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…

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…

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….

We are very excited to announce The Magnus Protocol, a return to the universe of our award-winning podcast, The Magnus Archives.