Fluff and fanfiction

Hi folks,

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

To start off this week, we have another exciting stretch-goal event, made possible by our The Magnus Protocol Kickstarter backers. Please join us on our Twitch channel at 4pm BST on Friday 28th April for The Magnus Archives fanfiction showcase with Jonathan Sims and Alexander J Newall. A few weeks ago, we asked Magnus fic writers to submit short extracts from their best works to be considered to appear on stream. We read through every submission and selected a few of our favourites, which will be read out – live – by Jonny and Alex. It’ll be lots of fun, and we can’t wait to see you there. As always, we recommend that you follow our Twitch channel, so that you get a notification as soon as we go live. If you can’t make the stream, don’t worry – the VOD will be available on Twitch immediately after the stream ends, and should be available on our YouTube channel within a few days.

If this stream leaves you craving the… fluffier side of The Magnus Archives, we’d recommend you checkout The Magnus Archives fluff competition episodes, exclusive to Rusty Knights and Nobles here on Patreon! This is a competition we ran back in late 2019 and early 2020, where we asked Patreons to submit “fluffy, slice-of-life” scenes featuring their favourite Magnus characters.

You can find all of these here on Patreon, or by using the Patreon Content Explorer on our website.

• Winner #1 – Epiphany
• Winner #2 – Expenses
• Winner #3 – In the Public Eye
• Winner #4 – Ostriches
• Winner #5 – Bargain Hunting

Meanwhile, hard work continues on our upcoming show, Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later. For our newer subscribers, Cry Havoc is a new Roman comedy created by David K Barnes and directed by Amani Zardoe. The two most powerful men in Rome – Mark Antony, played by Kazeem Tonsin Amore, and Gaius Octavius Caesar, played by Harry Roebuck – can’t get along. And that’s a problem, because they’re running the country together, and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, played by Lara Sawalha, is on their doorstep! Recording has now wrapped, and our production team are now editing, sound scaping and bringing the world of Ancient Rome to life. We are also still hard at work on the music for the show, with composer Sam Jones having met with our team to discuss scoring. If you can’t wait for the show, we shared a Cry Havoc themed puzzle back in February, introducing fans to some of the main characters and locations that inspired the series.

Finally, our Friday bonus for Rusty Knights and Nobles is another episode of Enthusigasm. This week, host Helen Gould is joined by Jonathan Sims, Lydia Nicholas, Marguerite Kenner and Nathan Blades to discuss 90s British TV phenomenon, Robot Wars. If you haven’t heard of Robot Wars before, it’s the original UK-version of the US show, Battle Bots – an amateur robot fighting competition featuring robots with names like Sir Killalot, Chaos 2, Dead Metal, Hypno-Disc and Matilda. This episode really epitomises the name of the show, so get ready for lots of enthusiastic chat and memories of this iconic show.

Have a good week all!

The Rusty Quill team