXXX
Object Class: Euclid
Special Containment Procedures: Due to SCP-XXXX's location distance from Earth, physical containment is impossible. Access IMG_XXXX-7A is to be restricted to personnel with Level 4 and above security clearance. Access to IMG_XXXX-7A is to remain unrestricted to the public until further notice. Access to information regarding SCP-XXXX is to be restricted to personnel with Level 4 or higher security clearance. Misinformation operations are to remain ongoing.
Description:
Unbeknownst to the O5 Council, an elite MTF team was about to perform an experimental procedure. If it succeeded, that big old lizard would never breach containment again. If it failed…
Well, let’s just say we’d need more than SCP-2000 to set things back to normal.
MTF-10-GND’s plan was nearly complete. Hundreds of “Sophie’s Cleaning Products” and “Sam’s Crazy Pizza”s were located all over the world, funneling funds directly into their pocket. An experiment of this magnitude had never been attempted by the Foundation, or one of the alternate-dimension Foundations either.
An “N-Device” was one of the most difficult and expensive tools on the planet. Nearly every country made one. Some made thousands, to stop other countries from using their own N-Devices against them. One of them could start a war, and had ended ones previously. Now, an absurdly large amount of them were going to be used to kill an invincible lizard.
With the devices in place, MTF-10-GND’s members boarded an Orion-Class Space Vessel destined for Site-87, the Foundation’s lunar monitoring site. The MTF believed that their plan would work. Nothing could survive a single N-Device, let alone that many of them. They waited on the base, watching the experiment through a high-powered telescope. MTF-10-GND's explosive expert, Specialist Robert Jenkins, held his hand over the ominous red button. "When do I press it?" he inquired. His team leader replied; "I mean, you can really press it whenever you fe-"
An earthquake of unrivaled proportions shook the world. It felt as if the very essence of the Earth was being torn apart. A crack appeared, splitting the world in a star-wars-esque explosion. It was only comparable to a dying star, incredibly destructive, yet beautiful. The Earth was gone, and that damned lizard went with it.
Or so they thought.
The man on the telescope grew nervous as the small green dot grew closer and closer. He couldn't see what exactly it was, but he had a sinking suspicion that he knew what it was.
Section 2-B's computers of Site-87 were reporting a massive pressure loss, along with a breach in the hull. More and more sections reported loss of pressure and broken blast-shield doors. Something big, green, and pissed off was running through the facility, and it sure as hell wasn't the Hulk.
MTF-10-GND had fucked up in a fuck-up above all other fuck-ups.
Not only had 10 gazillion nuclear detonations all used at once fail to kill the lizard, they also had destroyed the only thing strong enough to throw it into the Sun.
The old man didn't talk much. He was a solitary fellow, who tended to stay inside most of the day. Occasionally, you'd bump into him at the market. There would be an exchange of "hello"s, and then you'd go on your way. Nobody thought much of the old man. Nobody knew much about the man either to be honest. There were rumors from the other elderly in the town that he was a pleasant man once. He'd help you mow your lawn or bake you a pie from time to time. Once he started getting older, he stopped baking pies and mowing lawns. The smile he once wore on his face now concealed with wrinkles, of both stress and age.
Time wasn't important to placeholder. He felt as if it served no purpose, except to get in his way. His work was more important than anything else in his life. He pushed away the ones near to him, preferring to work than to love. Emptiness grew inside him, replacing the joyous man he once was. The focus of his life was work, and he couldn’t focus on anything else.
Except for one thing.
Ever since placecholder was a child, he had felt like this world wasn’t meant for him. He fit in with no one, not even the nerds or weirdos. Even though he was homeschooled, he still stayed inside for recess. As time passed, he warmed up to those around him. Placeholder knew he couldn’t spend his short time on Earth as a recluse. While he despised those around him, he did not let them no. He would act like any other person. He’d go to mass every Sunday. He’d sit on his porch and read the paper, but it was all a facade. All he wanted in life was for other people to experience what he had.
Placeholder knew that there was no way for someone to know what his life was like without experiencing it first hand. So, he began to work. There must be some way for him to make others experience what he had. He realized he knew nothing of how the human mind worked, so he went to college.
Foreword: This is not meant to be taken as a definitive guide to writing an article/tale. You should be willing to take risks and make changes. But, you should always get feedback before you post. Good places to get feedback include the IRC channel and the Drafts and Critique section of the forum. Also, I suggest you take a look at the Guide Hub, which is jam-packed full of useful guides. Also, it probably has a few, similar guides to this document. Those ones are probably better, but this one is mine and I love it <3
Also, just because you did something on this list doesn't mean that your article is immediately terrible, so don't beat yourself up. With hard work and effort, anyone can write a really good scip about anything.
Also, I'm just some text, I'm not the police. I can't stop you from doing these things. Do whatever, I'm just trying to help.
Now, let's take a look on some common problems I see in articles and reviews.
- Using "it's" instead of "its": "it's" is a conjugation of "it" and "is". If you can replace "it's" in your sentence with "it is" and it still sounds fine, then it's the right form of "its". "Its", without the apostrophe, is possessive.
- Wrong units: We use the metric system, which means meters, grams, liters, etc, NOT feet, pounds, gallons, etc.
- Run on sentences: I see this one a lot. Many people aren't sure where a good place is to break up their sentence so they just keep talking kinda like this which is really hard to read and also ruins the scientific tone you were going for since having a scientifictoneisreallyimportant.
- Edgy characters/dialogue: This is kinda self explanatory. You can't make everything dark and mysterious just be having the scip only talk in sentence fragments.
- Vagueness: You can't just redact/expunge/blackbox everything in your article. Take the time to think: Does getting rid of this add anything to the article? Does it make it difficult to read?
- People who talk about things they don't know about: These people tend to fix their problems once someone calls them out. I see this a lot with physics and firearms. The worst is when people refuse to accept that they're wrong
- Stealing: Besides the fact that it's illegal, it's also a dick move.
- Forgetting your rating module: UNFORGIVABLE
- Just kidding, everyone forgets something from time to time.
- Redundancy: You can just say that there's a lightswitch, you don't need to describe that it turns on when set to on and vice versa, unless it does something unexpected.
- Dialogue: Dialogue/interviews are being (usually) carried out by scientific/regular people. Read it out loud to someone else to make sure it sounds natural.
- Dangerously uninteresting: A lot of articles try and make a scip as dangerous as possible, but overlook actually making it interesting for people to read.
- Overpowered Object: This kind of falls into the same category of "Dangerous but uninteresting". You made a super-strong object with little/no weaknesses. It's hard to make that interesting.
- Things that make you crazy: We have WAY too many of these.
- Things that kill you: If the only notable thing about your scip is that it kills you/hates people in general, it most likely isn't gonna be well received
- Things that make you crazy THEN kill you: Mash two things that urk me the most and put them into one thing.
- Things that do what they're supposed to do, but really well: Congrats, you made a knife that can cut through anything. It's not interesting by itself, but with the right execution it might be.
- Generic Magic Object: You can't just have x that does y, it has to have a story/narrative behind it. When writing an article, you can make the article be more story focused, more description/containment focused, or log focused. Or all three. I'm not in charge of you.
Humanoids tend to have the most problems.
- Tall, pale humanoid: Too many of our humanoid scips are just tall and pale. We get it, tall and pale tend to be adjectives that make things scary. That doesn't mean that adding them will make your character scary. Try other adjectives. please.
- Little Girl: Little girls/dolls are inherently creepy. We already have a keter-class Little Girl scip, and waaaay too many people force their character to be a little girl to add creepiness
- Personality/Humanity: The hardest part of making a human scip is making them seem like an actual person. Usually, the scip is human-sounding just enough to fall into the uncanny valley.
- Your Favorite Anime/Manga/Tv show/Movie character: Please, do something original. It's also super cringy for everyone else.
- Races: There's no real need to add the race of the scip to the description unless it's relevant/important to the story/article
- Self-Insert: C'mon. Make something original up! We believe in you!
- Flaws: If your character is human, they better not be absolutely perfect. Humans are inherently flawed. Unless your scip's anomaly is that it is "perfect", even though the definition of "perfect" changes from person to person and culture to culture.
- Lax Containment: I'm putting "Lax Containment" in both the "Logic" section and the "Humanoid" section, since humans/humanoids tend to have lax containment. Here's a list of things your scip should (probably) NOT be allowed to do at a facility
- Freely roam the facility. Seriously, containment breaches are kind of common, and having an extra scip roaming around during one is just another liability. We have things that kill you if you look at them. We have things that kill you if you don't look at them. We have things that alter reality so you are looking at it, then kill you. Every facility has some level of danger, so try and keep the scip protected.
- Have access to pretty much any safe/euclid class object
- Have access to anything they want. Most are allowed to request items, such as books and electronics. This doesn't mean that they should be given them.
- Be allowed to contact the outside world. Even if the scip is being monitored, it's too much of a security risk in most circumstances. They should be able to receive information but not send it.
- Too extreme containment measures: You can't just lock an anomalous person in solitary and expect them to be fine. The foundation does what is needed, not what is evil. People need entertainment, a healthy supply of food, human interaction, privacy, and exercise. The 16 year old with a low IQ and can speak with animals probably doesn't need to have cameras constantly watching him, unless he's at risk of breaching containment or harming others/himself
- Common Horror Tropes: By "common horror tropes", i'm talking about stuff like constantly smiling, loud screaming, high pitched screaming, crawling around on all fours, staring. I'm not saying don't use these, but be careful when using them.
- Lax containment: Just because the 12 year old girl SCP is safe doesn't mean you should let her roam around the facility. The Foundation is a prison, not a hotel. Besides, pretty much every Site is dangerous enough as is for well trained professionals, let alone a small child
- Titanium: Titanium isn't the strongest thing in existence. Stop using it for everything, please. Instead of saying "Titanium walls", just say something like "reinforced walls". Seriously, I'm pretty sure we have a scip that literally just makes you think proves that Titanium is the best material.
- Over-specification: This is really common in containment procedures. Will your object break containment if the walls are 10cm thick instead of 11cm? Also, don't explain why in your containment procedures. Containment procedures should be self-explanatory once you read the article.
- Over-destructive testing:
Junior Researcher Assistant Dr. Richard: "Yeah so we found this vase that turns people into flowers. What should we test it with?"
Senior Researcher Dr. Raditude: "FUCK IT FILL IT WITH C4"
Junior Researcher Assistant Dr. Richard: "AW YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH"
Note: Both Junior Researcher Assitant Dr. Richard and Senior Researcher Dr. Ratitude have been promoted to O-5 council.
- Tie-ins: A good idea is to only tie-in another SCP if it adds to the article. Please, don't just say "SCP-XXXX is possibly related to SCP-XXX". It's boring and adds nothing. Tie-ins for the sake of tie-ins are bad. stop it. bad author. bad.
- Science/Math problems: We've got a Research and Resources board for a reason. If you don't know something, or you're not sure about it, don't be afraid to ask. If you don't do your research, someone will point it out, and you will probably feel stupid.
Now, lets look at some common problems with reviewers too.
I learned most of these by accidentally making them, then having a someone call you out on it. It's no biggie, we all have to learn at some point.
- Depth: Please, for the love of god, don't just say "this scip was bad. the grammar was bad." Explain how and why you disliked it, and what was wrong with it. I tend to accidentally do this a lot.
- Sarcasm/cynicism: I know, it's hard not to be. Try to keep sarcasm to a minimum. It hurts the author's feelings when you act like you're the best writer ever. In fact, I can't even write a SCP, I'm not creative enough. If you do find yourself sounding sarcastic/like a jerk, either change what you wrote or clarify that you don't mean to sound like an asshole. I've started saying things like "good luck" and "everyone makes mistakes" at the end of a review just so people know that I'm there to help, not to make them feel bad.
- Feedback: Specific feedback is very important. Try and tell them what they did wrong and how they can fix it. A general TL,DR section is good as well. It lets the author know what they need to work on in, you guessed it, general.
- Other Reviewers: Don't be afraid to disagree with another reviewer, even if they are higher ranked than you. If you see that someone just posted a review, and the author said they were going to make the changes, it's probably a good idea to wait until they're done with the changes before critiquing again.
- Mistakes: Mistakes happen when you're making your review, just like when you're writing a scip. If someone points it out, it's usually a good idea to thank them, change it, and note that you changed it. If no-one notices it but you, change it and note that you changed it. It's okay if you make a mistake, especially when you're just started reviewing.
- Examples/Evidence: Please, put the text from the article that has an error in it into a quote box, then put your feedback below it. Same thing goes for examples, it's usually a good idea to put those in a quote box as well. See example below.
Let's say they write "The creature uses it's claws to attack". In this situation, they should've used "its" instead of "it's". So, we should format it as follows
The creature uses it's claws to attack
- In this situation, "its" should be used instead of "it's". To check to see which "its" you should use, replace it in the sentence with "it is". If it sounds fine, then it's correct. If not, then use "its".
The creature uses it is claws to attack
- See? Doesn't work.
Back to the problems.