Tickets, testing and terms

Hi folks,

Wishing you the very best for the coming week from everyone at Rusty Towers!

Thank you so much for your incredible response to our tenth anniversary celebrations announcement, especially to those of you who have booked tickets to attend our Statement Begins event with Alexnader J Newall and Jonathan Sims in Manchester, UK later this year! The vast majority of tickets have now sold out, including the VIP tickets, but there are a very small number remaining. If you would like to hear Alex and Jonny read and discuss statements live on stage, make sure to get your tickets soon, as there are very few left.

If you can’t make it to Statement Begins, don’t forget there are also a very small number of tickets left for our Magnus theatrical show, The Hilltop, in November. Featuring iconic characters alongside new, original work, The Hilltop will be a podcast live show quite unlike any other, bringing a whole new dimension to The Magnus Archives and The Magnus Protocol.

We are also really pleased to say that you have yet more chances to see the Rusty Quill team, as we will be hosting a panel of The Norwich Games Festival on 31st May! Join the cast and crew of Rez High, an upcoming Neon Inkwell series, to find out how they worked to create immersive worlds, and to explore the video game history that inspired this story.

Rez High is set in a distant future, where a band of scavenging young adults find a vintage VR system that becomes their gateway to a surprising alien world: a gamified recreation of a 20th century high school. It grapples with timely questions about video games, from accessibility to representation, while sending its cast of irresistible characters on an adventure across both virtual realities and epic, post-apocalyptic landscapes. Rez High will release on the Neon Inkwell feed later in 2025. You can find out more about the event and purchase tickets on the Norwich Games Festival website.

Next up, we have a brief update from Patreon about the multiple show feeds feature that we – and our Patreons – have been involved in testing. A huge thank you to everyone who has used the separate show feeds so far, and for your feedback on your experience using them. The Patreon team will very shortly move from alpha testing to beta testing, and the feature will largely remain the same. However, some fans ultimately preferred consuming shows all in one, combined, RSS feed. With that in mind, they will shortly be re-enabling this feature, in addition to the split feeds.

What this means for you: soon you will be able to select a Combined Feed option alongside the list of separate shows when adding a Rusty Quill Patreon RSS feed to your podcast player (except for Spotify). If you’ve added the feed that is currently labelled “The Magnus Protocol - Ad-Free and Early Access Patreon Feed” to your podcast player, this will revert back to being a combined feed. Once Patreon has made the switch, we’ll create a new separate feed for The Magnus Protocol and let you all know. However, you shouldn’t miss an episode if you don’t subscribe to the new feed; it will continue to get all The Magnus Protocol episodes, as well as any other new podcast episodes we release. Thank you again for helping us to test this feature with Patreon – as always, if you have any issues or feedback, please send us a Patreon DM or email mail@rustyquill.com .

Meanwhile, this week on The Magnus Protocol, Alice struggles with a technicality. We know you have enjoyed the Live Listens we’ve so far hosted here on Patreon with the Drops feature and will be hosting more of these throughout season 2. Therefore, Knights and Nobles are invited to join us at 6pm GMT on Tuesday, two hours after the initial early access release, to listen to the episode and chat using the live feature! We can’t wait to see you there and to listen to the episode together.

Thank you so much for the amazing comments you left for our most recent The Magnus Protocol guest writer! The writer of the episode, Aaron Blanton, creator of What Happened in Skinner, was kind enough to share some of his inspirations for the statement, including a photograph. 

Aaron writes:

"This submission was inspired by two evenings:

First, an extremely liminal and strange evening the What Happened in Skinner team had at the pier in Santa Monica, CA.

And second, an eerily misty evening (under an orange harvest moon) three months later at Coney Island in NYC. I'd already been thinking about the night when the Santa Monica pier abruptly shut down around us, and as I looked down the boardwalk, I snapped this picture for reference while I drafted the episode.

If you want some more spooky coastal vibes, check out my show What Happened in Skinner! It plays like a true crime, and we spend a lot of time enhancing that feeling on the Internet. But unlike true crime, things veer into the supernatural when the mystery takes our investigation inside a secretive occult religion. (If you liked True Detective: Night Country or Yellowjackets, that’s the vibe. But in the Pacific Northwest.)

Every episode is full-cast, fully scored, and finished with 360º cinematic sound design. And we do it all from my living room without any funding."

(Image description: A photograph on a boardwalk at Coney Island, NYC. It is nighttime, and the boardwalk stretches out into the distance, disappearing into a hazy mist. The boardwalk is lined with fairground rides on the left, and lamp posts on the right, with a small number of people in the middle distance).

You can listen to What Happened in Skinner, a tense, supernatural mystery exploring a secretive occult religion in Oregon, wherever you find podcasts. You can find out more, and watch additional videos, at https://www.whathappenedinskinner.com

Finally, this week in Broken Hearted Monsters Frank and Dracula’s epic road trip exploring America’s best – and worst – roadside attracts and diners, continues. However, as Frank continues to self-sabotage instead of opening up to his former partner, trouble is brewing.

Here is our full schedule for this week:

Tuesday 25th March

The Magnus Protocol 35 – Terms and Conditions (Patreon & Kickstarter backers) (4pm GMT)

[KNIGHTS+] Drop: MAGP 35 Live Listen (6pm GMT)

Wednesday 26th March

Neon Inkwell: Broken Hearted Monsters 3 – Diced Onions, Relish, Sauerkraut (Patreon) (4pm GMT)

Thursday 27th March

The Magnus Protocol 35 – Terms and Conditions (Public) (4pm GMT)

Friday 28th March

Neon Inkwell: Broken Hearted Monsters 3 – Diced Onions, Relish, Sauerkraut (Public) (4pm GMT)

Have a good week all!

The Rusty Quill team