Novel

[Kedjane]

Would be fun to flesh out Penumbra some more, but as Tom says, there is probably not a very large audience for it. What could be possible, is that if we ever release Penumbra HD, or what ever weird thing might happen in the future, a shorter story could be included in the pack. Penumbra has quite a lot of text, so there will probably be enough people who buy the game that will find it interesting. Not sure if anyone would buy a 300+ page book based around it though. Also, there are certain legal issues surrounded with releasing Penumbra material, so it is nothing we at Frictional Games can do whatever we please with (it's pretty "slack" legal stuff, but still, we do not have 100% freedom).

Making a 300 page story for Penumbra would indeed not be interesting for very many, but some sort of shorter story or perhaps a flash game to add a bit to the story? If you happen to have an abandoned mine and a rock worm costume at hand you could make it a Youtube short like they did with Lost

As for fan fiction, I do not think the releasing maps and such is needed and I think that would restrict people too much. It is more fun if people imagine themselves what might lurk in other parts of the base or what other weird things the Archaic have been up to. The places that we have left unknown are meant to be filled up by the players themselves, so they can fill them with their personal fears

I guess I can agree with that, I've just always been into making stories as realistic as possible and as faithful to original stories as possible. Particularly the last part of that sentance was interesting though: "fill them with their own personal fears"... that's brilliant.
Anyhow I hate to see it when fanfictions take off in completely unbelievable (even if possible) directions such as the Archaic being aliens, the Shelter having some sort of weapons laboratory and stuff like that where you end up reading it just thinking "this is dumb".

As closing note, I just wanna say that I would LOVE to read some fan fiction!

So make it a contest Winner gets a wagonload of sloppy artwork sketches.
Anyhow I do think there are people that would be interested in writing fanfiction for Penumbra. It was a while since Black Plague was released now though so the forums aren't quite as bursting with activity as they once were and the next game won't be Penumbra related, but someone might still have the energy and inspiration to do it.

I will be possible to make user created maps for Amnesia and we are working to have some nice ingame system for this, so one can just click "Play custom map" and then select a downloaded user selected map.

Being able to make your own maps would be nice. I've only tried mapping for Doom a bit, plus GarrysMod and Forge which isn't actually making the maps. Could be fun though, if it isn't all too hard and plenty of tutorials are uploaded.

Awesome!

But let's say you (normal user) are making a map in game, do you need to know basics of coding or is it as easy as map editor, let's say, in Age of Empires, etc.?

Probably more like the Doom 3 Editor than the Age of Empires Editor
Here's a video showing pretty much how to make a room (there are probably better ones), it's not hard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvd85DZnVt0
So it won't be "easy", but you won't need coding skills for the mapping at least.