The Tower

Summary:

Need some feedback on my idea.

The Tower

Aaris Whyle 09 Oct 2020 11:14

Seeking Greenlights: Yes

Page Type: SCP Article

Genre (Optional): Action

Elevator Pitch: So, a giant 3km high tower made out of a carbon monoxide solid isotope called ”Carbon-16”. This tower resides in an alternative dimension called XO-16 and is believed to be one of the superstructures created by an ancient race of humanoid entities in order to maintain/generate (by unknown means) reality. Like a beacon for existence. Because Carbon-16 is not very resilient, it is of high priority that Foundation’s MTFs protect it from receiving any damage.
It has been suggested that the SCP had a self-defence method to protect itself from incoming damage but unfortunately, this system has been destroyed or it’s malfunctioning (it's superheated) because of excessive attacks from extra-dimensional forces. It's now up to the Foundation to protect it until it can do it again.

Central Narrative: There are many extradimensional beings that try to destroy the tower. The Foundation thus constructed an outpost in this dimension to deal with all the enemy forces. Attacks to the Tower occur via huge waves of concentrated light or via direct projectiles or even with enemy forces coming in-person to attack the Tower. While the Tower actually regenerates over time, if it is damaged significantly, reality alterations will occur.

Hook/Attention-Grabber: The strange thing is that the isotope that makes up the Tower itself has some anomalous properties that can be used to create reality anchors, small devices used by the Foundation to negate the effects of a reality disrupting anomalies. While Carbon-16 can be created in a lab, it has been shown that only the on from the Tower itself possesses anomalous properties. Thus, protocol Hephaestus was born. Designed to collect Carbon-16 from the Tower.
The Tower was discovered in 2016, after some reality disturbencies occured on Earth any some nearby systems. The Foundations tracked the disturbances back to an alternate space, where they found this SCP. It is also to notice that there are possibly more then one Tower like this one in the Multiverse. None have been observed as of now.
Another thing, the beings that constructed it have died long ago but a few signs of their civilization remain as strange hieroglyphs and low humming sounds coming from the Tower itself.

Additional Notes: I really have more to say about this SCP. Thank you!

Last edited on 10 Oct 2020 11:40 by Aaris Whyle Show more

Re: The Tower

daybloom 09 Oct 2020 15:37

Note: Not experienced. Am I allowed to do this? Sorry if I'm not.

1. Why does the foundation want to protect it? All it's giving them is trouble.
2. This idea is really confusing. There's words like reality anchor and carbon-16 just floating around and I don't really get why they're significant or what they're doing.

Forum Criticism Team - Junior Staff Post

OCuin 09 Oct 2020 18:09

bloodynoseBT, per the Criticism Policy, forum critique should be relatively in-depth.

This idea is really confusing. There's words like reality anchor and carbon-16 just floating around and I don't really get why they're significant or what they're doing.

This feedback is vague and lacks detail; these words are standard for Foundation articles and not generally considered complex. When critiquing ideas, please try to look at all elements of the idea in order to give the author a better idea of what to improve. You are allowed to provide feedback, but please try to ensure it is helpful to authors as members of the Criticism team will prioritise threads with no responses.

---

Aaris Whyle, I recommend you reach out to the Butterfly Squad Roster for critique.

Last edited on 09 Oct 2020 18:10 by OCuin Show more

Re: The Tower

Booblesnoot 09 Oct 2020 19:07

Warning: I am fairly new to the site, and have not made any SCPs. Take my advice with a grain of salt, and if someone else contradicts me or says I'm wrong, listen to them.
Let's begin.

The concept itself seems fairly fleshed out, but will probably be a bit difficult to pull off. I have a few questions I recommend you think of an answer to:

+ Questions?!

How did they find it? If it is in a different dimension, it is probably pretty hard to get to. Is there a magical gateway leading to it, or some item that sends you there?

How was it protected before the Foundation found it? Presumably, it had some kind of defense mechanism before we showed up, or else it would've been destroyed by now. Was it on its last legs when it was found, and the Foundation had to rush to form a defense? Or did they kill the previous defenders when they first arrived, only to realize what they were protecting?

How did they figure out what it was? Is there some kind of writing on it, explaining its function? Or were some soldiers hanging around it when it got attacked, and they all started speaking in blue?

You don't have to know the answer to all of these, and you certainly don't have to explain the answers in your article. Small plot holes build mystery.

Now into some smaller stuff:

+ show block

ancient race of humanoid entities

Why humanoid? Not saying there's anything wrong with it, but it could be neat to have the creators of reality not bend to its laws.

Attacks to the Tower occur via huge waves of concentrated light or via direct projectiles or even with enemy forces coming in-person to attack the Tower.

This paints the opposing force as a organized army, which I'm not sure is your intention. If it is, ignore me.

This is a story idea that got a bit longer than I though it would. Feel free to take as much or as little inspiration from this as you want.

What if this dimension was where all the concepts of things(such as the concepts of Summer, distance, or falling) were just chilling in their non-physical existence, when Order got annoyed about how chaotic everything was? They team up with Form to give everyone bodies, and put their powers into a different dimension: ours. Now all the concepts are pissed because they don't much like having forms, and want to destroy the tower so they can go back to their original state. Would raise some interesting questions about what Order and Form are doing now, as well as how you win against the literal embodiment of Victory.

Expanded the collapsible since the post was still a bit long to scroll through. ~Zyn

I made a sandbox page with it if you're interested.

Generally speaking, try not to make a draft before you get the concept fleshed out. It makes it much more annoying to change parts of your idea, and it can be frustrating to have to throw parts or even the entirety of your work if it doesn't get greenlit.

Also, listen to OCuin.

Last edited on 10 Oct 2020 05:09 by Zyn Show more

Re: The Tower

LondonDown 09 Oct 2020 19:41

Hi Aaris -

Not an experienced reviewer, but I did have some general comments about your idea:

+ Comments

• The imagery and general concept seems very reminiscent of Stephen King's Dark Tower. You have a monstrous tower which is essentially a pillar of reality affecting all worlds. Not necessarily a bad thing, just pointing it out.

• Might be good to establish a timeline; for example, the Foundation just found this Tower but it is apparently constantly under attack from extradimensional beings. Has this attack been ongoing for years, centuries, millennia? Why are they attracted to it? There can be some mystery here (probably better than outright exposition).

• What's in the Tower? What is its nature? You hint at the origin, but it clearly it contains, or embodies, something that extra-dimensional beings want to destroy. This should be the key underpinning mystery that pulls the reader in.

• We see the Tower regenerates, but it seems convenient that the Foundation just found the Tower right as the attacks are taking a heavy toll. I think you implied this, but the narrative should strongly correlate damage to the Tower to breakdown in reality, which is why the Foundation was alerted to the situation. (I.e. the Foundation could not have down anything to help until the Tower was already damaged to the point of creating reality-splitting portals).

• One other way to take this (just an idea, take it with a grain of salt): Rather than the Tower being attacked by the entities from outside, it is a prison and they are staging a jailbreak. Whatever powers bound them through past eons has weakened so much that they are tearing their way through the Tower (i.e. tearing holes through reality itself). This lends to some good Action Exploration logs as the MTFs battle their way into the Tower, trying to set up chokepoints, trying out experimental tech, etc. all while the Foundation is attempting to stabilize the Tower from the outside.

Anyway, I like the concept! Hope this feedback helps.

Re: The Tower

Aaris Whyle 09 Oct 2020 21:43

Thank you to everyone for your feedback!

Re: The Tower

Quadraginta 09 Oct 2020 23:02

I'll just add this placeholder

Sorry for the mild delay. Had a busy day. Let's see what I advice I can offer, hm?

+Let us start the crit!

While I find the general idea itself interesting, I have gripes I'd like to address.

superstructures created by an ancient race of humanoid entities in order to maintain/generate (by unknown means) reality.

not very resilient, it is of high priority that Foundation’s MTFs protect it from receiving any damage.

Please forgive me, but I have a difficult time believing that entities powerful enough to create multiversal pre-existence reality anchors would make them easy enough to break as well as completely defenseless and requiring the help of beings as tiny and inconsequential as humans to maintain.

Your Central Narrative can essentially be summed up as the Special Containment Procedures where the Foundation protects it from invading forces. The rest of the narrative is in the Hook/Attention-Grabber, where the real interesting bits are placed.

The strange thing is that the isotope that makes up the Tower itself has some anomalous properties that can be used to create reality anchors,

SCP-3000 is where amnestics come from. That's an interesting in-universe method of creating a source for them. It's brilliantly clever headcanon and I can see your idea emulating that with reality anchors. I can see Robert Scranton studying reality bending and the laws of reality itself only to discover these bizarre structures and materials that aid in furthering the technological advancement of reality anchoring.

It is alos to notice that there are far more then one Tower like this one in the Multiverse. None have been observed as of now and their location is only speculated.

If it's only speculated, then how were they discovered?

I made a sandbox page with it if you're interested.

You should really do this after getting the greenlights, because most ideas are fundamentally still incomplete when first proposed.

That said, I'm definitely intrigued by the idea of a source of reality-anchoring materials being harvested from another dimension, but to see it be a pathetically easy to destroy creation from a supposedly ancient race of beings is extremely off putting.

That would be like if someone made an incredibly elaborate safe to protect a priceless gem, but the safe was made out of glass. And it was guarded by a guard dog chihuahua, because tiny humans would essentially be adorable little animals to a race of entities that powerful.

Speaking of which, I'd like to know more about these ancient beings. I'm not saying we need to know everything about them, just like how SCP-3000 is largely unexplained but gave some hints about its entire existence…just tossing us some breadcrumbs here or there to give us a hint would be nice.

Maybe some ancient indecipherable symbols or something. Or vague alien hummings that can be barely understood. Or some weird Memetic thing. Maybe. Just tossing some of my own half-baked ideas.

And that about wraps up my thoughts.

I hope I helped and I bid you a lovely day!

:D

-Quadraginta

Last edited on 10 Oct 2020 04:53 by Quadraginta Show more

Re: The Tower

Sonderance 15 Oct 2020 02:53

Alright, here’s my take.

+ show block

To illustrate my main concern with this pitch so far, I’m going to use an example. Let’s consider two situations.

Situation A:

Yesterday, a meteor struck Toledo and killed 100,000 people.

Situation B:

Yesterday, John Gulliver was struck and killed by a meteor while driving home to his wife and two children.

Logically, Situation A seems like it would be the more emotionally charged event. After all, the death of a single person couldn’t possibly compare to the loss of 100,000 people and all the relationships connected to them. And yet, to the reader, Situation B will often be seen as more tragic because there’s more attached to the victim than their role in a tragedy. A reader needs to have some sort of emotional connection to the story and its setting/characters before any kind of danger will feel like it matters.

Now, let’s consider this concept in relation to your pitch. We have a massive Tower, which has effects that span the Multiverse. The Foundation (a massive organization) defends it against nameless waves of enemies with nebulous motives while carting off chunks of it for their organizational use. What in this story would draw the reader’s emotional attachment enough for them to care about what’s going on? If the Foundation fails and the Tower falls, what will make your audience have any reaction at all?

If you respond to this comment and would like me to see it, please send me a Wikidot PM, as I will not be notified otherwise.

Re: The Tower

Aaris Whyle 15 Oct 2020 11:03

Thank you so much! I'll start working on new idea!

What in this story would draw the reader’s emotional attachment enough for them to care about what’s going on? If the Foundation fails and the Tower falls, what will make your audience have any reaction at all?

So, to answer this question I’ll have to dive deep into the story. Let’s go! Well, I think the best way to show off this is by showing the discovery addenda. So, the story starts with a normal day on Earth, but it quickly becomes one of the worst as many powerful reality disturbances occur across all the planet changing the course of time, space and even matter! The Foundation is quick to activate some reality anchors in some major cities (New York, London) negating some of the effects of the disturbances. After this madness is over (with a lot of casualties), the Foundation tracks the source of the disturbances to an alternate dimension. They then travel there and find this Tower being under attack from alien forces. They fight some of them and eventually, the aliens give up and leave. Analysis of the compound of which the Tower is made by Foundation scientists suggests it has a lot of reality-altering properties. Then they decide that the Tower needs to be protected.

Last edited on 15 Oct 2020 20:40 by Aaris Whyle Show more

Re: The Tower

Sonderance 18 Oct 2020 06:09

Once again, it seems like you're talking in grand, epic terms. To say there were "a lot of casualties" doesn't affect the reader, because it's just a word. The collapse of the entire world, even, won't have a strong effect on your audience if you don't establish more human stakes. There's a reason why the vast majority of movies and books provide us with a few main characters to care about; it's a lot easier to feel emotions about the pain of a single person than about an entire country.

Re: The Tower

Aaris Whyle 18 Oct 2020 12:04

it's a lot easier to feel emotions about the pain of a single person than about an entire country.

Ok, I bet I’ll get it now. So, what if a put an addendum in which I describe the life of a Foundation agent before the disturbances (his normal life, his family, friends and all others), and then he witnesses their death while the disturbances take place (and that was in New York, where there were somewhat protected from the reality anchor. Imagine being in an unprotected city).

Re: The Tower

Sonderance 22 Oct 2020 05:54

Disregarding any issue concerning the pacing of the article, I don't see how the experiences of a person in NYC has anything to do with anything you've mentioned so far. Jumping from your core anomaly to someone only marginally affected by it is a little like spending the back-end of a superhero movie watching a guy in the next town over wondering what all the explosions in the distance are.

To put it another way, I'm not seeing any real connection between your anomaly and your planned plotline. I've heard this referred to as the Cars Problem; if your core anomaly could change drastically without affecting the narrative, then there's something wrong. Why include information about the tower, its reality-stabilizing capabilities, even the hordes of aliens if all you're going to talk about is one of its effects?

Re: The Tower

Aaris Whyle 21 Nov 2020 14:50

Thanks to everyone for their feedback. After thinking about this some time, I’ve decided to scrap the idea. Thanks anyways!