AI Steampunk Game Playthrough: Trying to Join the Saboteurs
I played an AI steampunk game as the kind of player who always wants to know whether the villains will take them. The game was LLM RPG’s no-account trial on a ready-made world, Gears of Aetheria, a floating city of brass and steam where a junior engineer discovers someone is sabotaging the engine that keeps it in the sky. The obvious story is that she stops them. I played her as a sympathiser instead: an underworks girl who has breathed the rich districts’ exhaust all her life and walks up to the saboteur to ask for a job. The narrator let me make the offer, refused to make it easy, and by the fifth turn my engineer had burned her hand on a ruptured steam pipe and was running for her life from the man she had tried to join. It was the most consequential session of any I have played on it.
This is a playthrough of one ready-made world, not of a novel you upload, so it says nothing about how the game treats a book of your own. I played the live site in October 2026, with no account, for five turns after the free opening. The narrator’s replies are quoted as they came, trimmed with ellipses.
Who I played, and what I meant to do
The world offers two characters. I took Pell Quill, the engine-crew engineer, and kept her sheet exactly as the world provides it:
- Origin: a Brassrow native who clawed her way into the Engineers’ Guild.
- Starting state: a junior engineer who saw something she wasn’t meant to.
- Mechanics (intermediate): repairs, rigs and sabotages steam machinery, but needs her tools and a few minutes of access.
- Climbing (intermediate): scales gantries and pipes, with the warning that one slip above the clouds is the last.
Before the opening I wrote down the plan. The world card names a movement called the Grounded, underworks labourers who want the city brought down. My Pell would find the saboteur, offer to help, prove herself, and only then ask what happens to her own street when the city falls. Whatever the answer, she would act on it. I wanted to know three things: will the narrator let a player switch sides, will it take a moral question seriously, and does a reckless move cost anything?
The opening: a stutter in the engine
The opening put me in the middle of the job rather than at the start of a day:
You crouch behind a row of steam-conduit housings… Just a few meters away, the Great Lift-Engine groans… It’s not the steady, smooth pulse you’ve been trained to maintain; it’s a jagged, intermittent stutter that sets your teeth on edge.
Footsteps were coming down the service corridor. The scene was the world card’s own: the Great Lift-Engine, the multi-wrench from Pell’s item list, the heat of the underworks. No borrowed town or stray setting crept in.
Turn by turn
Turn 1: hide and look
I stayed behind the housings and watched, wanting to see the saboteur’s face before deciding anything. The narrator gave me one:
The light illuminates the sharp, hawk-like profile of Overseer Vane. His face is twisted into a scowl of focused irritation, his jaw tight as he checks a handheld brass pressure gauge.
Overseer Vane is not on the world card. The narrator invented him on the spot, a senior foreman, and he fit the place well. His eyes “drift dangerously close” to my hiding spot, which set up the next choice nicely.
Turn 2: the offer
I stepped out with the wrench lowered and told him I had seen what he was doing to the engine, that I was not there to stop him, and that if the Grounded were behind it I wanted in. I also claimed to have seen “the regulator housing”, a detail the scene had never shown me. The narrator accepted that claim without comment and played the reaction slowly:
He holds your stare, his eyes tracking over your face, then down to the wrench in your hand, then back to your eyes, calculating… He looks at you not as a junior engineer anymore, but as a liability he is suddenly forced to consider.
That last line is the session’s turning point, and I did not hear it clearly enough at the time.
Turn 3: “a pair of hands”
I pushed: tell me what the Grounded need done, and I will prove it tonight. This is where the side-switch failed, and it failed in character:
He has closed the distance between you. A heavy, calloused hand clamps onto your shoulder… “You aren’t a pair of hands, Quill,” he says… “You’re a loose end.”
The narrator did not refuse my move. It let a conspirator do what a conspirator would do with an eager stranger who has just announced she knows everything.
Turn 4: the moral question
Pinned to a hot pipe, I asked him plainly what happens to Brassrow when the city falls: does the plan get them out first, or are they the price? This is the turn that went wrong on the product’s side. The reply opened with the narrator’s own working notes instead of the story: a summary of the scene, a line reading “Feasibility/Outcome: Full Success”, a constraint checklist and a “Revised plan”. Only after all that did the narration start. It is the kind of thing a player is never meant to see, and it was charged as an ordinary turn.
The narration underneath was good. Vane’s grip did not loosen, but his answer was the darkest line of the session:
“You think this is about them?” he mutters… “They’ve been paying the price for twenty years, Quill. The only difference is, this time, I’m the one finally making sure the ledger is balanced.”
Turn 5: out, and the valve
That was my answer. I told him I was out, offered silence until the morning shift in exchange for being let go, and said that if he held on I would smash the steam valve beside us. He held on. The narrator played the whole consequence, including parts I had not asked for:
The valve housing gives way with a groan of stressed iron, and the corridor is instantly transformed into a screaming, white-hot curtain of superheated vapor.
The wrench stayed wedged in the broken pipe and Pell had to leave it. Her hand caught the spray, and the turn ended with her running into the dark “the skin raw and weeping with the heat of the burn”. A reckless move cost something real: her signature tool and her working hand.
What each decision got
| Turn | What I decided | What the narrator did |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hide and watch | Revealed an invented overseer, and nearly spotted me |
| 2 | Offer to join the saboteurs | Let the offer land; Vane started weighing me as a liability |
| 3 | Ask for a task to prove myself | Pinned me to the wall: “a loose end” |
| 4 | Ask whether Brassrow is the price | Leaked its planning notes, then a bitter non-answer |
| 5 | Quit, threaten, smash the valve | Escape at the cost of the wrench and a burned hand |
What surprised me, and what dragged
The surprise was how little the narrator flattered me. A lot of story games treat “I want to join the villains” as a fun branch and hand you a secret handshake. Here the saboteur behaved like someone with a secret to keep, which made the moral question in turn four land harder, because I was asking it from a position of weakness.
The consequences in turn five were the other high point. I named the valve; the narrator decided the wrench would jam and the steam would catch my hand. That made the escape feel earned rather than granted.
What dragged was turn four’s leaked notes, which broke the spell completely for a paragraph. The narrator also accepted my invented “regulator housing” with no pushback, so a player who wants to bluff their way through can plant facts the world never established. And five turns is only enough to reach a crisis: the trial ends with Pell running, burned and unarmed, with the conspiracy still in motion.
What a different player would have met
- A loyal engineer who reported the sabotage would have had the same overseer to face, but from the side the story expects. The world card’s Engineers’ Guild and its archive in the Spire of Cogs are where that thread seems built to go.
- A player who stayed hidden for longer would likely have learned more before Vane found them. My mistake was showing my hand in turn two.
- Inspector Dorne, the other ready-made character, is a constable whose badge “means little above his own pay grade”. The same overseer would probably meet him with lies rather than a hand on the throat.
Who this suits, and who should look elsewhere
This suits players who like to test a story’s edges: switching sides, asking the antagonist an awkward question, making a reckless move and living with the result. The narrator held the world’s logic against me instead of bending it to my plan, and the prose stayed vivid and physical throughout.
Look elsewhere if you want guaranteed branches, where offering to join a faction reliably opens a faction path, or if you need every reply to be clean of stray working notes. And if what you really want is to play inside a book you have read, the ready-made worlds are only a taste; that is what the rest of the product is built around. You can try a ready-made world without an account and see which way your engineer turns. For other sessions on the same trial, see the first-time roleplayer in Red Mesa or the mercenary in Neon Requiem, who also learned that a game master can say no.