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
Featuring: Daniel McKeon — comedian, writer and storyteller (Boy Boss, Your Next Village Idiot)

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