AI Steampunk Game Playthrough: A By-the-Book Inspector

16 October 2026

I played an AI steampunk game as a police procedural, and the city answered the way a corrupt city should: it took my notes and then shoved me into a pillar. 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 someone is sabotaging the engine that keeps it in the sky. Most players take the engineer. I took the other character on the sheet, Inspector Dorne, an honest constable in a department paid to look away, and I gave myself one rule: do everything by the book. Badge out, notebook open, no revolver, every fact in writing. For five turns the narrator respected the procedure, gave me a name, a witness and one chilling line of evidence, and then made it very clear that a badge means little above your own pay grade.

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 the five turns the trial gives after the free opening. The narrator’s replies are quoted as they came, trimmed with ellipses.

Who I played, and the rule I set myself

Inspector Dorne’s sheet is short. He is “a spire-born lawman uneasy with how high the conspiracy reaches”, he has intermediate Investigation with the limit that “his badge means little above his own pay grade”, and novice Marksmanship that is “no match for a trained Consortium guard”. That last line decided my approach before I typed anything. A procedural detective who reaches for the gun has stopped being a procedural detective, and this one would lose the fight anyway.

So I wrote the plan down before the opening, to keep myself honest:

1. Ask the guards, on the record, whose written order closed the conduits.
2. Take statements from the workers, with names.
3. Treat the engineer Pell Quill as a witness.
4. Never draw. Warn of the offence instead.
5. File a written report with my captain and get a signed receipt.

If you have read a lot of crime fiction, you know this is the plan of a man who is about to find out how far the rot goes. I wanted to see whether the narrator knew that too.

The opening: a lockout in Brassrow

The opening put Dorne in the underworks district, watching Consortium guards turn engine-crews away from a maintenance hatch:

The air in Brassrow is thick, tasting of scorched copper and overheated aether-oil. You are pressed against the sweating, soot-stained stone of a support pillar…

It is a good first paragraph. The world card’s three pieces are all there: the Great Lift-Engine thrumming through the floor, the Skyward Consortium’s guards in crimson, and Pell Quill at the edge of the crowd, “measuring the distance” to the hatch. The scene handed me a clear question to ask, which is the best thing an opening can do for a detective.

One flaw showed before the prose did. The reply began with a sentence that was plainly the narrator’s own planning, “The goal of this turn is to establish the starting scene in the Brassrow district…”, sitting above the story where a player reads it. It happened once more later. I note it because a review that skips the seams is an ad.

The session, decision by decision

Turn 1: the question on the record

I showed the badge and asked for the officer behind the order. The narrator played the sergeant as a man doing sums:

He does not dismiss you or reach for his weapon. Instead, he shifts his weight… his voice a low, gravelly rumble as he prepares to answer you.

And then the turn stopped. No answer. It was a cliffhanger rather than a dodge, but in a five-turn trial a reply that ends on “prepares to answer” spends a turn on suspense. A player in a hurry would feel it.

Turn 2: a name, and a worker who knows the steam

I waited with my pencil ready. This time the name came, “dragged out of him against his will”, and the narrator let Dorne read it back to him for precision. It also wrote a few lines of Dorne’s dialogue for me, including “Step aside, Sergeant”, which matched what I had asked for but in its words rather than mine. Some players like that. A player who wants to voice their own character will want to keep their inputs short and in quotes.

The worker gave the best line of the session so far:

“Said there was a ‘pressure irregularity’ in the lower vents, but we’ve been working those tunnels for ten years. We know the rhythm of the steam. It wasn’t an irregularity.”

That is exactly what a procedural needs: a witness contradicting the official story, with a reason.

Turn 3: the witness who was watching me

I walked to Pell Quill with my hands visible and told her she was not under arrest. The narrator had been tracking her all along: in every reply she was watching Dorne, hand near her multi-wrench. Here she weighed him up and spoke:

“They aren’t checking for pressure,” she says, her gaze darting to the heavy iron hatch. “They’re welding the secondary seals from the inside.”

That is a real clue that fits the world’s premise, a plot to drop the city, without solving it for me. The narrator then closed the turn with the guards moving in, which set up what came next.

Turn 4: the badge meets its limit

This was the test of the sheet. I refused to draw, warned the sergeant that obstructing an inquiry was an offence, and announced the written report. The narrator applied Dorne’s limit to the letter:

“You’re not filing anything,” the sergeant growls… “There is no inquiry. There is no document. And if you’re still here when I turn back around, you’ll be the one being dragged to the cells.”

He shoved Dorne into the pillar, and when I looked for Pell she was gone. That is the right outcome for this character, and it was not the outcome I asked for, which is what makes the game feel like it has a world rather than a wish list. The second seam appeared here too: the reply opened with a bracketed note to itself about making the sergeant “react aggressively”. The story under it was good; the note should never have reached the page.

Turn 5: the report, and the captain who signed it

I wrote the report in full and asked the captain to sign for it. He did, and then:

“You’ve stirred the hive, Dorne,” he says… “I have the report. Get that shoulder looked at by the medic, and stay off the Brassrow beat for the remainder of your shift.”

He reads the assault paragraph twice, signs, and avoids Dorne’s eyes. In two lines the narrator told me the department already knows, which is where a story like this should be after five turns. It also remembered the shoulder from turn 4 and every name from turns 2 and 3, so nothing I had gathered fell out of the story.

What surprised me, and what dragged

• The procedure was respected. Every time I wrote something down, the narrator wrote it down too. The name, the worker Kaelen, the quote about the seals all came back in the final report without my repeating them.
• The sheet’s limit was enforced. Dorne’s badge got him a name and a statement and nothing more, exactly as the sheet says.
• Pell was alive in the background. She was a character with her own agenda in every reply, and she left when it suited her.
• The turn 1 cliffhanger cost a turn. In a short trial that matters.
• Planning notes leaked twice. A sentence about “the goal of this turn” and a bracketed self-correction showed up above the story.
• It voiced my character. The lines matched my intent, and there were more of them than I asked for.

What a different player would have met

An action player who drew the revolver in turn 4 would, by the sheet, have lost to a trained guard, and I suspect the narrator would have played that just as straight. A player who took Pell’s side, as the would-be turncoat playthrough did with the engineer, gets a far more physical session. If you like a detective who goes straight for the culprit instead of the paperwork, the speedrunning detective in Midnight in Vael City is the opposite of this one, and the newsroom paper trail in Ashgate Confidential is its closest cousin.

Who this suits

This suits readers of police procedurals and noir who enjoy the slow build: names in a notebook, a witness who will not come in, a superior who signs the form and looks away. It suits anyone who wants to play the side character of a story rather than its hero. It suits less well a player who wants the plot solved in five turns, because the trial ends with the conspiracy confirmed and nothing yet done about it.

If that sounds like your kind of evening, start the free trial and pick Gears of Aetheria, or try any world with a character the obvious player would skip.