SCP by Series
SCP Tales by Series
SCP Library
Discover Content
SCP Community
User Resources
Seeking Greenlights: Yes
Page Type: SCP Article
Genre: Mystery, Horror
SCP is a child’s bedroom created by a rouge foundation scientist capable of reanimating the dead. With the unforeseen side effect of bring non living objects to life. Through anomalous means, the room detects an absence of life and corrects that. Dead humans that are reanimated are husks of what they used to be, their vitals work and they can move but they do so aimlessly. Objects animated by the room are loyal to whoever placed them in there, able to execute complicated commands and loyal to their creator objects will also when not executing an order attempt to entertain and care for husks in their vicinity, preferring women and children.
Foundation scientist (Doctor Mortifer) wife and child dies.
He becomes obsessed with death and becomes convinced that he has found a way to cheat death.
Foundation denies him funding
Mortifer goes rouge and funds it himself
Through use of his knowledge about anomalous properties Mortifer is able to create this SCP and attempts to reanimate his wife with the room.
She is brought back in husk state.
Distraught, Mortifer becomes more obssessed.
Grave robs for test bodies.
Begins killing for test bodies.
Discovers room’s ability to animate objects, uses them to help collect more tests.
Neglects Foundation duties.
Foundation begins manhunt for him.
Mortifer learns about their investigation into his disappearance, attempts to reanimate his daughter.
Faliure, turns to husk.
Mortifer kills himself in the room, becomes husk, joining his wife and child. The foundation cover up Mortifer’s death, secretly continue Mortifer’s research.
The immediate hook: Possibility that the Foundation was discovered a way to cheat death.
What Keeps Readers attention: Watching the slow deterioration of Mortifer’s mental state as he desperately attempts to refute the harsh reality that life for all intensive purposes life is temporary. Story will be told through first person journal entries from Mortifer’s point of view, audience is brought along to experience Mortifer’s downward spiral with him.
Horror of this SCP is not so much the husks themselves as by themselves are not actually scary. Or the objects brought to life which are friendly and loyal. Horror comes from the disturbing first person recounts of a man who is facing death as well as his own trauma only to be bested by them and lose his life as a result.
What if you made one of them a drawing on a piece of paper?
The room would bring the piece of paper itself to life instead of the actual drawing but the paper could use whatever is drawn on it to communicate. Besides there is already an SCP with a living drawing so I don't want to copy that.
Author, as per the Ideas Critique required reading: http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-13095662/required-reading:how-to-use-this-forum-ideas the last four sections of the template (Elevator Pitch, Central Narrative, Hook/Attention-Grabber, and Additional Notes) should not exceed 400 words. What you have here is 460 words over the limit. Please trim your material accordingly before requesting feedback.
Once you have revised your post, please reach out to reviewers to request that they look at your thread. You can find a list of ways to contact reviewers in this thread: http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-13282692/how-to-get-more-reviews
[Placeholder, summoned via pm, will critique asap]
Hello! So I kind of like what you're going for, but the idea itself feels a bit flat. Let's break it down.
The Anomaly:
Real quick, you mention your SCP is a room in the title and summary, but you don't actually say it anywhere in the pitch, which confused me at first. It's best to state what your anomaly is in the pitch for ease.
So you state your SCP is a child's bedroom, yet you also mention that it's removed from the house and brought to the site? Sure, I guess that's possible, but it's kind of weird the Foundation would take an entire room from a house. I think the more realistic thing would be that they would buy out the house, and maybe set up a site around it. I'm not sure how they would remove a single room from a house, but buying out the whole house would be much easier.
I like the core idea here, a child's bedroom that brings things to life. Seems like a play on children and how they play with toys. Though I like this idea, it feels very onenote. It's a room that does a thing. This idea could possibly work if you tie it with the right narrative though.
After being brought to life objects are exposed to different tests, including interactions with D Class and other SCPs. The most noteable being 682 which after being a bit confused by the objects at first destorys every object it is introduced to.
Cross testing with other SCPs is not something the Foundation does lightly, and outside universe, cross testing is something that most people don't like, especially if you choose an SCP as popular as 682. This SCP is a room that brings things to life, why on earth would they cross test it with a killer reptile? Those two things have nothing to do with each other.
With cross testing, ask yourself this. Does the SCP I'm cross testing it with make sense? Could I get away with the exact same effect without cross testing? Why am I cross testing? What does it add to the article? Only cross test if it makes sense, and if it helps add to the article. But don't choose cross testing as a main hook or narrative, as again, cross testing is something that gets mixed responses.
The Narrative:
The way objects interact with the world after being brought to life. For example a toy car brought to life would first have to learn how to drive the way a child learn how to walk. A ball would have to learn how to roll and real cars would need to learn how to operate all their systems. The inventive ways objects use their already existing features would both be entertaining and facininating, allowing readers to think of ways objects around them would behave when brought to life.
This actually could work as a narrative. But you'd have to make sure it isn't all the same thing. Right now, I can see this easily failing, as it's basically all 'thing learns to be alive'. What would help is if you had an overarching story that connects all objects shown. Maybe use the tests to each show a piece of a story. Perhaps the story could be the story of the kid who first owned the room, or maybe choose one toy in particular. There's endless possibilities. For more information on narrative, check out this helpful guide.
Hope I could help! Good luck!
Thanks for your input it really helps a lot. Like you said there a lot of ways a narrative could be structured around this idea so I'm going to brainstorm on a list of possibilities and chose the one I think will work the best before updating the idea template above. Also don't worry I realised how ridiculous cross testing with 682 is pretty much as soon as I posted the thread lol. I'm planning on attempting to form a narrative around slowly unveiling the mystery of how and why the room was created and exactly how it works. Which will build up to some kind of twist that I'm still in the process of developing. Your advice was very helpful and will aid in this effort a lot.
Awesome, glad to hear that! I'm really glad I could help! :D
Hello! I like the story you've added a lot. It has a lot potential to be strong and emotional. You have to be careful with journal logs to make sure they're paced well. Pacing can help determine how the emotions come across. Make sure to really show how this trauma affects him. Show his slow descent into madness. Don't start out with him super crazy, having his mental state slowly deteriorate will help the emotions come across much stronger. I think this idea does have potential, and I feel like you've got a clear plan you'll be able to work with. For that reason, I'm presenting you with a greenlight!
Thank you so much! Of course I will make sure to pace this out as slowly as it can without being boring, he should lose his touch with reality in the final act and before that he will start of stable with clear reasons for his madness coming about. I hate stories about mental illness that have it appear for no reason. I want an as realistic as possible depiction of mental illness and trauma as the issue is quite close to me.
Contacted through PM
Hello there! I hope you're doing alright!
I'm not sure about your idea since it reminds me of SCP-387. I'll address your post in two points: the anomaly and the narrative. Without further ado, let's begin.
The anomaly: Like I said, your concept reminds me of SCP-387, the sentient Legos. And while I like the idea of non-sentient objects gaining sentience, the items you used for the SCP reminds me of Toy Story. Plus, we don't know what made the anomalies gain this sentience. You mentioned something about a room, but you never explained this in your post. So, I suggest you explain this. If you want to explore your anomaly's potential, I suggest you read this guide: The Journey of Your First SCP: Part I - Introduction & Ideation.
The narrative: This is my main issue. The discovery is logical, I guess. It doesn't need any changes, in my opinion. The problem that I have is the cross-testing with popular SCPs. You see, the problem with test logs is that most of them don't add anything to the narrative, and it remembers, again, Series I articles. Try to find an emotion you want the reader to feel when writing your draft. With the type of anomaly you have, you might want to give it a more humorous or emotional aspect. Maybe talk about how the objects feel after gaining sentience, and if they are aware of their situation. If you want to know what kind of narrative you want to tell read these guides: The Journey Of Your First SCP: Part II - Narratives & Originality and An exercise in narrative-based SCPs.
I hope this has helped you. I suggest you contact critters from the Butterfly Squad Roaster, who give amazing and useful critique. That's all for me.
Good luck, Comrade!
Thank you for your input I will take everything you've said on board. On the topic of cross testing with other SCPs I don't think I'll actually include that if this gets to a draft writng process. It is not nessasary and I don't want to rely on other SCP's to grab people's attention. Besides using 682 is so clique and overdone. I am aware of 387, it wasn't an inspiration but I did discover it when searching fro SCP's that were the same as my idea. While 387 is more like a community of lego people. My idea would more like focus on a large mass of lego that is one entity. As well as not being the soul focus of the article, being only a piece in contructing a larger narrative around the room, why it was made, how it works and what the foundation uses it for. I'll take a look at the guides you sent. Again thanks for taking the time to look at my idea :)
I'm really uncertain about this having test logs here; like, the idea of testing it feels…kinda boring perhaps? I really don't have a feel for what the testing reveals: it sounds like it just makes toys behave as you'd expect, which isn't very interesting, but there's probably room for some kind of subversion here.
I guess my bigger question is like, where does the testing go: why are you using testing to tell this story and how does the testing escalate to some kind of satisfying conclusion?
It might be worth really considering why the Foundation are doing the testing: if it's just producing the expected results, they're likely gonna be like 'eh whatever' and not; so either it needs to do something interesting or there needs to be a reason for them to (and not just a property tacked on to force it: this is what the entire story would need to revolve around, so it needs to be something strong enough to carry it for a reader to want to see resolved).
I am considering not doing that anymore, not sure what direction just yet. Maybe a series of notes from it's creator or interview logs with different objects or someone connected to the room's creation. I origianlly went into this not aware of how important a narrative was for SCPs so the test based narrative kind of refelcts that oversite. I would like some test to still be in the article just to clearly explain to readers how the SCP works but not as the entire narrative.
Got a PM about this, stated my review would be negative, was asked to give a critique all the same. Most of my concerns have been noted in the posts above, so I will keep my response relatively brief.
With regards to the core anomaly, it's admittedly fairly bland. The fact that it brings so many things "to life", without any sort of pattern or selectivity, feels kind of sloppily presented and not well thought-out, especially since there's no noted reason for why the item does this in the first place. "Thing that causes inanimate objects to become animate" are extremely common in fiction writing (see list of examples on this tropes page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimatingArtifact). Having your anomaly just give everything animal-level intelligence and movement, despite inanimate objects obviously lacking the basic range of motion and physical properties to benefit from those newfound abilities, feels like a very simple version of existing franchise material and as such doesn't really bring much new to the table.
Narrative-wise… you don't really have a narrative. "Foundation tests the item ad nauseum, and involves 682 for no reason" isn't really a narrative, it's more a laundry list of information with an unrelated test slapped on at the end. I have trouble believing this would be "entertaining and fascinating" since I get more the impression that the logs would become repetitive and a little nonsensical. The 682 reference is gratuitous and predictable, and can be removed entirely. See the Crosslinks Guide for more information on contexts when not to reference other articles.
To fix this… you'd essentially have to rewrite almost all of it. Are you certain you want to continue with this concept and the substantial amount of extra legwork involved, compared to working on something else more likely to succeed without a lot of retooling?
Thanks for your feedback, in regards to starting a new concept I do want to keep working on this idea. I know that it most likely won't end up becoming an offical SCP. However I want to keep working on it regardless until I hit a deadend. I think doing so would teach me a lot about the writing process of SCPs and improve my performance. Just to clarify, I know the site rules state to not intentionally write a bad SCP as your first attempt and this isn't what I am doing. I am genuinley going to put everything I've got into making this better.
Had been summoned by PM, so here I come. Pighead In, let's take a look at your idea.
Elevator Pitch : Well, I will talk more longer on the "Central Narrative" section below, but right now, for the pitch as it is on this section, I don't feel too much hooked into it.
Central Narrative : Here's the big part. And… I'm not really hooked into your narrative. I feel like I'm in a loop, something that seems to not really end. It's just "SCP Foundation takes a new thing and spent most of their time making tests with that and other SCPs". And while I don't really mind SCPs with crosstests, there's nothing else that you have on this one. It's just "they make tests" and that's all. I don't really know why I should care for these living objects and that's why I don't feel appealed by your narrative. Plus, the 682 mention is worth of being scrapped. There's too many mentions of 682 in too much new ideas and it will just not succeed at all.
Hook : This is already a little bit better and more interesting. You provide examples and I think you should focus on that, rather than focus on the crosstesting. Use the examples you provide and the conclusions made by the researchers for build a story about that. Alas, I don't really have exact examples to provide you, but at least, it's an example of what you can do.
And I will stop here. No greenlight from me. It was actually a little bit hard to write this review because I was struggling a little bit with writing something more interesting and helpful than just "I personally don't find this really interesting" and if this review lacks examples of a direction you could take, I apologize. But for me, there's two questions you can think about in order to improve your idea : why readers should care about these little objects and what things other than tests can make that more interesting? The origin of the room, why the objects still stay alive even when they're not in the room… things like that.
Oh, and for the rest, don't hesitate to contact another reviewers. It's all for me, Pighead Out.
Second review requested by PM
Hey there! I hope you're doing alright!
Let's take a second look at your concept, shall we?
First, I apologize for not giving you a second critique; I completely forgot. Here's your review.
I see that you fixed the issues that other reviewers and I made on your concept, and I have to admit that it's better than the original idea you had. However, there are some issues with it. While I do like the emotional side, touching the topics of insanity and suicide for the doctor is something that you should be careful; with a proper execution. I also wonder about the room. Why create a bedroom instead of something else? What's the meaning behind that decision?
I have a split opinion on the Foundation using Mortifier's SCP. First, there isn't any usefulness by part of the Foundation to continue Mortifier's project since it doesn't bring back the death correctly. Why continue its research instead of containing it?
Overall, this is an improved concept that I would enjoy reading. Sadly, I don't have greenlight privileges to give you one. My only suggestion is for you to contact reviewers from the Butterfly Squad Roaster.
Best of luck, Comrade!
Thanks for the review :) Just on why the Foundation would choose to continue Mortifer's research. The SCP as it stands when the report is written is incomplete as Mortifer dies before being able to complete it. Throughout his trials of trying to get it to work it will be hinted that he is making slow progress and in reality while not overtly stated it is my own cannon that the SCP can be made to work with enough time by the Foundation. The reason that progress on getting it to work is so slow is because Mortifer will end up destroying his original plans out of spite when he knows he is going to die as he doesn't want to allow the Foundation to benefit from his work. Plus if the Foundation could get it to work imagine the logistics they could make so much easier with it, it would basically allow them to have an endless supply of D-Class. Think like an army of the main character from Containment Breach just less efficient. Not to mention their task force agents who could perform tasks that would normally be considered too risky if this SCP were to function correctly. Which is why the report is written from a point where it doesn't as that would be OP as fuck.
It looks like this has been through a lot of revisions, and it looks like it's approaching a pretty good place.
I think the people above make very good points, and their comments should be taken into due consideration.
In addition,
Through anomalous means, the room detects an absence of life and corrects that.
I think a carte blanche "brings back everything" is the most boring way to go about this. This scientist is trying to revive his family, not just random things. I think having the room animate things that appear random at first, but are revealed to be important to his wife and kids, is a better approach.
Mortifer kills himself in the room, becomes husk, joining his wife and child. The foundation cover up Mortifer’s death, secretly continue Mortifer’s research.
As pointed out, this is a very sensitive topic that should be handled with care.
And the Foundation doesn't really do that sort of research, what with raising the dead. They already have an endless supply of D-class, in the same way the US government has an endless supply of prison labour.
It's very close. Figure out what this anomaly should do to complement your story - the idea that it revives everything and will be used to bolster D-class ranks has nothing to do with the otherwise sad tale of a man failing to revive his wife and kids.
Yeah okay I didn't consider that. I guess the objects were just a hold over from the original idea, they're not needed anymore. I have a few ideas for changing the exact properties of how the SCP functions. A mix of technology and the somewhat established cannon version of ritual. Maybe Mortifer originally worked on an SCP that involved ritual like the Deer or some other god like SCP. He takes his experience from that SCP and combines it with his technology expertise and creates a hybrid of modern technology and old-god ritual. He is able to nail the technology side quickly but struggles with the ritual, believing that his ritual design is faulty. However it could be revealed at the end that his ritual was correct he just didn't understand fully what was needed to properly communicate with the god and that if the ritual is completed fully the SCP is able to work as intended. However, this is only discovered after his death accidentally by the foundation. What these final steps would be I'm not sure yet, perhaps he has to sacrifice one husk in order to revive another or 2. Something along those lines. Or even just not have that at all and keep the SCP a failure that the Foundation has no interest in pursuing. Could be a neutralized class SCP or a Safe class.
Sorry for the brick of text it's just I have reached the word limit on the template so I'm just running my idea past you here before trying to add them to the template within the word limit as I need to know exactly what I'm going to change first.
[Placeholder from PM]
Noting that there's a lot of information in this thread, and I've only read what's in the original post, so I'll have missed any information not added to that.
Mortifer goes rouge and funds it himself
How does he fund himself? Given the Foundation denying him the funding was an issue, it can't really be as simple as just "he funds himself, done and dusted".
My primary issue with this is that the character arc just feels kinda predictable and generic? The family man who loses his family and goes "crazy" trying to get them back is a story that's played out a thousand times across pop culture and media at large, and this version of it doesn't really do anything unique beyond it's framing within the SCP format, which just isn't really enough.
I could guess easily where this story was going to end immediately after being told the narrative premise - it's the most obvious and simplistic payoff for a story such as this. He gets his comeuppance - it's a very simplistic take on the ideas presented in the subtext. It's just not very interesting to me.
Perhaps it's just not for me, I can see others enjoying the simplicity of this narrative arc, but it's really not my thing.
[Placeholder]
I'm sorry, this doesn't do it for me.
The characterisation you have of Doctor Mortifer seems very flat. The idea of a selfish, lovesick fellow using some sort of magic (or science) to bring back his loved ones from the death has been covered multiple times in pop culture, and it starts becoming very stale. For example, from the series, Harry Potter. Even my first idea had a similar story!
I'm also not a fan of using suicide as a sad way to end an SCP because it's contrived to elicit feelings of sympathy from me using a common trope because the author doesn't know how to properly end it.
However, I'm probably just not your target audience with this piece. You seem to have many other critters supporting your idea so I don't see a problem why you shouldn't continue. Good luck, author!
