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.

This article is awesome. Do not fuck it up.

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.

So what is the Foundation?

The Foundation is an secret organization that protects the world from supernatural, or anomalous as they prefer to call it, threat by containing and studying objects, people, creatures, places, and phenomena that break the accepted laws of physics and thus threated the world's normalcy. Dangerous or otherwise interesting objects that they discover are classified as SCPs, which stands for Special Containment Procedures. The Foundation has a policy of focusing on containing the anomalous rather than destruction because they want to understand what they fight against, and because destroying anomalous objects often has unexpected consequences. Although the Foundation does have some knowledge of magic and other supernatural stuff that could be used to help them contain the supernatural, most SCPs are contained by mundane means if possible. To help keep the existence of anomalies a secret from the world with fewer deaths, the Foundation uses amnestics, drugs that erase memories, on civilians who witness the supernatural. They also use amnestic drugs on their own members to keep dangerous information classified, as well as protection against things like anomalies that can spread just by knowing about them. But the Foundation is not exactly the good guys, as they are willing to do just about anything to keep the world safe and sane, including performing extremely unethical experiments on people, sacrificing many lives, and imprisoning any anomaly they discover including sapient ones that just want freedom. There are very few lines that they will not cross as long as it furthers their mission. For dangerous experiments and occasional human sacrifices, the Foundation uses prisoners called D-class personnel, who are mainly recruited from prisons. They are supposed to be mostly death row inmates but this probably isn't true considering the high turnover rate. The Foundation is run by a council of thirteen overseers, who are the mysterious all powerful bosses of the organization, and by an ethic committee, whose job is to decide exactly how evil the foundation is permitted to be. The only person above the O5 Council is the even more mysterious administrator, who rarely does anything.

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. The most commonly used classes are Safe, Euclid, Keter. Safe-class does not actually mean that the object is safe, but that the object is simple to contain and is only dangerous is if you mess with it. This includes stuff like people with weird but harmless powers, and objects that cause you to die a horrible death if you touch them but can't stop you from just locking them in a box. Keter-class objects are the stuff that are extremely difficult to contain and have huge consequences for failing to contain them. Here you will find immortal monsters, zombie plagues, and universe-threatening glitches in reality. Euclid is for everything in between. Some other commonly used classes are Neutralized for objects that have been destroy or lost their supernatural properties, Explained for objects that are no longer considered to be abnormal, and Thaumiel, which is sort of the opposite of Keter, for objects that are used for containing other SCPs or for resetting the world after an apocalypse. And writers are free to make up their own classes so their are a lot more.

Famous SCPs

• SCP-001: Unlike other SCP numbers, there are multiple SCP-001 articles, and it is up to the reader to decide which ones are canon. SCP-001 might be the first monster the Foundation ever discovered, or the source of all other SCPs, or the origin of the Foundation, or the biggest apocalyptic threat that they face, any number of other important things that deserved to be in the number one slot.
• SCP-049: A humanoid resembling a medieval plague-doctor whose outfit is actually part of his body. He is obsessed with curing a supposed "pestilence" he perceives in some humans, but his "cure" turns the victim into a rampaging zombie, which to him is somehow better. It's unclear whether this pestilence is a real thing that only he can see, or if he is just insane.
• 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 variety 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, and it might actually be a living portal between worlds.
• SCP-447: A spongy ball that constantly exudes a green slime, this substance is extremely useful and is good at improving the quality of whatever it's applied to (gasoline becomes more efficient, smoke grenades last longer, food becomes more delicious). The only catch is that it does something to dead bodies that is apparently extremely dangerous, and the Foundation is so afraid of this effect that even proposing to apply the goo to a dead body is enough to get you demoted to D-class!
• SCP-529 (aka Josie): A half-cat (not that kind), the entirety of her body behind her ribcage is seemingly non-existent. Despite this, she still behaves as though her body is whole. Given that she is a cat, she is allowed to freely roam the lower levels of the facility. However, SCP-529 is not to be given any cheese; if she doesn't get enough cheese, she gets upset.
• 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. Oh, and in one story he's the messianic son of SCP 231-7 and the Scarlet King.
• SCP-1471: A malware app that, once installed, causes a skull-faced wolf-thing (the picture of it that used to be on the page was stolen from a Furry) to begin stalking you inside your phone until you can see it in real-life. Fortunately, the creature itself is harmless. Unfortunately, this all means that furries in real-real-life are totally obsessed with the character and you can't mention it without risking Rule 34.
• SCP-2521: A weird tentacle monster that can walk though walls, can only be safely described with pictograms, and loves information about itself, so 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, and finding an exit is extremely difficult. Many of the people trapped inside the super IKEA are from other versions of earth and they are forced to play Dwarf Fortress (or Minecraft for the current gen reader) where they hunt for food and look for an exit during the day and craft weapons and fortresses using IKEA products to defend against the monsters' attacks at night.

SCPs with minimal tabletop relevance

• 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 is 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 is 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 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 lead 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.