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A Brief History Of Foundation RP by The SCP Foundation Lyrics

Genre: misc | Year: 2015

I've researched SCP Foundation history for quite awhile. But for this outing into where our fine community came from, I thought we might take a break from the site itself, and move to some of the supplemental sites. Specifically, the roleplay sites. There's not a lot of collected information out there… so here's some collected information.

If the forums are to be believed, we've been trying to start a Foundation RP since we had more than a handful of people. In the beginning, there was some informal free-form RP on IRC. But the first formal game was known as Fieldwork.

One of its founding concepts was that only Senior Staff really ever got to do anything. As evidence, take a look at the earliest edits of Kondraki's sheet. Now compare it to someone who's not staff.

Add to the fact that a lot of the GMs just didn't care about skill enforcement (prime example: Yoric's Creative Bullshit skill that could be used to justify absolutely anything) And you have a recipe for disaster outside of just not liking Kondraki, or tone problems, or popularity issues - Break

Clef had a grand total of two skills. "Genre-Savvy" and "Enigmatic."
:|
- Clef

Fieldwork was a silly place, an RP born in the time of silly researcher OC's and very little restrictions on how the Foundation could be played. Founded on April 2nd, 2009, it quickly became very very popular, with a character list appearing to have characters from almost every active SCP users at that time. Most of the senior staff were also players. The primary GM's were LBD, Rights, and Lurker. Fieldwork was never meant to be balanced, and as such was not always fun to play.

Okay, Fieldwork.

I wasn't really particularly active in AD, but I effectively took charge of FW after AD started and players started moving there. There were a lot of self-insertions there - our characters were basically crafted from our personnel pages or ourselves if we didn't have personnel pages and the Senior Staff stats were so very high above the regular players that they dominated play

What killed fieldwork was imbalance, the start of active duty. About the time that AD started and FW started declining, I took charge of the game, and I let LBD help me out. Worst decision ever - if there was a noose around the neck of the game to begin with, my appointing him as a GM pulled the lever of the trap door I suppose I could have saved it, but real life got in the way and that's when I essentially took off from all the SCP sites in general from then to now.

It's simply a matter of activity - no one was interested in FW, especially now that the much more balanced AD was starting, and the only active FW GMs let it die - myself and the other admins due to neglect, LBD due to mismanagement - to be honest, no one really wanted to play FW. I guess it was more of a thing concerning LBD as a person as it was due to mismanagement; he wasn't particularly popular. - Fifthman
The game quickly began to suffer from the senior staff character's self-aggrandizing behavior, and a lack of real quality control on who was allowed to play. Some of the players wished for a more serious, and grounded game. In addition, with the trials and tribulations of Kondraki, many people simply did not want to play with him. They left to form the Active Duty game.

Essentially, FW was supposed to be the place of misfitsit was Site 17, dangerous SCPs all over, and people were kind of loopy to keep from going insane. The site was kind of run in the "Director is unseen but felt, Bright is the head of the site, Kondraki is the Gestapo." All of the field agents and doctors had their quirks. It slowly went from "this is a dangerous site and everyone should be pants-shittingly terrified while trying to keep sane" into "there are some really talented fucking people here no wonder they were at this site"

There were tough ass characters, there were non-combat characters, there were funny scenes, depressing scenes, and terrifying scenes. Runs would range from something kinda stupid to an outbreak of 008 in which the result was the nuclear strike of the infected area.

It was pretty much /the/ place to be, but some people didn't like the way it was ending up because they weren't in the spotlight so much anymore (IMO, even though they kinda were), so they said "this is too dumb we want something more serious" and made Active Duty. Only AD was retardedly grimdark and not fun unless you were Bright, Yoric, or Waxx, or on occasion, Rights

As it went on it did get a little bit sillier and very much less serious. There were blatantly stupid runs, most run by LBD. Dr. Syx (Lurker) and Dr. Rights were in a relationship despite being 9 kinds of illegal, but to be honest, the people who were playing most of the time were having fun, so it didn't matter. It may have been intended to be a super srs SCP RP, but it ended up being a fun kind of little slice of life thing

Not to mention Gears ran the best fucking run ever, the barge thing, I can't remember what number. I don't remember it entirely because I unfortunately had shit to do, and couldn't participate, but I heard that it was a mix of terrifying, exciting, and thinking "oh my god is my character going to actually survive?"

Really? The end came because of the fact that a large chunk of people jumped ship to AD left FW kind of barren, there weren't really enough people online at the same time to do much of anything - Anonymous

Active Duty! wanted to be the balanced and serious successor to Fieldwork. It was Founded by Heiden and Bright on July 10th 2009. Information about Active Duty has mostly come from the former player base, as the wiki content has been fractured due to the frequent reboots of the game and as such some information may be biased.

Heiden, Waxx and I made a side channel to crack wise about FW's flaws. Usually with a beer and popcorn in hand. Drafted up new rules, showed it to a few choice people. Made the wiki, and people jumped ship from there, mostly non Senior Staff - Break

Active Duty was about Foundation Personnel stationed at Site 23, which was located in the Australian outback. Its player base is one of the largest any SCP RP has ever had, with most current and former SCP RP community members being descended from the ranks and membership of Fieldwork. It was even the genesis of the concept of the Tamlin House. The terms "run" in reference to an in-character session started in Tamlin House, as did the tradition of using the FUDGE system.

Active Duty was marked by several over-arching plots, mostly perpetuated by Bright. The most complex one I can recall is the one in Kens's image, which involved the research director being pregnant with a baby that was also time and then Janus was zombie - Salman Corbette

My first RP moments were in Tamlin house. My character at the time was a research botanist who ended up being assigned to Medical because he had a nursing degree. Tamlin House was always a bit of randomness Bright would run when he was in the mood to do something. It was a dungeon crawl in some ways, with our researchers and agents trying to explore it and get some sort of handle on it.

I had a lot of fun with the first iteration, because I was playing MacKay, a helpful, conscientious man who had to run into the morals and lack thereof in the Foundation. I was the one who got serious about Tamlin House explorations. People just went in and walked around without any preparation! Fuck that, I thought. I set up a pack of things that I figured would be useful, like paracord, a fire ax, medical supplies.
The explorations set off bits. Light was a big participant in the game, too, from my stand point. I think she loved ordering my character into empty rooms just to see how they would fuck me over. For a while, I was playing a research scientist who turned into a six year old boy whenever I was in the house. Which was better than the time I turned into a nine year old girl.

There were also slice of life bits, too. Like my character's romance with Gnosis. Which was the first time I recall doing a homosexual romance, TBH. The second AD game was Bright's attempt to set everyone up into a game of Clue. The major characters were all moles from other GoIs. Echo played Jason, who was with GoC. Maddy was Alice, who was the daughter of Dr. Prometheus.

I was a little irritated by the reset, so I made Jim "Mac" Guffin. I intentionally made him a serious joke character, serious in that I used all of the bits. The Joke was that I made him a maintenance worker. Yes, I was ready to RP a Janitor. I did it so people wouldn't pester me to make a character. Bright won me back by offering me to be a mole for the Chaos Insurgency. And I said, "Sure!" And unlike everyone else, I played a mole.

I worked to get connections and handles on people. I used the good will I had from my last character, also named Mack, and I did evil. And this is where I came up with a lot of my ideas for the CI, not as a splinter of the Foundation, but an organization with its own goals and objectives.

As you can see, I had a lot of fun. It culminated into the containment of Jaeger and Bright really outdid himself. But after that point, Echo and Maddy were tired of the AD game, and that's where AA was born. I played in that game as Midnight. - MisterFlames

Initially, the game shared Fieldwork's tone problems, for the first few months. When EchoFourDelta became the primary GM, the tone shifted to be much more serious. The game lasted from the middle of 2009 to around the end of August 2011, although its heyday was in 2010.

The end came around due to three primary reasons: repeated reboots that caused dissatisfaction with the user base, giving positions that were nominally NPC's to players instead of GM's, and having the RP focus around only a few GM characters, along with some confusing story elements caused by reboots. For these reasons and others, including some fiated total-party-kills, AD declined, and was eventually put into hiatus. However, before we get into what comes after AD, we will have to talk about the RP self-proclaimed to be AD's "Sister" RP, Far Recon.

Far Recon was founded on October 16th, 2011 by Salman Corbette, based on the idea of Site-354, built to contain the red pool. It was founded with the intention of being different from other SCP RP's which had preceded it, being more serious and less prone to reboots and retroactive continuity. These goals were quickly set aside due to the tone set by the head GM, Salman Corbette.

Well, I was in AD and FR, so I guess I could do some kind of long-winded analysis of both, but let's be honest, this thread doesn't need another wall of text. So instead, here's a short list of some of the most awesome/WTF moments that I remember from both:

The time Sal did a run based on How The Grinch Stole Christmas, GMed entirely in rhyming couplets. Yes, it was as ridiculous and fun as it sounds.
The run Ragazzo did in AD where we all used disposable characters. Ended with a giant battle against SCP-517 hands in an abandoned Foundation site. And one very angry German man wading into the wall of demon hands, swinging a pair of tomahawks and singing the last verse of Panzerlied.
The whole Red Pool Prison Blues run in FR. Just read the logs, it's too awesome to try to summarize here. Suffice to say one scene involved an extradimensional prison riot, a giant bomb, and Johnny Cash.
The run series with SCP-939 in AD. Particularly the heroic door and Berk breaking his hand on a 939's face.
The Foundation: Vietnam Edition, in which we ruined a large patch of Australian jungle, and fought giant lizard-bugs.
Run marathons in FR. - TheRaven

Far Recon was the most popular RP after Active Duty folded, with two heydays. One in the summer of 2011, and the next in the spring of 2012. Due to the lack of time from the GM team, some intentional sabotage from those who did not like the game, and a lack of new ideas, the game collapsed in late 2013.
- Far Recon emerged from a chat Gears, lurker and I had in Rights's alien porn unlimited channel, concerning the current state of RPs. Gears pioneered many of the ideas involving a multi-dimensional portal, which I then smoothed out into the Red Pool.

Gears's activity dropped off right after this, however a month after this brainstorming session I set up the RP in one weekend (including the items system), borrowing the structure of Active Duty's run system and a modified version of After Action's combat system (I doubled the amount of statting each base stat had - from 4 to 8 - and changed the fudge rolls so it was less luck based. This was so that the RP could accommodate the equipment system Gears and I had thought up.) Daedalize later smoothed over many of the bumps I had missed while I was creating FR - Salman Corbette

During Far Recon's time, several other, smaller roleplaying games were set up, including the Serpents Hand, After Action, and the comparatively larger Tamlin House.

The Serpents Hand RP was founded by Mann and pooryoric, and attempted to be the Active Duty for the Wanderers Library. A reboot was attempted in 2012, but there was never extraordinarily high interest in the game. It lasted several months from June of 2010, with a brief resurgence of activity in July of 2011. Always a small rp group, it focused primarily on the fantasy elements of the library. After a brief revival attempt in December of 2012 petered out, it resumed inactivity.

After Action is an rp based on what happens after the end of the world, and it combines the Active Duty and Serpents Hand universes. It was a private rp run by EchoFourDelta. It has gone through several periods of sporadic activity, mostly dependent on whether there is GM interest in running the game at the time. Currently, the game has been rebooted and is effectively inactive at the time of writing.

- After Action was set up in June/July of 2011. I won't go into details as it is Echo's private RP, but it was a rather nice of Serpent's Hand and Active Duty "magic and tone", for lack of a better phrase. This was further helped by an actual goal to work towards in the end (at the time it was escaping Australia), and that made the RP much easier to work with because the characters had something to work towards and the GMs' antagonists had something to stop the characters from doing without outright killing them.

- After Action worked off the Serpent's Hand RP fudge dice system, whereas the Tamlin House uses Active Duty's d10 system (with several additions to skillwork)

- At its peak I'm pretty sure Active Duty was busier than Far Recon was, although not by much. After Action was also quite busy because it funneled in player from Active Duty and Serpent's Hand - Salman Corbette

Tamlin House was the last real official Foundation rp, based on the idea of a house that is a hub point for every reality that could ever exist, and every reality that ever has existed. When Tamlin first launched, it was a stripped down system, which was upgraded by Scantron.

Tamlin House is based off an area characters could return to in Active Duty (THE Tamlin House) which was run by Bright. It was widely regarded as being one of the funnest recurring places in AD. - Salman Corbette

Tamlin was very popular initially, and attracted a large player base. It suffered from many of the same problems which plagued Active Duty. The end came when the final remaining group of players confronted Bright, the head GM, about an overpowered character. Bright responded by admitting he just could not run Tamlin House, and placing it on indefinite hiatus.

it was a crazy game. Lots of random characters. Had its own spirit. Kind of fizzled out due to said random characters, not all the players were great, but overall it was fun while it lasted. - Dexanote

Now, we have two RP's. A traditional IRC based one, Origins and one based on forum rp, known simply as SCP-RP1. Since both of these are currently active, I'll just leave you with the links so you may make their histories your own!