Greenland, 986 CE. Erik the Red has just established the first Norse settlement at Brattahlid, and comedian Ashley Haden has been living among the colonists for three months. The problem? A prominent farmer named Thorvald has accused him of stealing two sheep he never touched, and a public assembly called the Thing is happening at dawn. If found guilty, he owes compensation he can't pay, which means outlawry in the middle of a Greenlandic winter.

Ashley's approach to Viking justice: invoke Odin, challenge his accuser to trial by combat, and open with a string of sheep-related insults so offensive that even the Game Master pauses. His knowledge of Norse mythology is suspiciously detailed, his combat instincts are disturbingly practical, and his long-term strategy involves hunting dedications to Freyja, political alliances with Erik the Red, and a patience for revenge that the AI clearly wasn't expecting.

The real Norse settlement of Greenland was a branding exercise. Erik the Red named it "Greenland" to attract settlers to a frozen island where winter darkness lasted twenty hours a day, farming was barely viable, and disputes were settled by public assembly under open sky. Survival required community, reputation, and knowing whose favour to court. Ashley brings all three, plus a moral code that draws the line at torture but not at snare traps.

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.

Era: Medieval | 986 CE | Qassiarsuk, Greenland

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Instagram @ahpoliticalbreakdown

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ashleyhaden.co.uk

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Alexandria, 48 BCE. Caesar's forces are closing in, fires are spreading through the harbour, and the greatest collection of knowledge the ancient world has ever assembled is about to go up in smoke. Laura Lexx and Ron from the Lexx Education podcast have been sent back to save it. They run an education podcast. They know this history. It helps them not one bit.

The mission is the Alexandrian Rescue: get the scrolls out before Caesar's siege burns the library to the ground. Laura and Ron's strategy involves what they call "hi-piz" (don't ask), urine-based camouflage (really don't ask), and a hot dog that the Game Master flatly denies exists in 48 BCE. The Game Master this week is the most brutal yet, and their brand of scientific whimsy is meeting ancient warfare with the kind of results that make the AI question whether they read the mission brief at all.

The Great Library of Alexandria was the intellectual jewel of the ancient world, a centre of scholarship that housed works from across the Mediterranean. Caesar's siege in 48 BCE caused fires that damaged or destroyed parts of the collection, one of history's most mourned losses. Laura and Ron can explain the historical significance in detail. They can tell you about Alexander's founding of the city and the Ptolemaic dynasty's patronage of scholarship. Sometimes knowing the history just means you can narrate your own failure more accurately.

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.

Era: Ancient | 48 BCE | Alexandria, Egypt

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Follow Laura and Ron's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com

Laura Lexx: IG @lexxlaura | X @lauralexx | lauralexx.co.uk

Ron Lexx: IG @lexxeducation | X @lexxeducation | lexxeducation.podbean.com

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Tikal, 741 CE. One of the most powerful Maya city-states at the height of the Late Classic period. Towering pyramids, elaborate blood rituals, and a head priest who has the king's ear and absolutely no interest in hearing about an upcoming solar eclipse from some random time traveller. Comedian Bilal Zafar has three days to navigate this. His toolkit: creativity, self-declared ruthlessness, and roundhouse kicks.

Bilal's mission is to warn the king about an imminent solar eclipse that the head priest has flatly denied will happen. Contradicting the priest means being accused of spreading fear and false prophecy, which in Maya culture is a fast track to becoming a human sacrifice. Bilal's response to learning the priest will have him killed: "Look, are you with me or against me? Because I can be very violent." His negotiation strategy involves clothing swaps with ceremonial priests and the kind of diplomacy that makes everyone present wonder if he's been at the suppositories. The roundhouse kicks remain untested.

The Maya Late Classic period was an era of extraordinary scientific achievement. They tracked celestial events with accuracy that wouldn't be matched in Europe for centuries. They also filed their teeth into points, inlaid them with jade, and took their alcohol via enemas because it gets you drunk faster and bypasses vomiting. Bilal is caught between the astronomy and the blood sacrifice, navigating a civilisation that was simultaneously more scientifically advanced and more terrifyingly brutal than anything he was prepared for.

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.

Era: Ancient | 741 CE | Flores, Guatemala

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Bilal Zafar: IG @zafarcakes_ | X @Zafarcakes | bilalzafarcomedy.com

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Samarkand, 750 CE. The Islamic Golden Age is in full swing, the Silk Road is the most lucrative trade network on Earth, and comedian Esther Manito has just been dropped into the middle of it with a mission to trek a caravan of silk from Samarkand to Baghdad. Easy enough — if you ignore the street-smart urchins, the uncompromising rulers, and the fact that the entire caravan has been poisoned.

The Season 5 premiere sends Esther into the heart of the Abbasid Caliphate, where hard bargains are the norm and the AI Game Master is in absolutely no mood for tomfoolery. Her strategy? Negotiation skills, improvised poetry, and being — by her own admission — "a naturally competitive person." The reality? Fifty merchants, guards, and handlers falling violently ill, trust collapsing faster than a silk price in a flooded market, and a diplomatic situation that makes medieval trade disputes look like a gentle disagreement over lunch. Nobody trusts anyone, everybody suspects poisoning, and Esther is making up limericks.

Samarkand was one of the great Silk Road trading hubs — a crossroads of cultures where Chinese silk met Persian craftsmanship and everyone had an angle. The Abbasid Caliphate at its height was the intellectual and commercial centre of the known world. Getting from Samarkand to Baghdad meant crossing deserts, negotiating with bandits, and surviving court politics. Getting from Samarkand to Baghdad as Esther Manito means all of that, plus camels, sherbet, and an alarming amount of poisoning.

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI is the Game Master. The chaos is inevitable. The accents are unforgivable.

Era: Ancient | 750 CE | Samarkand, Uzbekistan

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Can the past be mastered? Is AI still cool? And where exactly has Keon gone?

Season 4 was a big one — we pitted ChatGPT against Claude in a two-player electricity showdown, launched Death Wish Speed Runs (the game where you try to die as quickly and stylishly as possible in history), went live on stage twice, let the Thots TV podcast loose in a gothic horror, and sent a rapper to the Battle of Hastings dressed as Michael Jackson. So, naturally, Ryan and Tan need to sit down and take stock.

In this bonus chat, the PastMaster hosts step out of the time machine to talk about what worked, what spectacularly didn't, and what's next. If you've ever wondered how the AI prompts actually get built, which episodes nearly fell apart during recording, or why Keon keeps mysteriously vanishing — this is the one.

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI is the Game Master. The chaos is inevitable. The accents are unforgivable.

Era: Special | Bonus Episode

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If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive -- or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? Season 5 of PastMaster is here. New comedians. New eras. New ways to catastrophically misread historical situations. Same ruthless AI Game Master. The past will be mastered.

Era: Special | Trailer

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The North Pole has gone very, very wrong. Father Christmas has swapped his "Ho Ho Ho" for a whiskey bottle and a whip, the elves are screaming, and the factory is belching black smoke into the Arctic sky. Merry Christmas from PastMaster.

Laura, Elsie, and Meg from the Thots TV podcast return for a festive special that was supposed to be a sacred pilgrimage to Bethlehem in Year Zero. Instead, they're staring down a corrupted Santa who's gone full capitalist monster. Their mission: save Christmas. Their strategy involves questions about whether frankincense is flammable, a proposal to have the baby kill Santa, and a suggestion about smashing an egg on the newborn Jesus "to start a new tradition." The Game Master is in absolutely no mood for any of it.

Sacred meets profane, history meets mythology, and three podcasters try to hold it all together while the AI makes everything worse. The Nativity is happening somewhere in the background. A dystopian North Pole is happening in the foreground. Whether the Baby Jesus can melt Santa's frozen heart or whether the Thots TV approach to theological problem-solving makes things significantly worse is a question that only listening can answer.

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.

Era: Special | ~1 CE | Bethlehem, Palestine

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Thots TV: X @ElsieLoades | IG @lauraconnolly98

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Northumbria, 687 CE. The nuns have survived Ryan's naked Jesus act and Nick's witchcraft-and-Christina-Aguilera gambit. Now it's Tan's turn. His character name is Wee Willy Winky, the Beast Master. That's the energy we're working with.

The Death Wish Speed Run finale: Ryan tried blasphemy, Nick tried seduction, and Tan's approach is to demand that Claude let him summon a bear called Rufus. Claude's response ("You don't have a bear") does not deter him. His relationship with the turnip cart, the nuns, and the basic laws of nature that PastMaster tries to uphold is adversarial from the first second. After three episodes of trying to provoke medieval nuns into violence, someone has to be crowned the pound-for-pound Death Wish Champion.

St. Hilda's Abbey in Northumbria was a centre of learning that produced five bishops and hosted the Synod of Whitby, one of the most important ecclesiastical debates in English history. None of those bishops had to deal with anything like this. Tan's ultimate fate is historically accurate for how Anglo-Saxon religious communities dealt with people they really didn't like, and the way it happens is both deeply sad and deeply funny. Stay tuned to the end for a rich, untapped vein of historical exploration that suggests the Nuns of Death series might not be finished yet. Part 3 of 3.

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.

Era: Medieval | 687 CE | Whitby, England

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Northumbria, 687 CE. The nunnery that refused to kill Ryan is about to meet its next challenger. Nick has a plan. A sexy, dirty, witchy plan.

Nick's opening move: introduce himself as Emily. The nuns take one look at his jaw, his build, and his beard, and are not convinced. So Nick pivots. He touches his beard "incredulously" and announces it must be "the witch I hung out with yesterday." In 7th-century Anglo-Saxon England, admitting association with witchcraft is tantamount to signing your own death warrant. Nick's strategy from there involves Christina Aguilera lyrics, body art in unconventional mediums, and a commitment to provocation that makes Ryan's Jesus act look restrained.

The Death Wish Speed Run scoring system has three categories: speed, artistic impression, and gritty realism. Nick is throwing everything at the nuns to see what sticks: blasphemy, seduction, gender confusion, witchcraft, and pop music. The 7th-century Anglo-Saxon church did not mess around with any of these things. Whether Nick's scattergun approach earns him a fast, stylish death or just another cold cellar and a man named Brother Cuthbert growling "more fire" is the question. Part 2 of 3.

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.

Era: Medieval | 687 CE | Whitby, England

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Northumbria, 687 CE. A 7th-century Anglo-Saxon nunnery. Prayer, scholarship, deep Christian patience. The last place in history you'd expect someone to get murdered quickly. Which is exactly why we chose it.

Death Wish Speed Run is back, the game where you try to die as quickly and stylishly as possible in the past, and after the Australian penal colony the difficulty needed raising, so the setting is deliberately peaceful. Ryan goes first with a plan to strip naked and claim to be Jesus. His problem: Sister Edberg, built like an ox and carrying a wooden staff, who has absolutely no interest in a theological debate. Claude refuses to grant quick theatrical deaths, instead enforcing grim 7th-century religious justice. Ryan's backup plan involves hymns, fermented turnips, and running up walls like a motorbike.

Scoring categories this time: speed, artistic impression, and gritty realism. Whitby Abbey, founded around 657 AD by Abbess Hild, was one of Northumbria's most important double monasteries and hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664 CE. It was a centre of learning and devotion. These women wrestled livestock, hauled water, and worked the fields. They were not the meek nuns Ryan was expecting, and Claude's commitment to historical accuracy means they are far more interested in locking him up than putting him out of his misery. Part 1 of 3.

If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.

Era: Medieval | 687 CE | Whitby, England

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