PastMaster: Reshaping History

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 settin...

Woodstock, 1969. Four hundred thousand flower children, Jimi Hendrix finishing his legendary set, and one man backstage who literally cannot stop beatboxing. Tan has been sent back to Max Yasgur's farm as MC Wicked, a hip-hop pioneer arriving roughly a decade too early, with a mission to get on the main stage and blow the counterculture's collective mind. There's a problem: Tan knows almost nothin...

The Colosseum, 80 CE. Fifty thousand Romans screaming for blood, Emperor Titus presiding from his box, and two time travellers with ten minutes to get rich, get notorious, and not die. Recorded live at the Bedford in Balham for the Cheerful Earful comedy podcast festival, this is PastMaster with a room full of people shouting suggestions. Nick Horseman and Tan go head to head in ancient Rome, with...

Neo-Singapore, 2999. A vertical city-state stretching from the ocean floor to the stratosphere. Humanity's entire pre-digital cultural heritage is stored in a quantum archive, and a virus is about to wipe it all. Comedy producer Al Clayton has 72 hours to save the future. His first priority? 3D printing Charlie Simpson from Busted. Al's mission is clear: recover three cultural artifacts before the...

The Great Exhibition, Hyde Park, 1851. Six million visitors. The Crystal Palace. The pinnacle of Victorian innovation. And Chris Reading has just rolled up in a quack-mobile to sell miracle tea bags to the most sceptical audience in the British Empire. Chris's mission: acquire serious power in Victorian London under the tutelage of Game Master Gregor MacGregor, history's most audacious conman. His...

Friend of the show Ian Walker joins Tan to pit four AI large language models against each other and see which makes the best Game Master.   The setting? It couldn’t be grander or have higher stakes: on board the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage to the US in 1912.   Can Ian avert disaster and prevent the ocean liner hitting ice and dragging 1,500 to their deaths? Will his performance as 90s TV p...

The Battle of Hastings, 1066. The day that ended Anglo-Saxon England, crowned William the Conqueror, and changed the English language forever. Now Keon's been sent back to stop it — armed with a red leather jacket, a single sparkling glove, and an unstoppable urge to moonwalk. As the mysterious "Agent M," Keon has one shot to save King Harold from the Norman invasion and — more importantly — get h...

Medieval England, date unknown. You wake up on cold stone. Your hands aren't your hands. Someone is shouting for Thomas, and there's a strong implication that Thomas needs to sharpen an axe. Welcome to PastMaster's Quantum Leap episode, where Ryan doesn't get to choose who he is, where he is, or what century he's in. In a twist cooked up by Tan, Ryan is dropped blind into history with zero context...

What started as a missing persons case in 1920s Arkham has gone catastrophically sideways. Ezra Whitmarsh is alive but changed. Forbidden books are burning. Alien technology is doing things to mortal flesh that mortal flesh was not designed for. And T.G. Fells has one obsession that overrides cosmic horror, sanity loss, and the basic instinct for self-preservation: he needs to know who killed Chri...

Arkham, Massachusetts, 1926. Businessman Ezra Whitmarsh has vanished from a locked study. The air smells of ozone. His business partner is sweating through his suit. And someone called "the Syndicate" is already following you from the train station. This is Lovecraft country, and PastMaster has gone full cosmic horror. The Apocalypse Players bring their Call of Cthulhu expertise to PastMaster. Jos...

Dakota Territory, 1875. The Black Hills gold rush is ripping the West apart, the Sioux are losing their sacred lands, and a full-scale war is brewing between miners and the native population. Nick Horseman has arrived in Deadwood as Thorne Jackson-Reynolds, a refined English gentleman with a piano, Spice Girls lyrics, and absolutely no survival instinct. His peace plan involves artisanal cheese, a...

Port Jackson, 1788. Britain's brand-new penal colony at the edge of the known world. The convicts are starving, the guards are brutal, and Australia's wildlife is doing what Australia's wildlife does best — trying to kill everyone. Ryan, Tan, and returning guest Nick Horseman have not come here to survive. They've come to compete in PastMaster's second Death Wish Speed Run: who can achieve the fas...

Timbuktu, 1330 CE. The Mali Empire at the height of its power. Gold dust literally fills the air. And sitting at the centre of it all is Mansa Musa — the richest human being who has ever lived, with a net worth of roughly $700 billion in today's money. Elon Musk is small fry by comparison. Ryan's been dropped into medieval West Africa with one mission: convince this golden emperor to fund humanity...

Gaul, 55 BCE. Julius Caesar's legions are marching north. A small Gallic village of thatched roundhouses stands in their way. And Tan has just arrived as "Risky Dave" — a cockney wide boy inspired by Asterix and Obelix, but with one critical substitution. Instead of magic potion, he's brought cocaine. In the Asterix comics, the druid Getafix brews a strength potion. Risky Dave has Colombian marchi...

Victorian London, 1873. A string of ritual murders is forming a pentagram across the city map. Comedian and writer Matthew Crosby has stepped out of his bathtub time machine and into a proper murder mystery. His cover identity? French detective "Inspector Pompidou." His qualifications? Absolutely none. His modern object of choice? A fidget spinner, because "it wouldn't freak people out. It would d...

Troy, 1200 BCE. The siege has dragged on for a decade. The Greeks are bored. The Trojans are smug. And "Tanchilles" and "Keonkeles" have just arrived with modern minds, Bronze Age materials, and a burning question: what if the Trojan Horse wasn't a horse at all? Keon has never heard of the Trojan War and thinks Achilles is a job title ("Achilles, like he kills"), while Tan brings a C in design tec...

Hampton Court Palace, 1522. Henry VIII is still married to Catherine of Aragon, but Anne Boleyn has just returned from France and is about to catch the king's wandering eye. Kim and Alice from the Fetch the Smelling Salts podcast have been sent back to save his wives — armed with a battery-powered smoke machine, a Halloween makeup palette, and their Catholic background. They didn't do any research...

Ur, Mesopotamia, 2100 BCE. The cradle of civilisation. The birthplace of writing, agriculture, and organised religion. Nick Horseman has been sent here as "Barry Smith" with one goal: cause as much mayhem as possible and die in the most spectacular fashion he can manage. Welcome to the Death Wish Speed Run. Nick chose Mesopotamia specifically because he knows nothing about it — "I've heard of anci...

Before the Big Bang. Before atoms. Before the laws of physics even bothered to show up. The Thots TV team are back, this time with DeepSeek as Game Master, and they've been sent to the most impossible location in PastMaster history: The Void. Their character? A "heat-resistant" Danny Dyer. Their mission? Survive in a place where literally nothing exists. Not even a decent boozer. DeepSeek calls th...

New York City, 1890. The War of the Currents is raging — and PastMaster is about to make it significantly worse. In this two-player showdown, Keon channels Nikola Tesla with ChatGPT as his Game Master, while Tan embodies Thomas Edison powered by Claude. Two players. Two AIs. One question: who controls the future of electricity? Google Gemini is on standby as impartial judge, because apparently thr...

Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva, 1816. The Year Without a Summer. Lord Byron is brooding by the fire, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin are whispering in a corner, and the air is thick with opium smoke. In three days, this house party will inspire Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and some of the darkest poetry in the English language. The Thots TV podcast have arrived as the mysterious "Lady Thottringham" — a th...

Middle Earth. No date. No rules. And Keon has never seen Lord of the Rings. PastMaster breaks out of the historical timeline for a trip to Tolkien's fantasy realm, and Game Master Claude flatly refuses to play along. "PastMaster is specifically designed for exploring real human history," it insists, before offering ancient Chinese imperial courts as an alternative. The negotiation to get Claude in...

Cape Canaveral, 1969. One small step for man. One giant mess for Chris Dillon. Back for his second PastMaster mission, Chris has a plan: impersonate Buzz Aldrin and steal his spot on Apollo 11. His cover identity? "Buzz Cauldron" — because it sounds like a wizard's name. His disguise strategy? Dress up "like a can of spam, whatever space food was." Chris's approach to infiltrating the most heavily...

Harvard University, 2003. A lanky guy in a grey hoodie is skulking the corridors of Kirkland House with plans to build something called TheFacebook. Chris Dillon has been sent back to beat him to it. His cover identity is "Thomas Jefferson," at a 21st-century Ivy League university. His understanding of coding? "It's like MySpace but better." Chris's approach to tech entrepreneurship involves physi...

Regency London, 1815. The ton is in full swing, reputations are made and destroyed over a single dance, and comedian Micky Overman has just materialised in the middle of it as the mysterious "Lady Hemming-Trout." Allegedly Dutch nobility, armed with concealed jewels and a matchmaking mission she has no business attempting. The target: unite a shy heiress with a secretly penniless war hero before a...