What's next - The Protocol hiatus, collabs and more!

Hi folks,

It has been another packed week here at Rusty Towers!

Firstly, a huge thank you to everyone who was able to join Alex, Jonny, Anusia, Billie, Lowri and Shahan for our The Magnus Protocol season one wrap party livestream! If you missed it, do not worry – the VOD is currently available to watch in full on our Twitch page, and we will be uploading it to our YouTube channel in the near future. The team played some Protocol-themed Quiplash games, followed by a fascinating Q&A about the show. Highlights included Billie’s frankly terrifying experience with a “maggot clown”, finding out why Alex is most like Colin, and what the most forbidden ship is in The Magnus Protocol.

Speaking of Q&As, there’s just a few more hours left to submit questions to Alex and Jonny about The Magnus Protocol for our much-anticipated season one mailbag episode! Submit your questions to the Mailbag Form before 23:45 BST today, Monday 23rd September 2024. As a quick reminder, please only ask one question per entry. We have already received hundreds of questions into the form, so we cannot guarantee that every question will be answered in the episode.

This week we will be releasing the first part of our between-season bonus content for The Magnus Protocol: The Season One Epilogue. The Epilogue, which we have been able to produce thanks to the support we received during the Kickstarter campaign, serves as a short addenda or coda to the first season. Similar to how our trailers work for Magnus, it is considered a canon part of the show. Without giving away any spoilers, The Epilogue absolutely should not be missed and is a very important part of the story…  

The Epilogue will be released at the usual times – in early access on Tuesday at 4pm BST and publicly on Thursday at 4pm BST. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to host the planned Drop and live listen this Tuesday due to staff unavailability – however, the early access is unaffected.

Looking ahead at some of the other hiatus episodes, we soon by sharing the first of our Fluff episodes for The Magnus Protocol. Long-time fans may remember the beloved The Magnus Archives fan-written, non-canonical Fluff episodes, which were initially released exclusively to Knights and Nobles Patreons back in 2020 (you can find them in our MAG Bonus Content Collection or by searching for “Fluff”). Now, Fluff has returned for Protocol, with a slight difference: this lovely vignette of OIAR life is technically canon to the series, though is not essential for the plot and is guaranteed to be completely horror-free!

Then we have our first “What If” episode, which we’ve called: “What if everyone just listened to Colin”. This is, of course, not canon, but takes a look at how things would have panned out in the first season of The Magnus Protocol with one small, but important change. We’ll leave you to guess what we changed in this one!

There will be a whole host of additional content including the season two trailer, the release of the latest Rusty Fears stories, and more – more of these in a future update!

After all of this, you can expect a return of The Magnus Protocol for season two in February 2025. We know that this feels a long way off, but making this show, as well as Neon Inkwell, is an absolutely monumental effort for our whole production team and even a single episode can take weeks to make from start to finish. Thank you so much for your support through season one and we can’t wait to bring season two to you next year!

Finally, some of you may have spotted an announcement for an exciting collaboration we’ve been working on! On 17th October, the team at Watcher will be premiering a three-episode special of their series, Are You Scared?, which they have made with a little help from some familiar voices… It has been such a pleasure to work with Ryan Bergara, Shane Madej and their talented team, whose work we’ve been fans of for years – and we know that many of you are fans of theirs too. The episodes will be released on WatcherTV initially, then publicly on their YouTube channel from 13th November. Their team have already shared a short promo video on Twitter/X, and we can’t wait for you to see the full episodes!

Have a good week all!

The Rusty Quill team