The Magnus Archives, produced by the Rusty Quill Network, is a long-running horror fiction podcast that follows archivists and investigators at the occult Magnus Institute. For 200 years, the institute has been collecting first hand accounts of unexplainable encounters with dark forces that lurk in the shadows. Each week, listeners follow the esoteric escapades of Head Archivist Jonathan Sims and his litany of assistants as they uncover the hidden secrets of London’s supernatural underbelly. Now you can dive into the archives yourself, solving one-off cases or diving into the truths hidden deep in the archives — and as the institute warns, when you look into the archives, the archives look back.
The tabletop game uses the Cypher System, a rules-light game engine known for its versatility, intuitive play, and character-focused mechanics. To update it for the world of The Magnus Archives, Monte Cook Games has made some minor tweaks to the system, including bespoke fear and stress mechanics, a necessary element for a world littered with vampires, cursed objects, and eldritch entities beyond human comprehension. The most notable addition involves a collaborative process for creating witness statements from laypeople who’ve unwittingly and unfortunately stumbled into this occult reality, offering a shared workload between game master and player to get the whole group invested before the story even begins.
Eager archivists can pick up The Magnus Archives RPG on the Monte Cook Games website. The physical edition is $74.99, with the digital edition available for $24.99. A PDF version of the game is also available for the same price on DriveThruRPG, where it has already reached Copper Best Seller status.
