Credits:
Beta Readers:
CA Archimedes
TheDesk
Dr Avenlee
Billith
Dr Gears
- Skye
- Miro
Special Thanks:
stormbreath figured out the problem I was having when trying to learn how to use the Offset Pages system… which, ironically, wouldn't have been a problem if I'd just gone ahead and posted it to the main website. Turns out the trouble was in the sandbox, not my code. Whoops.
- And to all of you SCP fans out there who turned this website into what it is today. Thank you for keeping the flame alive.
Ruminations
This is the first SCP article I have written in over two years, and the first original one I've written in… probably over five years? SCPPER appears to be down, and I can't figure out how CROM works to list my scp articles by date.
In any case, I had two goals in mind.
- I wanted to make one of those cool new articles with the spiffy formatting and the cool widgets and the thingies you do where you can have multiple pages under the same upvote/downvote module. Basically, I wanted to play with all the toys the damn kids today use all the time.
- I wanted to revisit a throwaway concept I'd once written in SPC-1764. That article posited an alternate universe version of SCP Foundation called the Deviant Artifacts Research Division. Most of the article was just an alternative format for an SCP, but in the end I threw in a line or two that implied something weirder going on in that world. I never intended to revisit that place, not really, until this contest came along.
The inspirations for this article are simple: I play a lot of D&D, and I like drow elves. The problem is that every D&D setting is, by necessity, human-centered. Everything happens in human time-frames, on a human level, in terms that make sense to humans. A lot of the world of the DARD was inspired by ruminations on what a society that works on the time frame of millenia might look like.
Thankfully, I didn't need to look far to find other points of view on this subject. Stephen Baxter and Frank Herbert were older inspirations, but the most recent spark was (of all things) a "Warhammer 40,000" novel by Robert Rath called "The Infinite and the Divine," about two immortal skeleton-robots squabbling over a macguffin over twenty-thousand years of history. Fun times.
Gears was the one who inspired the last little twist of the article: making the other world's Chaos Insurgency the good guys. I think I was a bit heavy-handed with the references (I mean, it's literally in the Covenant of Illyriel's initials), and it didn't have too much to do with the article, but I found it a fun twist.
Like all of my articles, this piece wasn't so much plotted out and birthed, so much as it was sculpted from random bits and pieces. Up until this morning, in fact, I hadn't worked out several of the key points of the story. I'd planned for some more bits (including making it much more obvious that the Covenant's attacks on the DARDic Labyrinths literally take the form of D&D style dungeon crawls), but time and energy ran low, so I ended up pulling most of these bits out. Maybe I'll put them back after the contest voting period is over.
In any case, I feel like this is going to be my last solo SCP I ever write for this site. The technical side has gotten way too complicated for the things I want to do, and I ended up losing a lot of my creative momentum trying to figure shit out that (in the end) I realized other folks answered years ago. Maybe it's just old-man stubbornness: I wanted to prove to myself that an old dog could still learn a few new tricks, but the truth is that these tricks weren't particularly well performed, so maybe in the future, I'll let you young pups do the new tricks for me.
- Clef
- 3:00 pm PST, 2-18-2024
EDIT and UPDATE
Thanks to everyone for their feedback.
On further reflection, I feel like this article didn't meet the standards I usually hold for my own work. It needs some serious reworks and rewrites before it deserves a place on the wiki.
Out of respect to the ongoing contest, I will not be making significant changes to the article until the voting period has ended. But I do want the readers to understand that their feedback has been heard and understood.
- Clef
6:30 PM PST, 2-29-2024
(account deleted)