The Magnus Protocol ARG: Full Summary

An ARG – an Alternate Reality Game – is an interactive puzzle game that employs both real-world and online elements to tell a story with heavy player involvement. When Rusty Quill ran a Kickstarter to fund The Magnus Protocol, one of the most exciting stretch goals was that we would run our own extensive ARG. If you weren’t able to participate, or want to recap what happened, here is a summary of everything that happened, how it was made, and some behind-the-scenes insights from the Rusty Quill ARG team. Please note that some resources and websites featured in the ARG are no longer available. The ARG team Alexander J Newall – Creator, Continuity Consultant, Copy writer Jonathan Sims – Continuity Consultant Sebastian Hutter – Co-Lead (Technical) Jessica Anson – Co-Lead, (Administration) April Sumner – Production Lead Martyn Pratt – Technical Support Tom Park, Hattie Quinlan, Callum Dougherty, Helen Gould – Supporting Staff The timeline 24th March 2023 – ARG Brain Trust 12th April 2023 – Initial Meeting 15th September 2023 – ARG begins Key ARG elements The Vortex It all began with The Vortex. [Image: The original Vortex concept, which has stayed largely the same over the course of the ARG] An original Alexander J Newall creation, the Vortex is the skeleton through which the ARG was created.  5 levels based on alchemically significant numbers, each interconnected and designed to draw in players and gradually ramp up in difficultly and complexity without allowing “lone-wolf” solvers, all the while revealing new information about the world of The Magnus Protocol.  While the ARG was not something that was necessary to participate in to understand The Magnus Protocol, it was designed to contain…

Cry Havoc: An interview with David K Barnes

Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later is a new podcast available to listen to now, wherever you find podcasts. Our intrepid reporter, David K Barnes, spoke to creator, David K Barnes, to find out a bit more about the show and why you should listen to it. Hi David! What’s Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later about? It’s an epic about power, politics, money, and murder – with lots of juicy drama and jokes! Yes, but what happens in it? Oh. Er. I’m waiting. What do you know about ancient Rome? Not much. That’s OK. I wrote the series to be totally accessible, so you don’t need to know anything going in. After all, we don’t all have an Ancient History degree do we? Ha ha! Was that a brag? Sorry. Christ almighty. But honestly, even if you’ve only dimly heard of Ancient Rome, you can jump into this series. And if you do know about Rome, there’s lots of geeky references and jokes you’ll enjoy too. So, Cry Havoc is set in the Roman Empire is it? Not quite. We’re at the end of the Roman Republic, when Rome was still run by a group of wealthy guys called the Senate. They were making decisions and taking votes. Sort of like a democracy, except the people in charge can totally ignore the poor. … I mean … gestures at the world I know, some things never change, sadly. But then along comes a statesman and military general called Julius Caesar- I’ve heard of him! He was basically already in charge, but he decided he wanted to rule forever. And some senators weren’t keen on that, so they killed him. But then…

Rusty Fears 6: Announcing the winners!

Rusty Fears 6 has been our biggest writing competition ever, with more than double our previous highest number of entries. Understandably, this has meant it’s also been one of our most hotly anticipated competition announcements. However, the writers who submitted entries did not make our judging panel’s lives easy, with an incredible standard across the board. Three shortlisting judges worked together to read all 700 stories across 6 categories. As the judges were doing their usual day-to-day jobs as well as the judging, they were given several weeks for this, to ensure they could give each story the time it deserves. Between them, they shortlisted about 10 stories for each of the categories. These were then passed to our lead judge, who after carefully reviewing the stories selected a winner and a runner-up for each category. This final shortlist was then looked over by Rusty Quill’s Head of Inclusion, Helen Gould, for a sensitivity check. Finally, we reached out to winners and runner ups to confirm their participation and understanding of the terms and rules of the competition. We had asked writers across the world to send in their best, new original short horror stories, inspired by one of the following 6 prompts: The judging panel this year consisted of: With assistance from Helen Gould. After much deliberation and discussion, the judges selected six talented winners. CONGRATULATIONS are in order for: These six stories will now undergo the Rusty Quill treatment, and will be professionally performed, produced, and released onto The Magnus Archives feed. We will announce the release date for these closer to the time. Once all six stories have been released, we’ll share a public poll for the…

The Magnus Archives Fanfiction Showcase

As a result of the incredible goals reached through the recent The Magnus Protocol Kickstarter, we reached the stretch goal of a live fanfiction showcase!  So, Rusty Quill are inviting fans to send in their own fanfiction based on The Magnus Archives, for creator of The Magnus Protocol Alexander J Newall and Jonathan Sims to read live on stream.   Please read the following carefully if you plan to submit your work for this livestream.  Terms and Conditions  FAQs 

The Magnus Protocol Announcement Codes and Ciphers

(AKA, the ARG “wash up”). Fans of Rusty Quill have always gone the extra mile when it comes to theorising, code-breaking and collaborating. So, when we were ready to start telling people our plans for The Magnus Protocol, a new audio drama podcast returning to the world of The Magnus Archives, we could have just… announced it. But that’s not very fun, and Rusty Quill is an entertainment production company. We decided to start with something subtle, to see how closely people were paying attention. In our regularly Monday newsletter to our Patreons, we included an alphanumeric code towards the end of the newsletter. It took a little while for people to notice (and then at first they thought it was a mistake). Then, as people started to recognise that, rather than a random string of numbers and letters it was in fact a code, the penny dropped that a game might be afoot. The first code was U3RhdGVtZW50IFJlbWFpbnMK . We’ve included the solution of this problem below; don’t look if you would like to try and solve it yourself. Alone, this code was quite exciting, but we also thought we’d share an eye emoji onto some of our social media pages. This got people talking, although those who weren’t Patreon subscribers weren’t quite sure what they were seeing yet. Two days, and a lot of Twitter notifications later, we thought we’d up the stakes a bit. Our Patreon subscribers had solved the Base64 code pretty quickly, so multiple folks at Rusty Quill put their head together and designed something a bit more complicated. We posted a new update onto Patreon with the subject line ‘Post title (required)’. The code…

Public response to an opinion piece

As a rule, Rusty Quill tries to avoid directly addressing unfounded social media accusations, preferring to provide formal updates like any other business. In this instance however, we are being forced to defend ourselves from what appears to be a case of carefully timed, deliberate defamation from people seeking to exploit recent hardships for our staff possibly to sabotage our fundraising and reputation. There are far too many false allegations within this blog to address them all at this time, so we will do our best and provide what information we can until we have finished consultation with our legal partners regarding this situation. Firstly, whilst it is true that there have been some redundancies this year at Rusty Quill, the company has no history of “financial failings” nor “worker exploitation” as is alluded to in the hearsay of this article. In fact, our most recent formal Employee Satisfaction Survey, which was conducted by an independent third party, found our scores to be “exceptional” and these were shared internally. Furthermore, we have already internally released a 2023 Operations Update which included factual information on related topics including recent redundancies and our plans for the future. This update is due for public release in the new year and multiple staff have already volunteered to provide testimonials in Rusty Quill’s defence. We were approached by Newt Schottelkotte to assist in “a comprehensive guide to fiction podcast networks” in November, and they did not disclaim their position as the Marketing Director of a competitor network called Fable and Folly. They later reached out to us asking if we cared to provide comment on “recent changes our network has gone through” for this article….

Rusty Fears 6: Remnants of Fear

As we look ahead to The Magnus Archives 2, we will be resurrecting The Magnus Archives podcast feed with bonus content, looks behind-the-scenes and other fun things! We are also preparing for our Kickstarter crowdfunding on 30th October over on our Twitch channel with fun, games, and special guests including Alexander J Newall and Jonathan Sims themselves. With all of that in mind, it’s time for one of our legendary horror writing competitions. Rusty Fears has been a staple here at Rusty Quill, and with The Magnus Archives 2 on the horizon, we want to once again showcase some of the best in new and undiscovered horror writing talent, this time with our best ever prize. As with all of our previous Rusty Fears competitions, six winners will be chosen to have their stories, read, produced and broadcast on The Magnus Archives feed. However, in our biggest ever competition, the winning stories will also appear on RQ Network shows, bringing your words to a huge audience. And that’s not all. From the six chosen winners, fans will choose their favourite writer, who will be given the opportunity to write a statement which will be included in the The Magnus Archives 2. This year, we would like to read your tales on one of the following themes: How you interpret these is up to you, but we’ll be on the lookout for original takes and/or exploration of tropes that might be less well-known in traditional Western media. Some important tips we’d also like to offer: For more information, please ensure you read the Terms and Conditions in full. If you have any further questions, please email mail@rustyquill.com. Fears 6: A Rusty…