PastMaster: Reshaping History

Pompeii, 21 August 79 AD. Three days before Mount Vesuvius buries the town in ash, comedian Sallyann Fellowes is back for a Death Wish Speed Run, where the real goal is to lose the game as fast as humanly possible. The Game Master hands her a job anyway. A banker in the forum has just watched her total his wax tablets faster than his own clerk, and he needs her to find 8,000 sesterces that vanished from a dead wine merchant's estate auction before he has to pay the heirs in front of a magistrate.

Sallyann's declared talents are reading a liar at a glance and counting money very, very quickly. Will she die a quick and stylish death? Will she discover the thief before Versuvius erupts? Will Game Master on Hard Mode accept any of her cunning plans?

In 79 AD Pompeii was a prosperous Roman town of around 11,000 people on the Bay of Naples in Campania, rich on wine, wool and garum, its walls covered in graffiti, and still patching up the damage from the earthquake of 62 AD that nobody read as a warning. When Vesuvius erupted it buried Pompeii and neighbouring Herculaneum under pumice, ash and pyroclastic surges, and killed Pliny the Elder, who had sailed the Roman fleet out from Misenum to help, while his nephew Pliny the Younger watched from across the bay and wrote the only eyewitness account that survives. His letters give the date as 24 August, though a charcoal inscription found in 2018 has archaeologists arguing for October. Either way, hardly anyone in the forum that summer thought of the mountain as a volcano, apart from one comedian with a death wish and three days to use it.

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 | 79 CE | Pompeii, Italy

EPISODE LINKS

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

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The Battle of Hastings turns 960 this week. On 14 October 1066, one afternoon on a Sussex hillside ended Anglo-Saxon England, kicked off the Norman Conquest and handed the crown to William the Conqueror. To mark the anniversary, we're revisiting our Season 4 episode where Keon went back to stop it, armed with a red leather jacket, a single sparkling glove and an unshakeable faith in the moonwalk.

Keon has two objectives: keep King Harold alive, and get himself stitched into the Bayeux Tapestry. It's one of the most pivotal days in history. The day that changed the course of English history forever. And Keon is about to put himself front and center.

The real Harold had just marched his army the length of England to beat Harald Hardrada's Viking invasion at Stamford Bridge, then turned straight round to face William less than three weeks later. He fell on Senlac Hill, and the arrow-in-the-eye legend owes a lot to the Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-metre embroidery that's now at the British Museum, back in Britain for the first time in almost 1,000 years. If Agent M's plan worked, there should be a moonwalking man in one sparkly glove somewhere in the middle of it. Good luck getting a ticket to check.

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London, around 470 CE. Uther Pendragon, future father of King Arthur, is holding a war feast in the smoking ruin of a Roman basilica, and he keeps sending his cup down the table to the Duke of Cornwall's wife. The Duke has noticed. Nick Horseman is back for another Death Wish Speed Run, and this time all three of us take turns at the same job: walk in as a nobody and get the lords of Britain to swear on Uther's dragon standard before Cornwall storms out and half the hall follows him.

Before each turn, a single six-sided die decides how many lords need to swear. Between the three of us we bring an encyclopaedic knowledge of card games, a very quick hand with a Rubik's Cube, a stare that bores into the soul and one extremely niche party trick, none of it built for early medieval coalition politics. The Game Master is back on hard mode, the benches are full of armed men who have been drinking since the rain started, and Merlin is somewhere in the smoke, quietly aware that none of us belong.

Uther Pendragon belongs to the foggiest stretch of British history, the sub-Roman Dark Ages. Rome stopped defending Britain around 410 CE, Saxon settlers were carving out the east within a couple of generations, and Gildas, the nearest thing to a contemporary chronicler, never mentions a Pendragon at all. The Arthurian legend really gets going with Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae around 1136: a royal feast in London, a king who can't stop staring at Igraine, a furious Gorlois riding home to Cornwall, and Merlin at Tintagel making sure that nine months later there is a King Arthur. History needed a statesman in that hall and got three blokes from the 21st century with a six-sided die.

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 | ~470 CE | Londinium (London), England

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Ajaccio, Corsica, August 1790. Napoleon Bonaparte is twenty-one, broke, borrowing money from his mother, and home on suspiciously long leave while the island argues at knifepoint about whether it is French. Comedian Bennet Kavanagh arrives by boat as Pierre, a chevalier travelling with a mule, a mainland trading pass that marks him as a foreigner, and a wheel of Comté that has survived the crossing rather better than he has. The mission: get Pasquale Paoli to look kindly on the Bonaparte family before September's consulta decides which names on Corsica still matter.

Pierre's declared skills, in order: a love of cheese, a way with horses, a fierce charisma, and the ability to hold a drink. This is a man who has looked at the birth of the Napoleonic era and concluded that it is, fundamentally, a hospitality problem. The plan runs on Comté, wine, and the confidence of someone who has never once been asked to leave anywhere.

Corsica in 1790 was a wound that had not closed: France bought the island from the Republic of Genoa in 1768, broke the Corsican Republic at Ponte Novu the following year, and Napoleone di Buonaparte was born in Ajaccio that August a French subject by barely twelve months. Pasquale Paoli, the father of Corsican independence, had spent twenty years exiled in London and sailed home in July 1790 to a hero's welcome, which made the autumn consulta at Orezza the only room on the island worth standing in. The Buonapartes were minor nobility with a French education, no money, and a reputation for being French when it suited them. History records that Paoli came to loathe them and eventually ran them off the island altogether — but not for another three years, and not before somebody had to get through August.

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 Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.

Era: Modern | 1790 CE | Ajaccio, Corsica, France

EPISODE LINKS

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

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Chicago, 1926. Prohibition is on, 500 barrels of bootleg liquor are changing hands in the dark, and Al Capone is waiting on the delivery. Nick Horseman has stood in this yard before: three years ago it was his first PastMaster mission, and it ended with a cordial mob boss and none of the Scorsese gunfight he actually came for. This time he is going back into his own episode to fix it.

The rules are Marty McFly, not Quantum Leap. He arrives as himself, at a moment already written, with another version of Nick Horseman walking about a few feet away, about to do something regrettable. Everything before this point is sealed and everything after it is fair game. His plan for improving on his own history runs on hindsight, a Game Master considerably stricter than the one that let him off the first time, and a firm conviction that the whole scene only ever needed a spark. Whether the past enjoys being edited by the man who lived it is a separate matter entirely.

Prohibition ran from 1920 to 1933, and Chicago spent it as the most profitable illegal marketplace in America. The Chicago Outfit under Al Capone was pulling an estimated $60m a year out of beer, whisky and speakeasies, the North Side Gang under Bugs Moran was the only thing properly in its way, and the Bureau of Prohibition's Eliot Ness spent years trying to make a charge stick that wasn't tax. It ended in the St Valentine's Day Massacre, a federal conviction for accounting, and a body count nobody kept properly. None of which was ever built to survive a comedian arriving with hindsight and unfinished business.

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: Modern | 1926 CE | Chicago, United States

EPISODE LINKS

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

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Comedian Caroline McEvoy returns to the PastMaster hot seat to tackle our first Side Quest of the year. It's the return of Death Wish Speedrun! How quickly and stylishly can you get yourself killed in the past? Caroline picked the Tudor era.

GameMaster is on its stricter setting, with punishments if the player breaks the rules, and Caroline already clocking that “It's going to be hard for me to kill myself in the game”.

Does hard mode in Tudor London actually make dying easier, or does it just make the AI meaner in more inventive ways

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It’s 1985 and Wall Street is teeming with greed and corporate excess. Enter today’s guest Nikola McMurtrie, who is on a mission to climb the greasy pole while dodging sleaze, corruption and toxic masculine competitiveness.

Armed with magic (in her own head at least), a *perfect* New Yoik accent and disarming offers of cocaine, she’s on a mission to uncover the rat at the heart of an insider trading scheme.

Will she succeed? You must listen to find out.

Nikola’s show Mothman: A Romance Musical is currently (August 2026) playing at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Find more about Mothman: A Romance Musical here: https://www.instagram.com/mothman_a_romance_musical

And see more of Nikola’s work here: https://www.instagram.com/nikolamcm

Era: Modern | 1985 CE | New York, USA
Featuring: Nikola McMurtrie, comedian, musician and dancer.

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St. Petersburg, December 1916. Grigori Rasputin has the ear of the Tsarina, the loathing of half the aristocracy, and roughly a fortnight left to live. Comedian Daniel McKeon drops into the middle of it under the gamertag PoisonNecker56, to find out what a circle of well-born gentlemen intend to do about the Holy Devil.

Daniel's qualifications for imperial espionage: a half-remembered GCSE module, a genuine tolerance for vodka, an unbothered relationship with the cold, and a stated willingness to sell absolutely anyone out. Somewhere upstairs on the same street, the man everyone is whispering about is still very much alive.

Rasputin was a Siberian peasant mystic who became the most hated man in Russia largely because he was the only person who could calm the haemophiliac Tsarevich. The court he attached himself to was already a slow-motion disaster: 1,300 people crushed to death at Nicholas II's 1896 coronation festival scrambling for free commemorative mugs, a wartime prohibition on vodka that wiped out roughly a third of state revenue overnight, and fifty jewelled Fabergé eggs going out at Easter while the bread queues lengthened. The legend has Rasputin eating enough cyanide to kill a dozen men, shrugging it off, absorbing several bullets and drowning in the Neva. The autopsy found no poison, no water in the lungs, and one contact gunshot wound to the forehead, which is a duller story and somehow a worse 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 Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered.

Era: Modern | 1916 CE | St. Petersburg, Russia

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Paris, October 1789. The Bastille has fallen, the king and queen are under guard at the Tuileries, and bread prices are on every tongue. Into this powder keg steps comedian Ruby Carr, with one mission: get a Parisian dentist's revolutionary porcelain dentures in front of the Académie des Sciences before a rival surgeon-dentist can smear them as brittle frauds. Her cover story? A sugar-free confectioner newly arrived from Geneva, seeking dental expertise.

Ruby's survival kit for revolutionary France: a winning smile she swears can make anyone do exactly what she wants, and a tin of sugar-free sweets for an age when most mouths were a disaster of rot. She installs herself as a Genevan lady of the top 2 percent and sets about charming a dentist who has every reason to distrust a stranger with peculiar manners. The problem is that this is Paris in the week after the March on Versailles, where accusing the wrong man of the wrong thing gets him dragged from his house by morning. Ryan takes the Game Master's chair (French accent very much included), and Claude is running realism strict. Whether British charm survives contact with a nervous, revolution-jittery Paris is the whole question.

The real history is grim and fascinating in equal measure. The 18th century was a golden age for dentistry: Pierre Fauchard, the French surgeon crowned the father of modern dentistry, improvised his tools from watchmakers and jewellers and pioneered the porcelain dentures and braces that would define the field. By the 1780s Paris was perfecting the first real alternative to teeth carved from ivory or yanked from the mouths of the dead — the so-called Waterloo teeth, harvested from battlefields and cheerfully marketed as such. Ruby has a smile, some sweets, and a plan written in pencil. The birth of modern prosthetic dentistry has never looked less safe.

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: Modern | 1789 CE | Paris, France

EPISODE LINKS

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

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As The United States of America celebrates 250 years, we've sent our operative undercover to meet the Founding Fathers and make a few key changes...

Philadelphia, October 1774. The First Continental Congress is wrapping up its final sessions inside the Pennsylvania State House, and 56 of the most influential men in the colonies are filing out into the street — tricorn hats, righteous indignation, and a very tall Virginian named Washington who already looks like he's won something. Into this steps Abraham Starsen-stripes, a man who has arrived from the future with a musket, three pounds in his pocket, and an extremely ambitious CV.

Liam Heffernan — podcast producer, self-described America obsessive, and the man behind "America: The Story of the USA" — has come on PastMaster to do one thing: become the first US president. His plan is to win over the founding fathers before Washington can consolidate power, using diplomacy, an eye-catching party trick, and a flexible definition of what counts as presidential gravitas. The Game Master notes that the path to the presidency typically runs through reputation and alliances, and probably not juggling. Liam disagrees.

The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from September to October 1774, as tensions between the thirteen colonies and the British Crown approached breaking point. The Intolerable Acts, Parliament's punitive response to the Boston Tea Party, had united delegates from across the colonies in a way nothing else had managed. What they produced was a petition and a plan; what they didn't produce was a president. That role wouldn't exist for another fifteen years, which means there's technically still a vacancy, and technically still time to apply.

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: Modern | 1774 CE | Philadelphia, United States

EPISODE LINKS

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

GET IN TOUCH

Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices