PastMaster: Reshaping History

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...

London, 1843. Charles Dickens is writing A Christmas Carol at 48 Doughty Street, and the PastMaster crew have been summoned by three Christmas spirits to atone for their previous sins against the timeline. Ryan, Tan, and Keon stand accused of "temporal meddling in previous adventures" — guilty as charged — and tonight they have a chance at redemption. Three tasks, three eras, three spirits. Nick H...

The countdown to Christmas continues with another PastMaster replay special. We've turned back the clock to this episode from Season 2 where we uncovered the mysteries of Stonehenge... Keon’s always wanted to know who built Stonehenge and why. So Ryan used PastMaster to find out (of course). In what is possibly the trippiest episode of PastMaster yet, our AI GameMaster concocts a Neolithic adventu...

In true PastMaster style we're turning back the clock to revisit the past. In this case, our own podcasting past. In this episode from Season 2, Tan travels back to the slums of Victorian Whitechapel in a bid to catch Jack the Ripper and solve one of the most notorious unsolved crimes ever. If AI has access to all the knowledge in history, could it spot patterns in the data that mere humans have m...

Palos de la Frontera, Spain, 1492. Christopher Columbus is about to set sail for the New World, and Ryan has joined the crew with one objective: convince everyone on board that he is, in fact, a deity. His strategy? Be extremely stylish and tell everybody to wash their hands. Recorded live at the Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival. If you were dropped into the past with advanced knowledge of future...

Philadelphia, 1775. Colonial America is on the brink of declaring independence, the Founding Fathers are assembling, and Ryan, as the ever-reliable "Ryanardo," has arrived with two goals: amend the Constitution before it gets written, and get his face carved onto Mount Rushmore. The first is noble. The second is unhinged. Both are very PastMaster. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams,...

Athens, 355 BCE. The cradle of Western philosophy, the birthplace of democracy, and the current location of a man who is simultaneously one of history's greatest thinkers and an absolute unit on the wrestling mat. Tan's been sent back to find Plato and answer a question that's haunted humanity for millennia: was Atlantis real? The only person who might know is a philosopher who got his name from h...

Three eras. Three players. One brutally unforgiving AI. Claude has been given a prompt demanding full realism, and the result is PastMaster's hardest episode yet — so hard there was time for three cracks at it, because nobody lasted long enough to fill a full episode. Welcome to Hard Mode 3.0: Hard Claude with a Vengeance. Keon heads to Victorian England armed with Downton Abbey clips. Tan gets dr...

We've been a little quiet over the summer, but fear not, the wheels of time are still turning at the PastMaster HQ! We've got 3 exciting announcements: 1. Next week PastMaster Season 3 returns. We're having another crack at making the show even harder, only this time using Claude instead of ChatGPT. But how hard is too hard? Tune in on Monday 23rd to find out. 2. PastMaster is going live!! We've b...