Octavian, October and Occular Occults

Hi folks,

It has been a pretty exciting few days here at Rusty Towers!

Firstly, this week we will be sharing the penultimate episode of Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later. Things are looking pretty bad for Gaius, Mark and Lepidus and Cleopatra is about to leave Rome. Is there anything they can do to save the Roman Republic – or their jobs? As we near the end of the story – here at Rusty Towers we’ve been thinking about our favourite moments from the show. What have been yours? If you’ve enjoyed the show, don’t forget we have some beautiful merch designs available on our Teepublic, Redbubbleand Crowdmade stores. As we said last week, leaving a rating, a review or recommending the show to your friends are great ways to get the word out about the show. And if you’re the kind of person who prefers to listen to a podcast all in one go, now is the perfect time to do so ahead of next week’s finale!

(Image description: A redbubble mock-up of some Cry Havoc merchandise. A person wears a white tshirt with an illustration of Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile).

This week our Friday Knights+ bonus series of Backstage continues with an episode on how creator David K Barnes and our talented team of writers went about making very serious topics – such as murder – funny. Joining David and Lowri this week are two of our writing team – Grace Knight and Robert Valentine.

Next up, we’d like to say a huge congratulations to anyone who has been participating in The Magnus Protocol ARG – alternate reality game – over the last month. We are pleased to say that every puzzle has now been solved, and our clever, dedicated players managed to unlock the final reward over the weekend. We still won’t say too much about the ARG itself – there’s still plenty of time to dive into it yourself – but we did want to share something extremely exciting with you. The final reward unlocked by the ARG players was the first trailer for The Magnus Protocol. That’s right – you can now get your first insight into the world of The Magnus Protocol and meet a couple of our new characters. We’re giving Patreon supporters and Kickstarter backers – as well as, of course, people who successfully completed the ARG – a chance to get an early look at the trailer. You can watch it here on our YouTube channel. Warning: watching may cause extreme impatience for the release of the show in January 2024!

The trailer features Shahan Hamza as Samama Khalid and Sarah Lambie as Lena Kelley. You may recognise Sarah’s voice as Octavia in Cry Havoc and Shahan from his work as Siva in Trice Forgotten.

Of course, if you’re a Kickstarter backer at the Archival Assistant level or above, or a Patreon supporter at a Knight or Noble tier, you will be receiving the digital premiere – a preview of the pilot episode – on 22nd October. The final version of the episode – with a full, professionally recorded theme music track composed by Sam Jones – will be released publicly in January 2024. We hope this little taster has given you a glimpse of what the series will be like and we cannot wait to share the rest.

We will also be releasing some special ARG merch onto our Teepublic and Redbubble stores later this week, so do keep an eye out for that!

Speaking of merch, last week featured the launch of one of the most unusual but exciting products we’ve ever worked on. The Jon & Martin The Magnus Archives perfume, created by Sucreabeille (who you may be familiar with from their scents for Old Gods of Appalachia). This completely custom-made scent, created in collaboration with folks here at RQ and in a hand-engraved bottle, represents the comfort of a cup of tea on a bad day, and the smell of an archive of papers, statements and old books. You can find out more about the perfume on Sucreabeille’s website.

(Image description: a perfume bottle with an engraving of The Magnus Archives podcast artwork on it.)

This joins The Magnus Archives dice set, which we announced a couple of weeks ago. These are still available for pre-order from the Dice Dungeon website.

Here is our full schedule for this week:

Tuesday 10th October

ROME 19 – Roman Comedy (Patreon) (4pm BST)

Thursday 12th October

ROME 19 – Roman Comedy (Public) (4pm BST)

Friday 13th October

KNIGHTS+ bonus – Backstage: Making Murder Funny (Patreon) (4pm BST)

Have a good week all!

The Rusty Quill team