New to the RQ Network: The Penumbra Podcast

Hi folks,

We hope you all have had a wonderful week!

Our summer of events and celebrations continues into June as we get ready for our Birthday Livestream on 28th June! Join guests from across the last ten years of Rusty Quill at 3pm BST for fun, games, RQ trivia, a TTRPG one-shot and more.

(Image description: Text reading: RQ Birthday Stream. Celebrate our birthday and raise money for charity. Join us on Twitch on Saturday 28th June. 15:00-20:00 BST. Below the text are two logos side by side for SpecialEffect and The Trevor Project.)

We’ll also be fundraising for two fantastic charities: The Trevor Project, who help to support and save young LGBTQ+ lives, and SpecialEffect, who work to transform the lives of physically disabled people by creating innovative, accessible ways to play video games.

Make sure you’ve marked your calendars for 3pm BST on 28th June and follow us on www.twitch.tv/rusty_quill so you get a notification as soon as we go live!

We’ve also been able to celebrate the success of some of our partners recently. CCO Callum and Marketing Manager Hattie attended the UK Games Expo last week to join Monte Cook in celebrating their amazing win of Best Roleplaying Game for The Magnus Archives RPG in the UKGE Judge’s Award 2025! As well as spending time with the Monte Cook team at their stand, they even had the opportunity to play the game during a taster session.

(Image description: A photograph from the UK Games Expo. Two people, Callum (left) and Hattie (right) stand in front of display of Monte Cook Games books. Callum is holding a copy of The Magnus Archives Roleplaying Game and Hattie is holding the Judge’s Choice Award).

If you’d be interested in buying the game for yourself, you can purchase it direct from Monet Cook on their website or you can make a late pledge on the Tangled in the Web BackerKit campaign to pre-order items from the expansion.

Next up, we have some very exciting news from the RQ Network. Firstly, Soul Operator is a finalist in two categories for the 2025 CRIT Awards: Best Innovation in the TTRPG Space and Best Artist of 2025. You can check out the “Official Soul Operator Voting Guide”, featuring folks affiliated with or supportive of the show, or cast your vote in the official form.

Finally, we are delighted to be welcoming a new show to the RQ Network. The Penumbra Podcast is a legendary and multi-award-winning science fiction and fantasy audio drama that first launched in 2016. The feed features two series, with a new one coming very soon: Juno Steel, a sci-fi noir, queer cult favourite and The Second Citadel, a fantasy epic where friendships and romance are forged across enemy lines.

In Juno Steel, follow a sharp-witted private eye on Mars as he investigates ancient alien artefacts, a mysterious homme fatale, and his biggest fears: heights, blood, and relationships.

Case by case, Juno tangles with politicians, police, crime lords, mad anthropologists, entertainment executives, and a rogues’ gallery of the most dangerous and powerful people the galaxy has to offer.

Despite his stubborn efforts to cling to his misanthropic ways, Juno’s list of bizarre and lovable friends and family only grows longer throughout his years as a PI. Can this sardonic sleuth beat his personal demons to find companionship, stability, and happiness even in a place as broken as Hyperion City?

Or step into The Second Citadel, where the fierce Sir Caroline, the first female Knight of the Crown, leads an eclectic team of warriors against mind-manipulating monsters.

As the humans hurry to grow and diversify their army of knights and the monsters genetically engineer ever more threatening beasts, the impending war threatens to destroy them all.

When the eradication of either side becomes too horrible to bear, is there any creature alive who can end the bloodshed for good? This silly and sincere magical epic is perfect for fans of Nimona and Our Flags Means Death.

To find out a bit more about The Penumbra Podcast, we spoke to the co-creators, Harley Takagi Kaner and Kevin Vibert, in this Patreon-exclusive interview.

Tell us more about you and The Penumbra Podcast

Harley Takagi Kaner: As a little girl growing up in Boston, MA, I always thought I’d be a ballerina one day. I ended up being a podcaster, and also, unfortunately, a man, but I’m having a pretty good time with all of it despite the circumstances. I’m lucky enough to work with my bestie, Kevin, on The Penumbra Podcast, which was intended to be a Twilight Zone-esque anthology series but wound up settling on two main storylines. One is Juno Steel, a sci-fi noir series about a misanthropic private eye on Mars who just cannot stop following this particularly sexy thief around no matter how much trouble it gets him into. The other is Second Citadel, a fantasy series about a group of knights who are all doing a very bad job fitting into society’s expectations of them, and their forever-war with the dangerous monsters who live nearby and may or may not be the real enemy. It’s very much not The Twilight Zone, ultimately, but sometimes you just have to let things grow up to be what they are, you know?

Kevin Vibert: I’m also a Massachusetts boy. I always wrote stories for fun as a kid, but it’s never what I thought I’d do with my life until I received some encouragement at 16 and then immediately took it way too far by starting a daily writing practice I’ve kept up almost every day in the eighteen years since. (If you’re looking to establish a lifelong habit, I really do recommend an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder diagnosis; if you can get past the paralytic anxiety and decades of amorphous dread, it works miracles.) I was a public high school teacher for seven years, which means I have a lot of opinions about education nobody asked for and talk about Othello more than is probably wise. The Penumbra is my first real published work.

What got you into podcasting?

Kevin: Hubris and happy accidents are excellent replacements for knowledge and experience when it comes to starting an unwisely-large, eight-year-long project. Harley and I just sort of hyped each other up to each step: first writing a script just sounded fun, then bringing in our actor friends sounded fun, then hosting it online sounded fun, and now it’s almost a decade later and we actually know what we’re doing, mostly. If I’d known how long and intensive this was going to be when we started, I probably would have chickened out… and I’m very glad I didn’t. So my biggest advice for anybody who wants to get started: just start. Today. Do it badly for a while, keep it up for a decade, and then maybe you, too, will know what you’re doing, mostly.

Harley: We got into it by accident, but staying in it: well, I’m head over heels for narrative storytelling, and podcasting is a medium that’s more collaborative than books, has a further reach than theater, and is cheaper to produce than film. I also became the sound designer for our show by happenstance and it turns out that I love working in audio. Designing audio drama feels very similar to dancing in the way that I play and paint with sounds. 

What are you most proud about The Penumbra Podcast?

Harley: When I was 25, I remember working my stupid horrible soul-sucking office manager job and thinking to myself, “I want to have made something by the time I’m 30,” and I did. We made something that is complete and has been meaningful to people and has allowed us to chart our journeys as people and artists. I couldn’t be prouder of that. 

Kevin: Something I was completely emotionally unprepared for when we started The Penumbra was how much we’d grow and change while making it. We were 25 and, to be blunt, much more optimistic when we conceived of Juno and the knights of the Citadel, but it didn’t feel fair to the stories, characters, or our audience to dramatically alter or retcon the story to align with how we’d come to feel… but at the same time, Harley and I both can only get invested in writing a story if it’s asking questions we genuinely care about. The end result is that writing these stories has always been a balancing act, finding ways to be good and true to the young artists we were when we started this while also doing the hard work and introspection necessary to make sure that every tale is honest to how we felt when we wrote it. That, ultimately, is what I’m proudest of: every word of these stories is honest to who we were when we wrote them. Real emotional honesty that does the long, hard, introspective work to figure out how you really feel, then how to phrase it in a compelling, evocative, and fun way, is incredibly difficult to pull off, but I’m so proud that we did it as well as we did and it resonated with so many people.

You can listen to The Penumbra Podcast wherever you find podcasts, or on the Rusty Quill website. If you enjoy the show, do consider leaving a rating or review, as this is a great way to support a show!

Have a good week all!

The Rusty Quill team