Rules
These are guidelines on writing an article for Marshall, Carter & Dark
Articles for MC&D's catalogue are split into several categories:
Adventures! - Selling explorer/hunter/archeologist expeditions to customers. Please feel free to add journals from previous explorers, whether successful or unsuccessful.
Excitement! - Selling or renting items, creatures, people, services, timeshare at locations. Customer reviews of these can add to both the humour and the horror of the item. Please make sure the cost of the item takes into consideration the difficulty in obtaining it. If it is good then make sure it has side effects. For example if you want to sell the elixir of youth, add a note that it will take from between 1 and 100 years from the imbiber meaning that there's a good chance that a sperm and an egg will lie dying on the floor.
Mystery! - Selling or renting access to items which the people at MC&D cannot understand in order for the customer to run tests and perhaps discover something important about the nature of the universe.
The Bestiary - Records of beasts and legendary creatures from around the world that may or may not exist. These can be anything from rumours to documented fact. If there is enough information here, you may want to add an Adventure! to go and hunt it.
The Atlas - Records of locations around the world where weird stuff happens. Anything from the hill where cars roll uphill to the ghosts of Edinburgh castle. Again, if there is sufficient interest, maybe make an Adventure! out of it with some explorer journals.
Articles for the intranet pages should be self explanatory. Internal memos, emails, and articles about items they want, items they have and are working on, or items that they have finished their work on for some reason or other. Please note:- MC&D don't have Class D's available to them. They have very savvy researchers with a lot to lose. They're not going to push a big red button labelled "Push Me" without knowing exactly what will happen when they do.
There are certain things that article should not have:
No anime
No mecha/robots/androids/people from the future.
No rape - yes this is a group that specializes in dark desires, but the clients who come here are gentlemen.
No articles based too closely on fictional settings. Myth, folklore, religion (although not too much), mysteries and historic fact is fine. I don't want to see a portal to middle earth or a book that transports you to a certain location in a galaxy far, far away.
No anime.
No plagiarism. Don't just nick stuff from other sites on the internet. This is meant for us to learn better writing skills and to show off our imagination. It's meant to entertain, to horrify, to amuse. This means that if you read an article on the SCP Foundation site, don't write an Adventure! based on retrieving said item.
Don't edit someone else's article without their permission.
No having the staff at MC&D being stupid. These guys know their stuff and don't want to die. They don't experiment needlessly -only to make money.
Be creative & have fun.