Death Wish Speedrun: Pompeii 79 AD ft. Sallyann Fellowes
Pompeii (Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum), Campania, Roman Italy, in the reign of Titus • Italy • 79 CE
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
Featuring: Sallyann Fellowes — comedian (Leicester Square New Comedian of the Year, co-host of the Weird Biscuit podcast)
Contains: Strong language and some bloody Roman violence.
EPISODE LINKS
Follow Sallyann's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com
Sallyann Fellowes: Instagram 👉 @sallyanncomedy
Play PastMaster yourself 👉 https://play.pastmasterpod.com