An actual-play podcast where we drop player characters into real historical events and see what breaks.What is this show? ·Subscribe via RSS
New here? Start with The Legendary Bass Reeves →
Season 3: The Legendary Bass Reeves
Season 2: The Salem Witch Trials
Season 1: The Final Days of Grigori Rasputin
Specials & interviews
About Let's Break History
Sometimes, history does not quite repeat itself.
Let’s Break History is a role-playing podcast where the players take on the lives of important figures and do their best to change the course of history.
Our Mission and Other Thoughts
The Let’s Break History podcast exists to entertain people with a mix of factual historical scenarios and wildly nonfactual improvisational role play. The game master tries to create thoroughly realistic scenarios based on what actually occurred and then the players take the wheel. That has a couple important implications. First, the actual endings are already out there! Wikipedia and your local library are major spoiler zones. That said, we would love it if this podcast inspires people to look up facts about history! Go for it! We are confident that you will enjoy the podcast regardless of whether you know how the history actually went down. We only ask that in discussing this podcast in reviews, on our dedicated Discord server, or anywhere else, you make sure to give a spoiler alert before revealing big plot points.
The second thing I want to mention is that history has a ton of horrible people in it and sometimes we’re going to impersonate those people. We try to pick periods of history that people find interesting and want to know more about and we try to spotlight historical figures who have been misunderstood, misrepresented, or underrepresented. We’re not sure exactly where and when this podcast will take us, but we can be sure that there will be topics like racism, homophobia, and sexism that rear their ugly heads. For example, our first series is set in 1916 Petrograd, where anti-Semitism was rampant. Hate groups like the Black Hundreds had serious political power. It will never be our intention to support hateful ideologies. We do not want to whitewash history, nor do we want to give its more negative aspects undue emphasis. You can be the judge of whether we strike a good balance.
Finally, we want to make the point that while we’re doing our best, we’re bound to make mistakes. We’ll get names and dates wrong, mix up people’s motivations occasionally, stuff like that. Some of the historical errors we make are intentional, the result of adapting history into a game that the players and listeners will find compelling. Others will be due to our own incompetence. Feel free to hop into our Discord channel and complain about everything we get wrong. That’s part of why we plan on putting together Let’s Break Let’s Break History, a series of interviews where Peter speaks with real historians about the periods we cover on the podcast.
Series One of the podcast has now been fully released! Follow the story of Rasputin’s friends as they try to avert his murder!
Series Two of the podcast follows the story of six accused witches as they try to avoid the hangman’s noose!
Series Three of the podcast details the exploits of the Legendary Bass Reeves, a federal marshal enforcing the law in the Western District of Arkansas.