This started with Creepypasta floating around 4chan. Not to mention the headache that would ensue if somebody made money off of it, and someone claiming to be the "original author" came out of the woodwork, demanding recompense. Unlikely scenario yes, but liable to happen nonetheless.

Anything more than that is going to cause problems, sadly.

If anything like an official RPG was developed, then it should be made freely available online as a .pdf with the option for printed copies at printing cost and not a penny more. Really, there isn't even a good reason for us to handle the printing. We could just give people basic instructions on finding a local print shop, and then it's entirely their prerogative and we don't need to handle money at any point. No one should make money off of this. Especially not after we started collecting donations to move away from Wikidot with no real plan and that project apparently folded.

tl;dr I feel the exact same way about a for-profit RPG as I do about anything else SCP related being provided for-profit. Nobody should be making money off of this. See my first post in the thread. It's still profits being generated from a collaborative community fiction project.

At least i've got a bit of sleep now…

I'd love to see a movie made someday, not because i want to be rich and famous, but because I think it'd be neat to see stuff I watched grow from basic ideas on a big screen. Same with the SCP games and such, I'm just stoked to see our horrors stalking halls and such. We're artists. Fucked-up artists, perhaps, but artists none the less. You don't paint for money, you paint because you want to. We write horror because…well…we can. What's more, we can share it with like-minded people, and even people outside our community dig it sometime.

Forgive me. As I said, I'm…a little loopy right now. Thanks for being honest, it helps make a foggy decision much, much clearer. Outside of the odd SCP mug or tee-shirt to keep the site going…we're a non-for-profit. Heh. A Foundation, so to speak.

No single person could have built the site into what it is now; even so, whether or not they could have is a moot consideration, as they did not. That just about anything posted here is relevant is due to the contributions of far more than singular authors. Publishing anything SCP related for profit, even if it is your own work, is still relying heavily on the success of the community-built site. That is, it is leeching off the success of the work others have put into this collaborative fiction endeavor for individual personal gain, and that's just not right.

It's greedy, dishonest, and taints the thing I've always loved most about the site: that none of this was for profit. That this was just a bunch of like-minded people who banded together on 4chan behind a throw-away creepypasta and built it into something much more for no other reason than they enjoyed scaring the piss out of people. I feel that bringing money into the equation, in addition to causing a slew of problems we don't need and upsetting people for no good reason, would destroy the pure artistic nature of this project.

If a profit should ever be turned from the site, my involvement with it would end, and I would ask that all of my works be removed. This is not a threat. This is a simple statement of convictions.

Sorry if that didn't make a world of sense, I've been up for 48 hours and I'm kinda loopy.

Yoric voiced a concern that the book's entries might end up set as "canon." I think it might be best to make sure the book's entries aren't compatible with the site's entries for that reason. Put a mention in the site that the book's entries aren't necessarily authentic. Hell, put a mention in the book that the site's entries aren't necessarily authentic. Far be it from me to try to set canon.

These are the ideas I've got off the top of my head.

I approve of this idea, and if it can increase the traffic to the site and create a new influx of users and writers, this should be damn good.

There are basically two big stumbling blocks to publication.

1) We can't use all of the SCPs. We need the author's expressed approval to use the work. Frankly, I think it's best to limit this to Senior Staff in any event. We're going to need to edit the pieces anyway, so it'll be easier if we're just working with our own material. Between all of us, we should have sufficient entries to fill a good-sized book, especially if we add a few actions reports and supplementary material.

2) We don't own the rights to most of the pictures. This one's a somewhat bigger stumbling block. We're going to need to either omit pictures entirely, come up with our own (doable with some entries), or find pictures in the public domain. It might even be worthwhile looking into illustration. It loses a bit of verisimilitude, but I think it might look better in the long run (especially since we're probably going to be printing in black-and-white).

So, while there are obstacles, I don't think they're insurmountable. Now, is this a good idea?

Well, that's kind of up in the air. Understand, this probably won't make us much money. Any money it does make is going to have to be distributed among us (and I suggest the first share go back to the site itself, for some of those projects Gears mentioned). It's going to take quite a bit of work. We'll need to decide which entries we want to use, and they're going to have to be edited for publication. We'll want some new material so that people who buy the book don't feel they could have gotten it all from visiting the site. It's really down to whether or not you think publishing a book is a cool enough idea to justify the effort. Personally, I'd be willing to put in the time, but I can understand if other people aren't.

As far as getting it published, I think the first step would be seeing if we could find a publisher interested in publishing the book, and, if none are, going to someplace like lulu.com. If we go with lulu, we're probably looking at something around twenty dollars a book, black and white (we really don't want to go with color if we publish with lulu, trust me on this).