SCP Foundation

This article is probably off-topic, but tolerated because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

Secure. Contain. Protect.

The SCP Foundation is a writing site focusing on scientific descriptions of terrifying, confusing, or just plain weird monsters, events, locations, etc. Expect plenty of REDACTED all across the website. The community prioritizes quality writing over pretty much everything else, and as such it is THE place to go if you like top-tier horror fiction writing. The fucking huge critical community within will RIP'N'TEAR bad articles to pieces. (On the flip side, if you want to read some hilariously bad writing, go to the lowest-rated articles page. You will know the true meaning of stupid.) The SCP Foundation mainly consists of extremely horrific GRIMDARK, but also has its light-hearted moments, and at points, absurd and ironic humor.

While the descriptions on the SCP Foundation website and the hinted-at setting loosely binding the different articles together are not directly related to any specific traditional games; the whole thing is a goldmine of ideas for your horror games from Delta Green to World of Darkness to Call of Cthulhu and everything in between; or even if you simply want to throw something weird at your players to deal with for a change.

Origins

The SCP Foundation started when some anon on /x/ wrote a clinically-toned article about a homicidal concrete statue that only moves when you don't look at it, spawning the idea of a worldwide conspiracy to suppress similar "anomalies". In this universe, Creepypasta Events like: "If you visit the ninth floor of a certain apartment at midnight, a spirit will assrape you and split your head open" are very much real, and the Foundation finds them and isolates them for the good of the world at large. Said fictional organization would send agents to survey the existence of supernatural phenomena, contain them (if possible) for analysis, and protect the public from the consequences by any means necessary, said means including (and sometimes surpassing) teleportation to alternate universes.

It eventually shaped into a fictional wiki where thousands of these "SCP"s (items, phenomena, or persons) are contained, by ludicrous force if necessary. Extensive descriptions and containment procedures are the most favored parts of the writings, as well as UTTERLY FUCKING TERRIBLE REALIZATIONS that your world is a clusterfuck of horror which out-edges 40K on several levels. For example: SCP-682 is a completely invincible reptilian creature that is extremely hostile to humanity, and can barely be kept at bay via complete immersion in hyper-corrosive acid. There are also writings about the personnel within the Foundation, logs of fictional excursions to capture SCPs, and experiment logs to comb through; as well as weapons and personnel that surpass the "legitimate" human authorities' power by magnitudes: extrasolar bases across the universe are the only a fraction of it. We're talking about bases in alternate dimensions for inventory and endless resources dug from a plain of white rock.

And that's just the very tip of the iceberg. One SCP is a genetic phenomena that makes the dreaming person's dreams real. That's right. Everything in reality, from World Wars to history of empires *and* new SCP's (there is a rumor that this phenomena was the start of everything) is rewritten in one night's sleep. The Foundation's obvious response is to capture, detain, drug them into complete and total amnesia, use them as disposable anomaly-destroyers, and quietly kill them afterwards. Obviously this genetic trait is so dangerous and disruptive that the organization will authorize the total genocide of "every population that may exhibit the phenomena above average." Another is Nikolai Tesla's Reverse Entropy Tesla Gun that will DESTROY EXISTENCE in a few centuries, with NO WAY OF STOPPING IT. There's also a rock eating fish that eats California's seabed, slowly worsening the San Andreas Faultline, and the foundation failed to kill them off.

And the worst part? There are thousands more yet to be contained or even discovered.

Classification

Every SCP has a classification. It's basically a handy way of labeling them as to whether they have the power to totally assfuck you or not. Some of them may even have circumstantial benefits for you interacting with them, goodies like healing or granting you (usually abominable) powers. These classes are:

Primary Class

The initial labels given to any anomaly by the Foundation.

• Safe: There is a good understanding about the object/entity, or it's easy to contain. Can still be dangerous if someone isn't careful with it. Think of it like a loaded gun: it's "safe" if you know what you're doing. Generally speaking, if you stick it in a box, it'll be fine.

• Euclid: The object/entity is unpredictable and the Foundation has very little understanding of it. Euclid doesn't necessarily mean 'Mortally Dangerous' but a great deal of them are. Euclid entities might also be sentient, in part or whole, so they are generally locked behind many doors and very thick walls.

• Keter: The good shit. Almost all are an extremely dangerous tier entity/object. At the very least they're contained heavily guarded, protected by specially trained MTF's (Mobile Task Forces). These things, if they ever manage to breach containment, will inevitably destroy the world in one of innumerable horrible ways. Fortunately the Foundation has ways of mitigating these risks.

Secondary Class

Replacement labels for things re-classified from the Primary Class. Given to SCP's that the staff of the Foundation have a comprehensive understanding of. True safety.

• Neutralized: SCP entities/objects that are dead, destroyed, disabled, or otherwise no longer a threat. Often-times these were former Keter-class SCP's that the Foundation managed to dispose of. Their only remains are what can be gleaned from the heavily-edited documentation and records that the Foundation keeps. No one really wants to keep a doomsday device around, right?

• Explained: SCP entities/objects that are no longer considered to be abnormal, which may be due to the Foundation mistaking something for an anomaly before closer examination, or due to advances in science allowing it to be understood, or due to an anomaly becoming so widespread that it has become the new normal.

• Irrelevant: Like the former Apollyon, it means simply. "Fuck it." It's gonna happen one way or another.

Esoteric Classes

The following Object Classes fall outside of the purview of standard classification.

• Thaumiel: Anomalous material or entities that can be used by the Foundation to contain or counteract the effects of other highly dangerous anomalies. Sometimes the best thing to do is fight fire with fire. Since its introduction, it's become an unofficial primary class, and is the fourth most-used containment class on the site.

• Apollyon: First used by SCP-2317 (iteration 6, Destroyer of Worlds which cannot be stopped and will destroy the world in the next 30 years) Apollyon is often derisively referred to as "Super-Keter." This class is only used for anomalies that present an apocalyptic threat that the Foundation has no way of stopping or slowing down. For example: in one alternate timeline the sun became an Apollyon SCP when something caused the sun to start turning any living thing exposed to sunlight into blob monsters. This included trees, keters, ANYTHING. The author community mostly considers use of Apollyon to be in poor taste; this has been lampshaded in some Tales, like the Antimemetics Division tale Wild Light: "Current thinking...is that Apollyon classification is a confession of defeat. It's bad for morale. It cultivates defeatist attitudes. [Keter is] the top of the hierarchy".

• Archon: One of the more popular esoteric classes, Archon denotes items that would do more damage contained than uncontained.

• Hiemal: Also growing in popularity, Hiemal-class objects are anomalous systems composed of separate anomalous parts, usually with one containing the other. One example was an anomaly that caused carnivores to stop hunting and survive entirely by eating themselves and regenerating, but when the Foundation contained it, a new anomaly was unleased that caused plant life and herbivores to start growing out of control and become extremely aggressive, because the Foundation didn't listen to the warnings given by the humans infected by the first anomaly.

• Cernnunos: A newer class, Cernnunos-class SCPs are entities that could be contained or neutralized, by already known means, but the cost of those means have been deemed too high, and the Foundation is actively looking for other means of containment. One example is a portal that could be closed, by the sacrifice of "every human heart that has not yet known silence."

Famous SCPs

• SCP-055: An unknown object that erases any memories about itself. The Foundation doesn't even remember when or how they obtained it, or even who wrote the object's containment procedures and why they work, but it is possible to remember what the object isn't, and so the Foundation is figuring it out by elimination. This spawned a long-running series about the "Antimemetics Division", which deals with SCPs which make you forget about them or are literally impossible to think certain thoughts about. Like a building, SCP-2602, which used to be a library, which has the effect of making all its properties seem totally normal for a building which used to be a library. Including the advanced book-sorting machines (which were damaged by being stored in a former library) and the restraints which libraries used to restrain patrons with large overdue book fines (likewise), and the hazardous waste pit and thaumically-active shrines, both normal things for a former library to have, probably to aid study groups who met in the library.
• SCP-087: A seemingly endless stairwell with a voice crying out for help that never gets closer no matter how far down you go. If you go down it too long a floating face will suddenly appear and scare you to death.
• SCP-093: A disc that turns mirrors into portals to an alternate version of earth where humanity was taken over and then wiped out by a being claiming to be God, who granted the world advanced technology and also his tears, which could be used to cure people of sinful behavior but eventually turned users into faceless monsters called The Unclean that grow larger by absorbing other people.
• SCP-096: A humanoid with abnormally long arms and a very large mouth. Normally it is docile, but if anyone sees its face, it goes berserk and hunts down those who have seen it until they are all dead. How exactly it kills its victims is censored so it must be something horrible. And once you have seen it's face there is nothing that can stop it. Even getting its organs blasted out by a tank round won't slow it down. And you don't even have to see its face directly. Even looking too closely at a photo containing just a few pixels of its face will set it off.
• SCP-106: A old man who can walk through walls, corrodes everything he touches, and can teleport victims to a pocket dimension where he tortures them.
• SCP-173: The Statue (AKA the Original) - A killer statue that can move extremely fast when not being watched and causes a mixture of blood and feces to mysteriously appear on the floor of the room it is kept in. This means people regularly have to enter the room it is stored in to clean it and have to be extremely careful not to blink so it doesn't kill them. Started the whole thing, and yes, Whofags, it came before the Weeping Angels. Was inspired by a creepy photo of a sculpture by a Japanese artist.
• SCP-213-7: The last surviving member of seven young women who were kidnapped and impregnated by a satanic cult. If she ever gives birth it will cause the apocalypse. The only way to stop her from giving birth is to regularly submit her to something called Procedure 110-Montauk. It isn't revealed what Procedure 110-Montauk specifically is, but it is something absolutely horrifying, probably some form of disgusting sexual torture. And the Foundation regularly erases her memory to make sure she doesn't get used to it because the trauma of the procedure is required for it to work. The horror doesn't come from the threat to the world she represents, but how far the Foundation is willing to go to keep the world safe. If you had to torture an innocent person to keep other people safe, would you be able to do it?
• SCP-294: A coffee machine that can dispense anything you request from it as long it can exist in liquid form, as well as several things that normally can't.
• SCP-354: A bloody red lake that spawns many terrifying monster 24/7. It spawn many varity of monster that can only be seen in movies and fictions like killer robots, lizard people, elemental monsters and a frigging krakens. The foundation put up a good fight but decided to abandoned the fuck out and nuke the site because they can't kept up the pace and fighting endless wave of monsters to a stalemate. The pool also sentient and will psychically attack you if you try to drain the pool.
• SCP-682: The Hard-to-Kill Lizard - A FUCKHUEG lizard that hates all organic life (except SCP-053, an immortal child who drives humans violently insane, for some reason) and cannot be killed. There is a LONG list of attempts, none of them successful. It will either become immune to what you tried to use to kill it with, or will copy the effects and turn them on you. The Foundation has even tried killing or controlling it using dozens of other SCPs, which normally is forbidden, and none of them have worked, and many have backfired.
• SCP-895: An empty coffin which causes any camera recording taken too close to it to be filled with horrifying images that can drive you insane.
• SCP-914: The Clockworks - A massive clockwork machine that has 5 settings: Rough, Coarse, 1:1, Fine, and Very Fine. Put something in the box, choose your setting, and pray the result isn't too radioactive. The two lowest settings take objects apart. The middle setting transforms the input into something similar, like maybe turning an apple into an orange. The second highest setting turns the input into a better version of itself. The last setting is similar to the previous one but is extremely unpredictable. The output will usually have a similar function the input but taken to an extreme, and often be anomalous.
• SCP-999: A harmless Slime that eats candy and sweats antidepressants and loves to tickle people.
• SCP-2521: A weird tentacle monsters that can walk though walls and can only be described with pictures because it steals any document written about it and kidnaps anybody who talks aboutAAAAAAAAHHHHHH! ITS GOT ME!
• SCP-2845: A Deer with a human face that can transmute any substance, turn humans into weird Hexagon things, is thought to be one of the few SCPs that are actual no holds barred gods, and can only be contained by weird rituals involving castrating Class-Ds and eating babies.
• SCP-3008: An infinitely large IKEA store in another dimension staffed by monsters who attack anybody in the store at night that people can get trapped in by walking into a specific, otherwise-ordinary IKEA store. The people trapped inside the super IKEA are said to came from other dimensions even and they are forced to play Dwarf Fortress (or Minecraft for the current gen reader) where they craft weapons and fortress using IKEA product to defend against monster's attack at night.

SCPs with minimal tabletop relevance

• SCP-1230: A book containing only the text, "A hero is born". Opening the book causes the reader to have a dream where they have entertaining adventures in a fantasy world, essentially placing them in a very immersive Quest, the next time they go to sleep. The entity who serves as the QM appears in the dreams on occasion, taking the form of an old cloaked man. This one's pretty harmless, but at least one researcher committed suicide after having spent over 2 centuries (by his point of view) in a single dream, after which the QM was inconsolable for a time.
• SCP-3973: An Ultramarines miniature that is sentient and has the ability to control which side dice in its vicinity land on.
• SCP-1974-EX: A d20 dice that gives players hallucination. Sadly judging by the -EX ending, meaning it isn't much of a exciting SCP meaning it is probably a fake or dud. Turns out the dice is covered in some kind of hallucination chemical. Never the less the article itself contain many references to /tg/ memes and related games, which is why it is listed here.

Other Factions

The SCP Foundation is not the only organization that protects the world from the supernatural or uses the supernatural for their own goals. Here is a partial list of notable rivals, allies, and enemies of the Foundation.

• Chaos Insurgency: Originally this faction was part of the Foundation, a covert deniable ops team simply named the "Insurgency." Operating under the fictitious pretense of being a group of rogue agents who assassinated and kidnapped on behalf of said organization, without their actions leading back to the foundation. They answered directly to the O5 Council, with little oversight from any other part of the Foundation. That changed when they really did go rogue, releasing various euclid and keter-class SCPs. What their goal still remains a mystery, as is the reason for their defection. It's suggested that rather than contain SCPs, they want to proactively control and weaponize them. Whatever the case, they're a threat to everything the Foundation works for.
• Global Occult Coalition: The GOC is an organization funded by the United Nations whose mission is to protect humanity from anomalous threats. Unlike the SCP Foundation, they are far more willing to use anomalies to fight against anomalies, but mainly focus on destroying any anomalies that they consider a threat instead of containing and studying them. The Foundation and the GOC have at times allied with each other, although their methodologies are diametrically opposite. Many of the other factions strongly dislike the GOC and see them as needlessly heavy-handed.
• Horizon Initiative: A religious organization formed from the three Abrahamic faiths and several other religions that work together to protect the world from the supernatural. They are particularly hostile to cults like the Church of the Broken God and the Fifthist Church.
• Serpent's Hand: The Serpent's Hand is a loose confederation of humans and other beings that fights for the rights of intelligent anomalies and the pursuit of knowledge. Their base of operations is a magical library between universes. They especially hate the GOC and call them "bookburners", they refer to the Foundation as the "Jailers". Occasional allies of the Foundation, though the Foundation usually comes to regret it later.
• Church of the Broken God: Basically the Adeptus Mechanicus mixed with Gnosticism and a little bit of Greek and Chinese mythology. The CotBG is a religion of machine worshipers that wants to find and reassemble the lost fragments of their god. Although they aren't evil per se, if they were to succeed in their goals it probably would cause the apocalypse; or at the very least turn everything into living clockwork metal, and according to some sources, fixing the god of machines would actually cause the god of flesh to be released which is the opposite of what they want. They are mainly broken into three distinct denominations: the Broken Church (the oldest branch), the Cogworth Orthodox (obsessed with standardization and clockwork body modification, and prefer Industrial Revolution level technology) and the Church of Maxwellism (unlike the other two branches, they embrace the use of electronics and believe that the broken god a digital being they can connect to through the internet).
• Sarkic Cults: Sarkicism or Nälkä (Finnish for hunger), as its followers call it, is the antithesis of the CotBG. The religion is mostly based on Gnosticism (but in an opposite way than the CotBG) with some elements of Hinduism and Alchemy. They revere disease and mutation and seek to achieve godhood by consuming the gods and perfecting themselves through horrifying Fleshcrafting sorcery. If you've ever seen the movie "The Thing", that'll give you the right idea. Most Sarkites are horrifically depraved monsters who should be killed with fire. The CotBG and Sarkites have a very long ongoing historical conflict. Sarkic cults are divided into Proto-Sarkic Cults, which mostly consist of isolated and technophobic communities and primarily worship the founder of the religion who achieved godhood, and Neo-Sarkic Cults, which are hidden in modern society as secret societies and organized crime organizations and worship the god of flesh.
• The Fifth Church: Well... they worship stars and have an obsession with the number 5. It seems to be based partially on Scientology and New Age and other new religious movements and parody religions, but little is actually known about their beliefs, and what is known is mostly incomprehensible. Most of the other factions consider them to be a joke, although they once nearly destroyed reality by selling a book that gave readers reality warping powers at the cost of causing insanity. It has been theorized that the whole religion is actually is an interplanetary scam started by aliens. In the Antimemetics Division canon, the reality is much worse than that.
• Doctor Wondertainment: Seem to be a company that produces supernatural toys for children, which usually are dangerous if they are not used properly. They often send their products to the Foundation as gifts. For some reason they also created a line of anomalous humanoids called the Little Misters that they challenge the Foundation to collect.
• Are We Cool Yet?: A organization of artists/terrorists with a twisted sense of humor that produces dangerous pieces of anomalous artwork for laughs or for making political statements. Things like paintings that drive people that look at them insane.
• Gamers Against Weed (GAW): Anomalous Internet Memes & the like. Love taking the piss out of the other GoIs; split off from AWCY? at least partly because the former were too high off their own paint fumes. Usually used as comic relief.
• Marshal, Carter, and Dark Ltd.: An occult business that collects anomalies to sell to anyone for the right price.
• Manna Charitable Foundation: An organization that tries to exploit anomalies for humanitarian purposes, often with disastrous results. The road to hell...
• Herman Fuller's Circus of the Disquieting: A circus that travels between dimensions to put on their shows and recruit more freaks. The Circus tends to be a refuge for the truly strange. Herman was overthrown and it's now lead by a pair of lesbian clown monsters.
• Shark Punching Center: Began as a joke for mocking people who misspelled SCP as SPC. The SPC is a completely insane version of the Foundation from another universe that is dedicated entirely to protecting the world from selachian (shark) entities by punching them. They do a pretty good job.
• SAPPHIRE: An organization of militant atheists who seek to destroy all religions by anomalous means even while being in total denial of the existence of the anomalous. All the other factions think they are insane.
• ☽☽☽: In an alternate timeline, the earth was saved from destruction by being teleported into an afterlife known as Corbenic and became a third moon. From there, the people of that earth work to try to save other versions of earth from going down the same path that to their destruction.

And those are just some of the major ones that appear on the English version of the SCP website. Writers on other language versions of the website have come up with tons more.

Drama

When you get a group of people to do something together, drama is inevitable. The SCP community has a number of big-names calling the shots, and what they say goes. They set the tone for what's allowed and what's not, and if you piss off the wrong person for a trivial thing or hurt someone's massive over-inflated ego, you can expect your stay on the website to be short. They are no stranger to massive internal strife either; fights between the big boys resulted in a lot of content being discarded at one point. It kind of mirrors TVTropes: the front end has a lot of nice reading but the community side is a dumpster fire of misery, egos and dicks. We do not prefer to give examples, but utterly retarded articles written by a newcomer cute girl may stay a lot while longer than they should (and any criticism thereof will result in a ban until someone with clout does something).

Early forms of alleged SJWism have also started to surface, with articles spotting unusual genders without them being played for horror, or commented upon at all for that matter. Given a lot of SCPs are frequently not of this Earth/dimension/etc., there's at least SOME reasoning for it.

Furthermore, as the community around the SCP Wiki has evolved over time, the tone of the works has shifted. In the first few years of the wiki, there was more of an inclusion of levity and humor, especially in regards to test logs and the antics of senior staffers. Over time the wiki has included less and less of this, as the community broadened and namefags or otherwise notable contributors left, taking their influences and in-universe characters with them. Circa 2018, the wiki is redoubling its efforts to be purely clinical horror, with fewer jokes (for better or worse).

(That being said, there's still room for somewhat "silly" SCPs, you just have to make them the product of an appropriate silly person or group, and make sure to (A) write it up clinically and (B) have something interesting besides the joke. See, for reference, the products of the group "Gamers Against Weed", or the products of "dado".)

See also

• Delta Green - The closest thing to a SCP tabletop RPG out there.