The Magnus Archives - RQ Network Feed Drop – WOE.BEGONE | Ep 1: Participant Observation

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

This month we are featuring a feed drop of one of many brilliant podcasts on the RQ Network: WOE.BEGONE.  WOE.BEGONE is a weekly sci-fi horror audiodrama series about the nature of power and the implications of linear time and is created by the amazing Dylan Griggs, who also makes The Diary of Aliza Shultz Podcast.  This first episode of WOE.BEGONE, “Participant Observation,” follows Mike Walters, a man who discovers a mysterious and violent online game that begins to affect his real life.  The series continues with over 150 episodes, following Mike as his exploration of an alternate reality game with real-life consequences morphs into a search for the technology that makes the game possible.  WOE.BEGONE is written and performed by Dylan Griggs, introduction and outro by Anusia Battersby. Listen to WOE.BEGONE on The Rusty Quill website, on Acast, or listen wherever you get your podcasts, or to learn more about the world of WOE.BEGONE check out its official website.  Content warnings:Conspiracy Grief and loss Altered RealityFor ad-free episodes, bonus content and more, join members.rustyquill.com or our Patreon.Pre-order FROM THE LIBRARY OF JURGEN LEITNER, a Magnus novel releasing October 27th: rustyquill.com/novelJoin our CHARITY LIVESTREAM on Friday 21st August at from 16:00 BST at twitch.tv/rusty_quill Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone, Kareem here. And today I want to tell you about Rusty Quill's upcoming charity live stream. On August 21st, we'll be streaming from 4pm BST to raise money for the Albert Kennedy Trust, who provides support to LGBTQ plus youths facing or experiencing homelessness. Alex and Johnny will be joined by a whole host of guests during the stream, and we are excited to announce that this will include Push the Roll with Ross Bryant for a live improvised game of Callo Cthulu. Plus the Pandemonium Institute will be running a special game of Blood on the Clock Tower.

These segments will have lots of opportunities for you to directly affect gameplay with your donation. and cause chaos for the players. Join us at Twitch.tv slash Rusty underscore Quill on Friday the 21st of August and help us support this fantastic charity. Thanks for listening. Hi everyone, it's Anusha here, voice of Gwen in the Magnus Protocol.

Today, we are bringing you the first episode from one of the amazing podcasts on the RQ Network. The show is called Woe Be Gone and is created by the incredible Dylan Griggs who also makes the Diary of Eliza Schultz podcast. Woe Be Gone is a weekly sci-fi horror audio drama series about the nature of power and the implications of linear time.

Episode 1, participant observation, follows Mike Walters, a man who discovers a mysterious and violent online game that begins to affect his real life. You can listen to more of this amazing series with over 150 episodes, following Mike as his exploration of an alternate reality game with real-life consequences, morphs into a search for the technology

that makes the game possible. Search for Woe Be Gone, spelled W. O-E, period, B-E-G-O-N-E, wherever you listen to your podcasts. By clicking the link in the show notes below, or by visiting rusticwill.com or Wobagonpodpod.com for more information. Have fun and enjoy the episode. My first mistake was thinking that I was a journalist, that I was simply observing a phenomenon from a safe distance, and that I wasn't going to get involved, like a biologist, watching the lion take down the gazelle and letting nature take its course.

I don't know why. I thought that I, of all, people, would be able to be party to this without becoming a participant. Hubris, maybe. It wouldn't be the first time that hubris has been my undoing. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a professional. I'm a shitty podcaster.

At best, a hubristic, shitty podcaster. So I guess the least I can do is that, a shitty podcast. If you're hearing this, That's what I decided to do. I'm out here, and strangest of all, I'm in the lead. My name is Mike Walters, and I'm going to tell you everything I've figured out about the game Wobagon. I'll cut the shit.

If you found this podcast, it's because you googled what is Wobagon, and after all of the dictionary definitions of the word Wobagon, you probably saw some cryptic nonsense from someone trying to look cool online, and you're hoping that this podcast isn't just more of that. Wolbegon is mysterious, and I'm not here to just tell you that over and over again. I'm here to tell you what I've dug up these past few weeks. And maybe that'll make me look cool online. I don't know. Wobagon is a competitive game with a secret rule set. The complete secrecy of the game, its rules, how many people are playing, and who they are,

is enforced by the group of black cats that run the whole thing. Anyone attempting to communicate about the game to people who are not already playing the game are immediately met with extreme grief online. The posts that I found that led me to Wobagon has been gone for a month now. I haven't met the guy that made it, I don't think, but I'm sure that whatever headache the Game Runner set up for him was enough to get him to take it down. He should have seen it coming.

He posted it on one of the major subreddits. It was going to get attention. I know the same thing will happen to me, but I'm pretty secure, and I keep a pretty low profile online, so there isn't that much that they can really do. do to me. From what I can tell, they haven't done anything too heinous, just spam and targeted harassment. No one's ended up dead in a gutter or anything like that, as far as I can tell. Maybe being so far

in the lead will grant me some leniency, unlikely but possible. I didn't want to, quote-unquote, play the game, so much as I wanted to be able to see the game being played, and there was no way to do that without some auspices of actually playing along, so I read the instructions from the Reddit post and signed up. I wanted to play just enough that I knew what the rules were, who the players were, and what the end state looks like. I surely did not intend to play to win. The first thing you do if you want to play Wobegon is go to an internationalized URL link. That just means that the URL was registered with characters that don't exist in the English language, like Chinese characters, for example. I don't know what language the original URL was

in, but it wasn't ASCy, so the link just looks like gibberish. It wasn't dark web or onion browser stuff though, it was all Surface Web. If you aren't on a VPN and incognito mode in your browser, the website kicks you. The webpage is just a black screen with a prompt that reads phone number in block letters and a submit form. I've heard that if you aren't using a VOIP burner number, it won't work, but that's what I was doing anyway. No way these guys are going to get my real phone number. I was excited because it was already feeling more like a real game than an ARG where you watch YouTube videos and solve a Polybius Square or some other easy cipher. I put my number in and went to bed. I woke up to 21 text messages. It was very annoying, actually. There were 20 text

messages that were spam characters up to the character limit. In the center of these spam messages was the first game. Call up your last ex-boyfriend in the middle of the night. If he answers, hang up and call again until you get the voicemail. Tell him about the worst thing he ever did to you. Bring up every upsetting detail. Tell him that you do not forgive him. Send us the MP3, signed w.bg. I knew that I was in for some edgy shit because of the way that the game was presented to me, but I really didn't want to do this. I can't say that I was surprised, but I did consider whether or not it was worth it. I'm not a good actor. There's no way I could fake this sort of conversation convincingly. It would have to be real. I don't know. I don't know.

how he figured out I have an ex-boyfriend, maybe a lucky cold read, or some black hat hackery nonsense. I don't know how they would find anything about me based on what I gave to them. They weren't asking for like a behind seven proxies dark web amount of security to participate, but I still didn't think I gave them that much. All of the speculation is me stalling, of course. I made the call and I don't really want to talk about it, but this is the podcast where I talk about it. I can't play it for you though. for reasons I'll have to explain when it happens. To say that this was upsetting would be a ludicrous understatement.

I know that I'll be sharing some deeply personal things about myself in the process of discussing Wobagon, but I can at least meet it out so I don't have a complete meltdown in the middle of the first episode. I called it 11.30 at night. That's the middle of the night for me. I'm old. Fuck you. John had probably just gone to bed. I hadn't talked to him in about two years.

We didn't have a terrible breakup or anything. it was just a normal amount of awful. But we didn't have all that much in common. That was sort of the problem. Around Ring 3, I had an intense urge to back out, but I stayed on the line. I was mortified at the thought that he would pick up and I would have to try this all over again.

Thankfully, he didn't answer, and I got his machine. It was the same voicemail message that he had when we were together. My heart was in my throat. I hit record on the phone recording app. The voicemail beeped, and I started talking. About a year into our relationship, my lifelong best friend died unexpectedly. The news of this happening trickled out slowly and torturously over the course of the day, while friends and family were contacting each other to figure out what was going on.

John was on his way to a hockey game with some friends when I first got when that something had happened, but nothing was confirmed yet. I hate hockey, but John loved it, and he would often go to games with his friends, and I would sit at home and screw around with the computer. I called and told him what I thought was going on. He was comforting, concerned even, but he said that he was almost at the arena and he'd be home in a few hours. Stunned, I just said, okay, I didn't even put up a fight. I spent those few hours panicking, texting, calling friends, refreshing social media feeds, doom scrolling,

trying to figure out what was going on. Alone. I had received confirmation of the bad news by the time John had come home. a few hours later, I was in a state. We got into the worst fight that I can imagine getting into. I've never been that worked up before or since. It did stop short of being a fist fight, though. It got heated. My body literally felt red, hot. We relitigated old arguments that had been peacefully put to bed months ago. I described these relitigations on the voicemail message that itself was a re-litigation of this horrible day. I screamed until I was hoarse.

John did too. I was so resentful of him for not coming home. I don't think he had time or context to process how serious the circumstances were when I called him on the way to the hockey match. I felt terrible for him now, but I didn't think I was allowed to tell him that. It all spilled out of me like a cup that had been fully inverted, all water moving in unison to make a forceful slap on the ground. It had clearly been pent up inside of me still. in a small corner that I only thought to look at in the lowest parts of my life. And then I told him that I didn't forgive him. After I hung up, I crouched in front of my closet and just sat there.

It's where I had ended up pacing to while I was spilling my guts out to John. I just didn't know what else to do, but sit there. My brain felt like there was a separator between it and the rest of my body. I think this is probably what depersonalization is, but I don't really have the life experience to say for sure. Some of this freak out was captured by my phone call recording app, which I forgot to turn off immediately after the call. I hated myself.

For bringing all of this back into John's world in the middle of the night, for wanting to know about Wobagon badly enough to do that to myself and to him, for not having let go of these negative emotions about something that happened such a long time ago, for every other, ugly, resentful story inside of me. that was just like that one. I ended up laying on the carpet and crying for a while.

I had made a horrible mistake. But, fuck it. I picked up my phone, and I texted the audio file to the Wobagon Game Runners. I had done it, so I might as well claim the prize that I was doing it for,

whatever that was going to be. Maybe nothing. Maybe blackmail? I mean, I don't think it's all a big blackmail scam, and I don't see how Mike Walters is really sad about his friend dying, is good blackmail material in the first place. They didn't text back. I wasn't really expecting them to. I assumed that I would hear from them whenever it was time for me to play the next part of the game. I took a melatonin and went to bed. I woke up the next day actually

feeling relatively refreshed. Even though I didn't get to talk to John, I did get to emotionally reckon with something that had been bothering me for a long time. It felt good to be on the other side of that. I got up earlier than usual and had a little bit more pep in my step while I was making breakfast for myself alone in my apartment. It wasn't until I was in the middle of frying some eggs and bacon fat that the effect of Wobagon actually hit me. None of that stuff happened. None of it. My friend who died is alive and living in Vancouver. He had to move for work. John and I never had that fight. We broke up at the same time as we had before, but this fight was not a factor in it at all because it never happened. That anxious day of panicking and figuring out what happened

never happened. None of it. The recording that I sent to Wobagon was gone. The voicemail never happened. I never called John. I never left the voicemail. I never recorded the voicemail. And I never texted that recording to Wobagon. To be clear, all of this had once happened and now none of that stuff had ever happened, which isn't clear at all. It all just changed. The world is different than it was before I sent that text message. All of these claims require an astronomical amount of proof to overcome anyone who is rightly skeptical, and, as you can guess, it is definitionally impossible to prove that what I'm saying is true. It's easy to fabricate, and improbable to have actually happened, maybe physically impossible, but I know that it happened. I called my best

best friend and we talked, same as it ever was. I choked up and he awkwardly brushed past it because he is as conflict avoidant as I am, same as it ever was. I don't know how it happened. I'm hoping that as I inch closer to winning Wobagon, that the answer will be more clear. I don't know what really happened. Am I in a simulation? An alternate universe, a time travel story, my character in a book, I honestly do not know, and all of it sounds impossible. I can assure you that not every life alteration that will happen to me over the course of Woebegone will be a good one. This is just the first of many games that I have played leading me to where I am now. But if the ending of the first game isn't a happy one, how do you get them to keep playing?

And I'm terrified that if I lose, that everything from that voicemail were returned to my lived experiences. This has been Woebegone. Next time, a new game, a mysterious contact, and a rekindled past. Thanks for playing. To listen to more of Wobegon, spelled W-O-E-P-E-E-G-O-O-E-P-E-G-O-N-E, and to check out their other content, please search for Wobegon wherever you get your podcasts,

or click the link in the description of this episode, and, as always, you can visit RustyQuil.com or Woebegonpod.com for more information. You can find the creator behind Woebegon on Twitter at WobegonPod, or on their website, www.wobeconpod.com. That's W-O-E-B-E-G-O-N-E-P-O-D dot com. Thanks for listening. Hi, Alex here,

founder and CEO of Rusty Quill Limited. In case you haven't heard, there is now a Magnus Archives novel. The Library of Juergen Lightner is set in the world of the Magnus Archives and written by Nebula Award-winning author, Premi Muhammad, with our very own Jonathan Sims.

The story follows Hugh, a university dropout, desperate to find somewhere to belong, and his new job at an esoteric library. The books he must investigate for the enigmatic Juergen Leitner are not normal, because the library is not a vault, sealed and silent, but a hive, alive, buzzing, and ready to sting. The Library of Jürgen Leitner releases October 27th, 2026,

but you can pre-order it right now in the US and UK from your local bookshop, or by using the link in the episode description. If you live outside of the UK or US, you may be able to make an international order for this first publication, but it depends on individual retailers shipping policies.