SCP Foundation

Hello, I am new to the site and after reading several interesting and frightening tales I have tried my hand at an SCP. It is titled Indigo Deathstalker (at the moment) and is in the editable sandbox.

Thank you for any comments and assistance that helps me evolve this first SCP submission.

Okay, so… first off, if you're going to ask for help in this forum, please provide a sandbox link. I've dug it up here: http://scp-sandbox-3.wikidot.com/robert-gresham but it really saves reviewers a lot of time in the long run.

So far as your concept goes… it's not good. And in all honesty, readers on the site will probably roll their eyes and snicker at a kind of tryhard-sounding rule-of-cool nickname like "Indigo Deathstalker" being used for a stereotypical dangerous humanoid formula article. We get tons of humanoids submitted and deleted every week because all they amount to is "human-shaped thing that can do a lot of damage with a lot of weird body parts and special D&D monster-esque abilities".

Humanoids are actually among the most difficult types of articles to write successfully; if you're really set on writing one, then first take a look at the humanoid writing guide if you haven't yet.

The writing is also highly problematic. You have non-metric measurements (feet are not metric, use meters) and excessively-specific containment requirements (°C 12.7778 is reversed notation, and it'd be incredibly difficult to consistently keep temperature exactly at this hundred-thousandth of a degree measurement) for no viable in-universe reason, and sloppy redaction (instead of using [REDACTED] a bunch, just use blackboxes. Much easier for the audience to keep track of, otherwise everything looks the same. You as the author know everything, but the reader doesn't have that foreknowledge). The SCP-008 reference is unnecessary and comes off as an attempt to try and make this thing seem more interesting by piggybacking off the fame of a more-popular article. Try to avoid that.

I personally can't say that I find this workable, but if you really want to try getting it written for the mainsite, first get the base idea polished up in the Ideas and Brainstorming forum before you try fixing the draft. Go to that forum, post a quick summary of your idea, and reviewers can help make it less cringy.

Noting that this has been posted to the mainsite here: http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-3353

Porting feedback over:

is referencing another SCP not allowed?

It's allowed, but not necessarily recommended.

I personally thought that was interesting, but if thats not allowed or considered instantly cliche, I will drop.

The usage here doesn't particularly benefit either this article or SCP-008, mainly because you could effectively swap out 008 for a number of other contagion/medical SCP articles and the narrative wouldn't change much. As such, it's kind of like unnecessary padding fluff text to just have someone say "oh yeah, also we want to check it for this other anomaly".

The humanoid may be dangerous, but I don't know whats stereotypical about it.

I paid attention to the humanoid writing guidelines, and it's not about containing a dangerous humanoid but experimenting with its anomalous properties.

Yeah—you focus way too much on its behaviors and anomalous properties and it kind of comes off as a D&D stats sheet or video game boss description. The backstory of "there's a serial killer involved, also the Deathstalker scorpion for some reason" doesn't really divert from those sorts of rule-of-cool themes, as well as the overall kind of creepypasta feel that the site has migrated away from in the 8-10+ years since it was first started.

I personally also disagree with most of the experimentation—the whole "Necessary testing with various D CLASS personnel is required to establish aggression levels and attack methods employed by SCP-3353." bit doesn't really seem necessary to me. The Foundation probably doesn't really need to know every attack pattern that this thing has at the cost of plenty of hard-to-replace trained/orientation-completed D-Class.

Overall, it feels like something that might have done okay 8+ years ago when that sort of thing was more commonly-liked, but after that many years of seeing those sorts of things be posted, and lately fail in recent times, it's just gotten kind of stale.