The Magnus Archives - MAG 120.1 - Season 3 Q+A

Episode Date: November 1, 2018

No tricks, just treats, as Jonny and Alex answer your questions about The Magnus Archives and Season 3!And we're pleased to announce that on 8th December 2018, 10am-10pm, the Rusty Quill charity livestream in aid of MIND & better mental health will be happening again, bigger & bolder than ever!Join us on Twitch, or in full 360 on YouTube, or even... IN PERSON! That's right - we'll be gaming & japing before a live audience and YOU can be there with us! Tickets & details available at https://rustyquill.ticketbud.com/rqgg18 with all proceeds being donated to MIND.Thanks to this week's Patrons: Paul Clemens, Jess Osterhout, Opaline illyria, Nick Dunn, Callum Ayres, Diana Restrepo, Stuart Finlay, ambre marshall, Danielle Carter, Dave Riley, Josh Wein. If you'd like to support us, head to www.patreon.com/rustyquillEdited this week by Elizabeth Moffatt & Alexander J Newall.Check out our merchandise at https://www.redbubble.com/people/rustyquill/collections/708982-the-magnus-archives-s1You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice, or by visiting www.rustyquill.com/subscribePlease rate and review on your software of choice, it really helps us to spread the podcast to new listeners, so share the fear. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You can still join us digitally. Just jump in online at www.twitch.tv forward slash rusty underscore quill on December 8th, 2018, between 10am and 10pm GMT and we'll be there playing games and encouraging you to donate money to this worthy cause. That's all for now. For more information, visit RustyQuill.com or get the latest updates via our Twitter at TheRustyQuill or on Facebook at Facebook.com forward slash TheRustyQuill. facebook.com forward slash the rusty quill. Hi everyone, Alex here. I'd just like to take a moment to thank some of our patrons.

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If you'd like to join them, go to www.patreon.com forward slash Rusty Quill and take a look at our rewards. Hello and welcome to the Magnus Archives Season 3 Q&A special. I'm Alex Newell, director, and with me I've got... Johnny Sims, I am the writer and I play the archivist. Yeah, so we are going to be going through all of your questions. We are going to be doing our best to answer them. I am excited. But I do have a few caveats before we start.

I'm less excited. We've got a lot of questions! Like, a lot of questions! Yeah, Alex has a literal pile of paper in front of him a lot of them sort of doubled up so whilst we will be doing our best to make sure that everyone's sort of credited with their questions i will be cutting through some of the wording to get to the sort of the the crux of it as quick as we can yeah to get thanks for that to get through as quickly as we can and make sure that we do get to everyone. So here's our first question. Tim Not Sasha on the Discord asks,

how do you plot both in a single episode and the meta plot? What they're getting at is you use a lot of detail notes or is it a more vague notion? Everyone knows now that we have a plan till season five, but do we have a ring binder with 50,000 pages of notes on it? The meta plot is actually planned in a lot more detail than any individual episode. Generally right at the start of the season,

me and Alex will sit down and we'll really hash out exactly what is going to happen, what the beats are. Within a given episode, I generally have a vague idea of what's going to happen and then I'll be going away and just sort of percolating, I guess. And sometime in the week beforehand, I'll be like, oh, this will happen in the episode. Because I really enjoy our season plans where we know all of the character arcs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But sometimes there will be just an episode that says, you know, spooky computer.

Yeah. And that's just our placeholder because we know what it's about. And then at some point I'll go very quiet and someone will go Johnny are you alright and I'll be like yes I know where the spooky computer goes

I know what it links to and they'll say eat your pasta Johnny yeah I have been around those conversations before okay a follow up

both Sazan Dorable via Discord and Neurosoc via Reddit ask how far in advance do we the characters' individual arcs? We have answered this before, so we'll get through it quickly,

but they're mostly interested in Martin having a crush, did we always know Tim's backstory, and did we know that Basira was going to join the team full-time? In order, right from the beginning. Yep. About two seasons ahead? Yeah, I'd say that there was some vagueness, but we basically had it. And very soon after she was introduced.

Yes. We know in pretty good detail what a character's arc within the season is going to be, because that's one of the big things that is laid out in the initial season discussion. And we have a good sense of what the skeleton, the structure of the overall thing is going to be. But a lot of those skeletons are built up with pleasant surprises. And for instance, Basira and to a certain degree Daisy becoming quite as significant as they were is largely because the characters and Faye and Frank are amazing.

And the actors really came through and we were like we want to do more with these characters the flesh hive good name in reddit asks how did you arrive at the idea of 13 fears specifically and with the tag on how long have you been planning this again as a um the fears right from the beginning that was very much um the beginning like the building block day one pitch yeah day one pitch for the world uh was the fears um i then went and did a lot of thinking i looked through long lists of common phobias obviously i have read and encountered an awful lot of horror stories anyway and started sort of dividing them up and just thinking more about like how different scary things feel in terms of the sort of fear they generate um and originally the hunt and the

slaughter were kind of the same in my mind but the the more um i started thinking about it and we started planning it properly the clearer it became that those were actually two quite distinct well let's say with them as well, it's one of the few ones where character fed back into lore. Very much so. Where it became apparent that you had two radically different types of character that were not going to gel. Yeah, at first it was, oh, fear of violence, nice and simple.

But actually, the more we did writing and planning around it, the clearer it became that, well, actually, there's two very clear strands here. Got a question from Mealybit on Reddit. Sure. Has anything changed drastically from what we'd originally planned? Yes and no. Grand scale, I don't think anything's changed drastically. But that's largely because the structure we built,

aside from one or two very key points that have remained the same, the structure we built was flexible enough that even though stuff has changed wildly from what we sort of assumed it was going to be, it still managed to fit very comfortably on the same structure. So this is from Penelope Twight from Reddit and Mika Kaditz from Facebook. Cool. How do you balance doling out the information for the long-term plot versus the statement of the week stuff? And more specifically, how confident were we before starting that we'd be able to sustain the podcast long enough to actually finish a meta plot if we got it started?

In terms of confidence in sustaining it, very confident, because I 100% pitched this to Alex as five seasons It did help we knew what short of horrible illnesses or something that no one can predict, like we've already locked everything down. I mean fundamentally if Rusty Quill had completely

collapsed, if Alex and me had both died in fiery explosions. Separate fiery explosions. Separate fiery explosions Though I like to think at the same time oh definitely um if that if anything like that had happened obviously the podcast would have stopped but you know you can never plan for that sort of thing but in terms of foreseeables we knew we were going to go the distance we started it with the aim of doing uh five seasons with a strong ending so got a've got a question here from CarnationLily2Rose from Reddit.

Were we always planning on having episode 120 be Elias reading the statement, or is that entirely because he got a huge fan base? Oh, God. Oh, God, Elias is... Why does everyone want to... No, it's fine. It had always been the plan. Right from season... I think it was only about it was only after 92 when he started to be properly overtly villainous well that's the thing everyone decided how sexy he was um so when we were planning that out there was no way for us

to foresee how sexy elias would probably be something i blame entirely upon Ben. So this is from, I want to say Fixcutton. I do not know how to pronounce that if I read it. In terms of writing them, not their themes, do you have a favourite power amongst the 14? The flesh, for the most favourite. I really enjoy writing the flesh because it allows me to be super weird. I can do lots of grotesque body horror and i do actually feel quite proud of the justification um behind why the flesh is so weird least favorite

least favorite probably actually probably the dark just because i find it draws me into tropes and cliches more than i'm entirely comfortable with it's really really tricky because the dark is such a well-explored fear that and also one that i don't have myself quite as strongly like most of the ones i really enjoy writing the ones where i'm kind of scared of it myself so i can really figure out what it is that gets to me and hone in on it and there isn't as much of that in the dark so i find myself having to um lean a lot more on historical stuff for instance or like it's a lot harder to find the interesting uh bit of writing a dark story certainly for me i have a nice simple one for a least favorite at least which is the spiral because the spiral is always a nightmare i love the spiral and it has stage directions like everything goes wrong that's that's a stage a nice simple one for a least favourite at least, which is The Spiral. Because The Spiral's always a nightmare to edit. I love The Spiral.

And it has stage directions like, everything goes wrong. That's a stage direction. Everything goes wrong. I can write whatever I like. It doesn't have to make sense. It's nonsense. Alex has to make it sense.

It's nonsense. Right. Weird spirals. Going more specific, Sentient8 from Reddit asks, what episodes are you most proud of? Um, a few. But for some reason, the one that sticks in my mind is actually tale of a field hospital there's nothing specific about that

episode that i'm super proud of but i really like the narrator and how i got to write him uh i was really proud of finding the book a tale of a field hospital because so little of it had to be changed to make it nicely creepy and it just dovetailed so well into everything else also it's one of the ones that i've been able to dive into the history in more than just a sort of uh set dressing sort of way yeah for me it's anything that's a punch to the gut i enjoy killing characters that people love um maybe the replacement of sasha by not sasha was a nice one because enough people didn't notice it. Yeah, I was always surprised. I mean, I guess because it's hard not to notice

piling four duvets on top of Lottie and just having her scream so that it didn't alert the neighbours at midnight. Yeah. Circus Mask via Reddit. Are there any episodes that you weren't happy with in terms of writing or story? I mean, yes, but I'm 100% not going to tell anyone which ones they were

because then they'll never be able to listen to them without being like, yeah, I see it. I will, however, say that it definitely won't be the ones you're thinking of. So, follow-up from FxKtn, or F-X-K-T-N, I still don't know which pronunciation via Reddit, which has been the hardest episode to write and why? which pronunciation via Reddit, which has been the hardest episode to write and why?

I would say that that would be number 95, Absent Without Leave, and I have no idea why. Actually, I remember. We did run into issues with that one. I have no idea why that one was so hard for me to write. Like, it wasn't emotionally. It wasn't mentally. I knew what was going to happen.

It just was one of those ones where I was sat at the computer and every word felt like pulling out a tooth it was the first case of block i think i've ever really seen come up in um years so yeah um that was the hardest zero idea why uh humid nebula via reddit what is one aspect event or nuance that you regret putting out? I mean, names. I'm really bad with all the names. I'm so bad with name hygiene. No, I'll tell you what it is. It is naming the main character after myself. It is not bothering when Alex went, hey, rather than making this an anthology series with you as the host, why don't we make it a long form meta plot thing

where the archivist is the main character? And I said, yes yes rather than yes in which case we better not have my name being the name of the main character i believe i remember this conversation being are you sure you want your name to be the main character and you were like yeah i'm sure it's fine like what what difference is it going to make uh from pci underscore compliance via reddit how do you write groups of episodes where the same events are viewed from different standpoints? I generally figure out the core of what that setting or event is.

Like, I know the deal with the Daedalus space station. I know the deal with Hilltop Road. Then I will write a story within that. And then when it comes to writing the next one, I'll think, well, what aspects of this haven't I covered yet? And then i will usually have a read or a listen through the last one to make sure that i'm getting all the details linked up right and i'll be like oh yeah i threw

myself that little hook when we did the first episode i'll take that and i'll wind it into this other episode and gradually just build up the whole picture and i remember we did bake into daedalus we were like yeah we will return to this yeah let's leave this for that yeah exactly we were like three and then we were like okay and then yeah we can have one in season three one in season four yeah yeah uh sort of linked adverse inference via reddit do you feel like you still have plenty ideas for statements is there any media you consume to stay inspired? The media I consume to stay inspired is generally anyone I talk to, because any time they mention anything that could be in any way construed spookily, I will ask them to stop and then I will write it down on a tablet or a bit of paper or the back of my hand and I will add it to my extremely long list

of potential spooky episode ideas. I enjoy playing the what-if subject but spooky game where you'll say 50 as a joke and then one of them he'll go, ooh, actually. Yeah, no, I can do something like that. Also, in terms of media I consume to stay inspired, basically anything but horror. Not knack via Reddit.

Which came first, the archivist and his journey or the Magnus Archives world? Exactly the same time. They were built up pretty much parallel. I'd agree with that. Scottums, again via Reddit. There seems to be very little swearing. Is that a conscious decision

or did it happen to work out that way? Why don't you answer that one, Johnny? So episode 14, piecemeal. The original cut of that, I remember I turned up to record that one and I started reading it out and about a paragraph in, Alex said, stop, there's lots of swearing in this one. And I said, yes, he's quite a sweary man, is this narrator. Didn't I then say, no, he's not?

Yeah, pretty much. And then Alex explained very, very gently to me about what the explicit tag was on iTunes and why it was a good idea if we could skirt around it. And I said, what about all the gore and the grotesque body horror? And Alex said, that'll be fine. And I said, what about the sexual stuff? I mean, we've already recorded episode six and that was some pretty horrific sexual horror. And he said, that'll be fine. And I said, is it literally just the swearing?

And Alex said, yes. Turns out the US market, especially for podcasts, has some very, very specific preferences preferences should we say yeah and it turns out that it's a lot easier to market sell and just generally make things for the u.s audience he does let me swear but i generally need to convince him in any given case so next questions from cuckoo for poco cuffs oh i got it out that's via reddit burke county got a reference near the end of episode 58, Trail Rations. They were very happy by that.

Yes. Is there any method that you use to choosing locations mentioned in the show? Right. What I will do is I will figure out the rough geographical area, like the country or sort of the area of the US, if it's set there. And then I will go to Google Maps and I will zoom in to a level that I think people will find creepy if they're there and it i will go to google maps and i will zoom into a level that i think people will find creepy if they're there and it gets referenced and they'll be like why is he referenced this

place specifically and there's no particular reason but i i really like being super specific deliberately to just slightly worry people question from dudling via reddit do you listen to music when writing do you have any songs that you use to get into the feel of particular powers um i do listen to music uh but not specific stuff that there are various sort of playlists of dark ambient uh sort of things that i will have on in the background or i actually find if i'm finding an episode particularly difficult just like intense rain soundtrack heavier than would be relaxing uh so it feels oppressive it's a pathetic fallacy yeah no absolutely i mean i i basically in my mind everything's significantly more dramatic

if i imagine it happening when it's raining very heavily i mean presumably before every writing session you start with something like they called me mad and then begin writing or something. Yes, obviously. So this one's a tough one. This is from Confectionary via Reddit. Right, right, right. What are Johnny and Alex's values when it comes to horror? As in, what should well-written horror fiction accomplish other than scaring people, obviously? To me, there are almost two sorts of horror. There's what I think of as escapist horror and what I think of as literary horror. Escapist horror is very practical in a lot of ways.

It is a way of catharsis. It is a way of catharsis. It's a way of indulging in fear and spooking yourself out in a controlled, safe way, allowing you to safely indulge in those slightly darker emotions and feelings. Which is one of the reasons that for Magnus, I think it's so important to take certain boundaries and treat certain subjects with a lot of respect and sensitivity. Because one of the key things here is you need to be able to trust that you can enjoy the horror. You need to be able to trust the writing and the performance that it's not going to suddenly cross lines. performance that it's not going to suddenly cross lines and what has previously been a very pleasing spooky catharsis suddenly becomes uh incredibly upsetting and of course i think there

is the other sort of horror and obviously it's not it's not a binary here it's very much um it's more of a spectrum it's very much on a spectrum. But what I think of more as literary horror, which is using the mechanisms of horror, the mechanisms of being spooky, being scary, to actually examine and come to terms with darker subject matter. Literary horror is just as thoughtful about how it engages with that sort of thing and to be honest i don't write literary horror i don't really feel like i have any place writing literary horror most of the most of the subjects that it tackles that it deals with well are things that i have no real experience of and that i would not be coming from a place where I'd feel comfortable exploring it because it's it's they're often not my stories to explore mine is going to be a lot more specific but I think a lot less profound let's say um I think that in all fiction you

should avoid I'm going to have to expand on this you should avoid being intellectually lazy and I think with horror more than any other genre and more than any other type of fiction, you must not be intellectually lazy. Now, to be perfectly clear, I'm not talking about using big, long words or writing it in a weird way that no one's ever seen. When I'm talking about intellectually lazy,

I'm talking about knowing that there's a better way of doing something and then taking the shortcut. It's stuff like, for horror, it's very easy to spot the uh the shortcut because what someone will do is they will write a taboo and then look at the taboo and go i broke a taboo horror and it's not it is a shortcut because you aren't putting the work in to really engage with stuff and try and pick out the bits that are interesting you are just taking something wholesale and slapping it out there and that the horror bizarrely is the thing that encourages people to take those shortcuts most yeah um especially things like body horror actually

that's the one where most often yeah you're heading into like horrible like torture porn kind of sub genres and stuff and actually it doesn't need to be that and it's just about putting the work in and not just taking the quick easy low-hanging fruit every time when we talk about being intellectually lazy we 100 are not talking about being original no no no no weirdly horror is actually one of the genres where I feel like you thinking about it in terms of originality is actually missing a lot of the point. There's only so many spooky things that you can write. It's all to do with the rhythm and the pacing and making sure that you're getting the right beats in the right place to evoke the emotions the same way that, you know, you need to evoke the right notes from an instrument. Asterix, how are the editors doing right now?

It must be hard having had all, with all the recent stuff. They're fine. They've been having some lovely weeks. They're safe and alive. Do not look for them. How do we get in the zone of giving the exact emotion needed for a piece, especially in recent episodes? I'm going to give the unsesexy uncreative answer here which is honestly 90 of the decisions are

based entirely on logistics it is i mean obviously that there are creative decisions in terms of like you know oh the buried should be bassy and and uh nikola rossanov if anyone's listening out for it has like the sound of like needle scratches on lps and stuff but in a lot of it a lot of the decisions are less about mood than about okay johnny has requested thousands of people screaming and this and this and this and this that's not going to be possible so easy to write it in so what i do is i write down what it is in order that i can get away with and then i'll actually experiment and uh certainly when it comes to the soundscaping this is true for the music i have to hand all credit to brock he's been doing a lot of the music this season and he's frankly better at it than i am uh he's getting very very good at replicating mood with music in a way that i'm less skilled at

when it comes to the soundscaping side a lot of it is just you keep trying permutations until something works which means i also have false soundscapes that we've never used because when you laid them up they didn't work yeah sumo bumo by a discord how do we achieve the convincing sounds of violence so there are there are three tips that i will give i'm not going to go into the specifics of it it will take hours. Tip number one, get your performers to physically act out stuff in the studio. I don't mean fully, but generally speaking, not on each other, but on themselves. I get them to hold their sort of shoulders, hold their own shoulders. Alex, what are you doing? There you go. So effectively, everyone holds their own shirts and then you sort of wiggle. That's the best

way I can describe wiggle iniggle in the correct way. Literally right now, what I'm doing is just holding my lapels. Oh, and I mean, bumping the table. Because that wasn't a controlled or safe way to do it. Don't follow in our footsteps, kids. So step two, once you've done that, is you want to find all of the correct sound effects. Do not pick sound effects that are accurate. Pick sound effects that sound right.

Melons are your friends. Melons punch well, they smash well, they grind well, they're great. And the last step is when it comes to things, layer it up. Too many people spend hours and hours and hours and hours and hours trying to get the perfect foley, you know, hitting a melon in 50 different ways to find the right one. Nine times out of 10, just layer three different sounds together and you will get it sounding right.

As the sort of bonus tip for everyone, bass. If you want something to sound heavy and to sound like it hurt, use more bass, less treble. Okay, which was our favourite episode or scene to record this season? I mean, I'd love to answer you, Alex, but...

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. That was a fun episode where Johnny... You produce a ridiculous amount of saliva. Johnny was right to believe that the only way he could possibly record being bound and gagged is doing entire recordings. You literally just shove as much of your fist into your mouth as you can and then try to speak. And it's not a pleasant thing to do,

but there's a certain certain it's just funny it's it's a weird one um i'd say probably my favorite from this season i did actually enjoy bizarrely recording with lori for martin's uh interview in episode 100. To be clear, 100 is actually my least favourite to record. I'm very sorry about that. I mean, no, I'm not. I thought it came out very well. But that specific scene was just me and Lowry getting into a room. I'm an improviser, she was an improviser.

We just hit record, did it, and then stopped and just tried to make each other corp. So that was actually quite pleasant. But with the exception of that scene it was a nightmare okay from steve bread via reddit all of the statements in 100 are they or are they not truly supernatural yes uh they fall 100 under the standard rule you will only hear recordings about statements that are legitimately supernatural because otherwise it's not fair to all the red string brigade correct okay the dialogue was largely improvised what was the

process behind that how much freedom did the actors have well okay so what i did was i wrote about a paragraph uh that was what had actually happened then i wrote a bunch of bullet points about the character giving the statement about what they might get sidetracked on what their sort of particular what the bits that they couldn't get past were and just generally how they were a nightmare to try and get a statement out of and then i let them go and then once we got that i sat down with the actors discussed it briefly and then unfortunately because of the nature of the show it's very difficult to improvise well to it. So what ended up happening is we would do a recording,

we would then stop, evaluate, do a recording again, stop, evaluate, do a recording again. For some of them, we went as far as like eight repeated recordings. Normally with improv, you just run the thing and let it go. But because Magnus is very specific and it's very easy to go off on a tangent when you're improvising and say something that's non-canonical or couldn't work. So what it's more like is

we'd get the first two minutes and be like, that's a nice two minutes. And then we'd focus on the next two minutes. That's another nice two minutes and keep doing that. But yeah, that was a strange one. Yeah, I think it came out very well, but it's not a method

that I would want to use again. Certainly not for this show. What made us decide on a more lighthearted episode? It's episode 100, isn't it? it i mean it's what you do like episode 100 has got to be a change of pace uh and it's got to be nicely self-referential uh it's got to be just a little bit of a victory lap because you've made it to 100 episodes we did discuss it well in advance as well what we wanted 100 yeah and to And to be fair, when we were planning season 3

we were like, oh, this is a really good way to answer everyone who's like, oh, I mean, does the magic... Everyone's very eloquent. Does the magic power also make them really eloquent storytellers? Yes. Yes, it does. Okay.

Next question's from Carnationily2Rose by Reddit. For 119, that had to have been brutal with your parents berating your alter ego so. Was it difficult to hear your parents reading those lines at you? Not even a little bit, it was hilarious. It was really funny. I've got a weird but a very good relationship with my parents. By this point in season three, right at the beginning of season one,

there were quite a lot of elements of the archivist that I saw within myself, and he was a little bit of a fictionalised version of me for maybe the first 20 episodes, but as soon as plot actually starts happening, he very quickly went on a strong right on a strong right angle character wise you're less of a hot garbage fire oh yeah no i'm i'm uh i like to think my decisions are less overtly horrific in many ways it was quite cathartic for me uh because it allowed me to uh have

these two authoritative figures within the universe just eviscerate the idiot that shares my name. Apathoras via Reddit, do you ever have any issues coming up with names to use in character statements rather than, you know, reusing everyone you know as a character? Obviously I do. Obviously I do. Why would you ask that question? I mean, he's never had the name Alex in the Mindless Archives at any point. Just saying, not once.

I'm saving it. You know what I'm going to do when I finally have an Alex. Terrible, this. Penultimate episode of season five when you can't cancel anything. Let's address the elephant in the room. This has been asked by a bunch of people, but especially Carnation, Lolita Rose and others. Is Tim actually dead dead or just mostly dead he is dead tim is dead so dead however uh while we make a point not to bring people back from the dead in uh magnus i know

it sometimes feels like that but we are very careful to never actually resurrect anyone we're very happy to play fast and loose with what might have happened to somebody pre-death and we're not shy about having dead people talking in various ways. We're very keen to keep death meaningful.

It's too important to horror. Exactly. And so why obviously, I mean, Gertrude's been dead the entire time. So we've heard plenty from her. So I'm not going to make any blanket statements that you'll never hear Tim's voice again. But Timothy Stoker is dead. Yes. Plunderduck and Liquid Mirrors via Discord and Reddit respectively ask,

Elias, are we going to get more of him? Are we going to get more backstory of him? How did he turn from a pothead to a high priest of the Watcher? No, you're not. I mean, he's in prison now, so that's him done for the series. I don't think we'll be seeing him again. Really satisfying arc. Yeah, I feel like he developed as a character and then we wrote him out elegantly. Although I think he overstayed his welcome from about season two onwards.

Yeah, realistically. Yes, obviously we will be diving more into what the deal is with Elias. Okay, Georgie by Dee Astley. Will we hear more from Georgie and especially her anti-fear power? That's not the phrasing of the original question. I'm just passing. Yes, we will be hearing more from Georgie. 71penguins via Reddit asks, what about Agnes?

What about Agnes? What a great question. What about Agnes? That's what I want to know is that your answer um i mean again yes we will be getting more from agnes from cats using coconuts via reddit what about michael is michael just helen now and that's the end of michael in the i mean in the same way that tim is dead michael is helen, we've got a lot of questions actually about this, so I've lumped them together. The other institutions suite.

Oh, right, yes. So Mark Sutton via Facebook and others. The Usher Institute, what's the deal? What can you tell us about them? Is there a chance that we'll see their people in future episodes? Right, the Usher Foundation is the American sister institution to the Magnus Institute. And they are similar, but different.

They will almost certainly not appear in the main story in any significant way. From a writing point of view, I want the Magnus archives to be a world as well as a story. And I'm always acutely aware that the more everything mentioned is super significant and everything mentioned ties into everything else the more it becomes a locked down story and the less it becomes an open world so i'm always very keen to add in just little things that maybe will you'll you'll never hear about again but they uh they fleshed out and they give jumping off points for a wider world that anyone wants to explore in. So this one's from Polyphonic via Discord.

Sure. Are the tapes or other recording devices that are able to hold statements purely neutral? Or is there a capacity for an entity to maybe enlist them to their aid like they can with humans? They are not neutral. Next question. Hobbs via discord in mag 87 the uncanny valley we learned that gertrude prevented the desolations ritual what are the deets uh can we know what the ritual was what it was called what it might have looked like etc etc you 100 can know those things next question i i mean wait is is the answer to that okay so historic references oh okay so

from self-referential name via reddit liquid mirrors about reddit and others as an example we got wolfgang von kempelen and library of alexandria and so on and so on um what other historical figures organizations and events are associated or puppeted by some power is there anything that you can go into oh that's a very good question uh and like the answer is yes and i know one or two of them but if i already know them it's because they're going to be coming up in a later story yeah it's one of those you can't actually say anything yeah i mean there's so much that i'll be like oh maybe i should I should do something with this historical event. Or what's the deal with, like, I mean, the whole Wolfgang von Kempelen thing came with me going like, oh, I haven't done much with automata yet. Yeah.

What's the deal with historical automata? And then I looked in and I was like, oh, cool. So, yeah, the Mechanical Turk, that's interesting. Oh, I can use that. And who was he built by? Wolfgang von Kempelen. And then I read Kempelen's biography and I was like, yeah, what? That's proper spooky.

What? He made a speaking machine that just goes. And and like it's so often that like if you actually just dive deep enough into a bit of history you'll be like that's weirdly spooky um so the the short answer is yes they'll they'll almost certainly have been quite a few and i'll be diving into as many of them as i can find and have time for uh because honestly that a lot of that history stuff is it's certainly one of my favorite bits of the writing for marimo discord does the archivist taking on the persona of people's statements revitalise him,

or does the archivist just have a secret pastime of putting on different personalities really well? Is John a secret impressionist? We, I mean, law-wise, the first one, though we came to the conclusion very early in recording season one that the archivist is secretly a bit of a drama queen yeah really likes like it's it's 90 percent a hostile malevolent uh alien force uh taking him over it was given but i mean fundamentally

he doesn't not like getting into a statement and really giving it a bit of the... Like, he probably did some Amdram. I bet he was insufferable while he was doing it. Oh, yeah. OK, there's questions from Duckpond via Discord. Does Tim have any hobbies unrelated to revenge? Not anymore, no. No.

Did Tim have any hobbies unrelated to revenge not anymore no no uh did tim have any hobbies unrelated i always thought of tim as one of those people who like he's very social uh but uh rather than having like a lot of hobbies in his downtime he would go on um big holidays like adventure holidays uh like he probably does like did did uh some rock climbing see i always picture him kayaking yeah kayaking yes i always hunt him down as he doesn't do it all the time no but he makes a point of his his main holiday yeah yeah for the year is always kayaking i don't know why i i think of it less specifically as kayaking like he's not gonna he's not gonna say no to like you know a bit of scuba or uh or that sort of thing but uh but yeah like i think uh for most of his time he would uh just general socializing uh relaxing i think he

probably i think he probably played a reasonable amount of like console computer games i couldn't judge that maybe he was too busy kayaking in my brain but uh but yeah like active social uh adventure holidays dead oh that's brutal so this next one's from sazandorable via discord sure what cat is the inspiration for the admiral what's their name and how precious are they uh okay so the the Admiral is an amalgamation of all the cats in my life. I have a real fondness for pets with like appellations or ranks. What are the names of your cats, John? I have two cats, one of which is Sir Pouncelot. Yes, that is the reference.

And one of which is the Ambassador. Ambassador Cat. It should be noted that Cat is his name and he is an ambassador. He is not Ambassador Cat in the sense of, you know, ambassador to all cats. He is an ambassador, his name is Cat, and he happens to be a cat. From Seraphim755 by Reddit. How do you feel about fan-made podcasts riffing off the Magnus archives? For instance, a RedString podcast where fans discuss episodes and the connections between them,

For instance, a red string podcast where fans discuss episodes and the connections between them, or a fan-based non-canonical podcast dealing with statements given to the Usher Foundation. Very flattered. Probably a little bit too intimidated to actually listen. So now the boring-y, business-y, not nice part hat on. The licensing is Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial share, like 4.0 international license, which means that anywhere in the world you can make derivative products as long as you do not claim that we gave permission you do not make money off it and um you reference the original source material as much as possible basically i'd have to say that of the two the usher foundation one carries a little more complications because of things to do like uh like trademarking and branding and so on next

questions from satanist goblin via reddit what is your favorite podcast not from rusty quill i binge podcasts uh quite a lot so for me the answer is almost always going to be a different my my favorite favorite podcast at the moment and i'm very happy i can give them a shout out because they gave us a really nice shout out on their last episode is apocrypals oh yeah you've mentioned them before i have uh they are they're sort of a secular bible studies podcast by two comics writers and it sounds really dry but it's incredibly interesting and really really funny uh because you know i thought i knew the bible quite well turns out i basically didn't know it at all uh and it is really interesting and really weird uh even from a like a non-religious point of view just as like

a foundational text of a lot of society it's fascinating and they are very very informative and very very funny so um it's benito sereno and chris sims and they are awesome. I think they're probably listening, so go guys! Aside from that, Pseudopod is always good. Knifepoint on Atari is always good. I've been going through the back catalogue of Shut Up and Sit Down recently because I'm in a real board game phase at the moment. So from my perspective, I listen to a lot of audio drama, shocker. I am often reticent to recommend audio drama,

like pick favour favorites and stuff yeah because it's a it's it's a dangerous game because it makes people it makes it sound like you're saying some are better than others that said i would say i recently finished and really enjoyed wolf 359 oh yeah done like as a personal taste thing, I enjoyed it, had good fun with it. In terms of things that aren't audio drama, so I'm quite peculiar in that my tastes outside of audio drama are really, really generic. Oh yeah, you're always recommending me. I like stuff you should know. Oh yeah.

History of Rome, great podcast. To be fair, it's good for me because sometimes you'll be like, oh, here's an interesting episode on something that could be very easily made spooky. And I'll listen to it and be like, yes, I can very easily make that spooky. So a nice, adorably naive question here from Liquid Mirrors via Reddit. If Rusty Quill as an organisation served a power, which would it be? I think the web. Okay, I think that was fairly conclusive.

I couldn't disagree. Wicked, I think the web. Okay. I think that was fairly conclusive. I couldn't disagree. Wicked. I think that's everything apart from thanks for listening as always. Thank you. Thanks for another season. I think this is probably going to be quite a chunky one.

Almost certainly we will have a reduced version coming out for public so that no one has to listen to us ramble on for ages. But if you happen to enjoy us rambling on for ages there will be a full version of this on the Patreon.

Speaking of which big thanks to all of our patrons who have basically been funding our way through this yeah this season would not have happened without you season one and two we got by we sort of we shouldered a lot season three would not have happened categorically so thank you so much thanks to everyone who's been reviewing thanks to everyone who has been sharing it's weird to say but everyone in the fan community has been putting in so much work on our behalf so thank you yeah thanks to uh an arrangement with third parties we're now available on spotify hey i didn't know that you hadn't told me that i hadn't told you this is the first that you and basically everyone in the company knows right we uh get to be making new shows as well which are going to be coming in the new year and again it's all thanks to everyone who's been you know leaving reviews and taking getting involved with the patron or

just telling people what we do if you are wanting to engage with the fan community over the break uh as as always we have the forums we have reddit we have um facebook we have twitter we are also running a discord which is specific to us so we have our own server if you go on to uh rustyquill.com you will find links to all of the above thanks again to everyone we do really really appreciate it and we are looking forward to season four uh we will have trailers on the way as soon as we can get them out yes but uh thanks from me thanks from involved, and we hope you keep listening and hope you enjoy it. And most of all,

thanks to you. Oh, yeah, that's there. Not these other losers. You. is attribution non-commercial sharealike 4.0 international license. For more information, visit RustyQuill.com, tweet us at TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook, or email us at mail at RustyQuill.com. Thanks for listening.

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