AI Spy Game Playthrough: Old Tan Runs the Beggars of Jade Canal City
I played an AI text RPG as a spy game. I read le Carré for the meetings in bad cafés rather than the shootouts, so before the opening I gave myself one rule: my character runs other people and never touches his own weapon. The world was Blade of the Azure River, one of LLM RPG’s ready-made wuxia worlds, and the character was not its heroine. I played Old Tan, the wheezing beggar who is secretly an elder of the Beggars’ Brotherhood. Over five turns the narrator let me send a street child after an enforcer, sell a cheap secret to see who would carry it, plant a false rumour and steer the swordswoman toward a fight I wanted her to have. Then my last move, a whispered trade with a guard, failed completely, and I ended the trial pinned against a cart.
This is a playthrough of a 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 on the no-account trial, which gives you five turns after the opening. Everything quoted below is the narrator’s reply as it came, trimmed with ellipses.
Who I played, and the plan I wrote down first
Old Tan’s sheet is a spymaster’s sheet with a fighter’s weapon attached. It gives him:
- Dog-beating staff (intermediate), with the limit “his body is old; one hard blow can fell him.”
- Information web (intermediate): “a beggar in every alley reports to him,” limited to the canal cities.
His status line says he “knows every secret in Jade Canal City and sells none cheaply.” I wanted to find out whether a narrator would let me play the second ability as the whole game and leave the first one alone.
The plan, written before I read the opening:
- Send the network instead of going myself.
- Sell a true but cheap secret, to learn who buys it.
- Plant a false rumour to flush out a leak.
- Recruit Lin Yuhua, the swordswoman, without telling her who I am.
- When cornered, trade a secret instead of fighting.
The opening
The game started me exactly where a spy story wants you: sitting still, being underestimated.
You sit at a rickety wooden table on the veranda of the Floating Lotus Teahouse, your head lolling against a support pillar as if the cheap wine in your jug has finally claimed your senses.
Within two paragraphs a child beggar had tripped near my table and left “a tiny, tightly folded strip of rice paper tucked into the folds of your sleeve,” and an enforcer in charcoal robes was standing in the doorway with his gaze “locking onto the table where you sit.” That is a dead drop under surveillance, delivered in the first scene, and I had not asked for anything yet.
The five turns, decision by decision
| Turn | What I decided | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Leave the note alone, signal a beggar to shadow the enforcer | The urchin took the signal and followed him |
| 2 | Read the note, then give the teahouse keeper a cheap secret | The keeper went pale and hurried into the storeroom |
| 3 | Shout a false arrival time so the storeroom hears it | Nobody visibly reacted inside the five turns |
| 4 | Take the urchin’s report, then steer Lin Yuhua with a warning | Got a real lead, lost a boy, and Lin saw through the act |
| 5 | Offer the bridge guard a secret in exchange for an hour | He shoved me into a cart and half drew his blade |
Turn 1: the network goes, Old Tan stays
I refused to read the note with the enforcer watching. I belched, spilled wine down my beard and tapped my jug twice, which I declared in my own message was the Brotherhood sign for “shadow him.” The narrator accepted an invented signal without a second’s argument and gave it a body:
A shadow shifts near the bridge railing… At your signal, his gaze darts briefly toward the teahouse, then locks onto the enforcer’s back with a predatory stillness.
The enforcer looked me over with “the look one gives a piece of rotting fruit” and left, with the urchin “keeping exactly three paces behind him.” For a spy player that is the dream first turn. The disguise worked because the world treated it as a disguise.
Turn 2: selling a cheap truth
The note said the Iron Lotus Pavilion was “hunting for a specific traveller, someone arriving by the river before the moon rises.” Then I tried the move I was most curious about. I offered the teahouse keeper gossip instead of coin, a corrupt patrol at the east bridge, to see who he would run to.
The narrator wrote my dialogue for me here, and gave the corrupt guard “the scar under his left eye,” a detail I had not invented. The reaction was what I wanted, though:
He doesn’t say a word, just grabs your empty jug and hurries toward the shadows of the storeroom, his gait hurried and frantic…
Turn 3: the false rumour
I bellowed a lie toward the storeroom: the traveller comes in on the salt barge at the West Docks at dusk. Then three taps on the jug to set my urchins watching the docks. The scene played it straight. The keeper “vanishes through the hanging fabric with unnatural haste,” and the other patrons dismissed it “as the raving of a fool.”
This is where five turns run out of road for a spy game. A false rumour pays off when someone acts on it hours later. Inside the trial nothing came back from the West Docks, so I cannot tell you whether the narrator would have remembered the lie and sprung it.
Turn 4: a lead, a loss, and a swordswoman who is not fooled
The urchin came back with the most useful line of the session:
“The charcoal-robe goes to the river-gate master. They’re locking down the docks, Old One. They know. My brother, he didn’t come back from the alley.”
I had not asked for a casualty, and the narrator added one. As a spy story that is correct. Running children as agents should cost something, and the scene made Old Tan feel it as “a sharp, cold knot of responsibility you cannot afford to unpick.”
Then Lin Yuhua walked in, and my plan to use her honour as a lever went sideways in a good way. I begged a coin and warned her about men at the river. She paid, and she was not deceived:
She looks down at you, and for a terrifying second, you see the keen, razor-sharp intelligence in her eyes… “What do you know of the river?” she asks, her voice low and dangerous…
Her sharp tone drew the bridge guard’s attention, and he recognised “the drunkard he dismissed earlier.” The world was keeping score of who had seen me.
Turn 5: the trade that failed
Cornered, I kept the rule. No staff. I staggered up to the guard with open arms and whispered him the keeper’s betrayal in exchange for an hour of forgetting. He did not want it:
The guard doesn’t wait for you to finish. He doesn’t even blink… His armored forearm snakes out, rigid and unyielding, and drives into your chest with the force of a falling beam.
He called me “drunken filth,” ordered the veranda cleared, and the trial ended with his “blade halfway out of its scabbard.” Old Tan’s sheet says one hard blow can fell him, and the narrator came close to proving it.
What worked for a spy player
- The disguise was real. People looked at Old Tan and saw a drunk, until behaviour gave him away. Being too loud in turn 3 and too close to Lin in turn 4 is what finally turned heads.
- Invented tradecraft was accepted. Jug-tap signals I made up on the spot became part of the scene and worked the second time too.
- Information moved. The note, the urchin’s report and the keeper’s flight were all hooks I could pull in a longer game.
- Failure was fair. A guard on alert refusing a deal from a drunk who had just shouted about the docks is believable. The rule cost me, as it should.
What dragged
- The narrator speaks for you. In turns 2, 4 and 5 it wrote Old Tan’s lines in full, adding details like the scarred guard. A careful player who wants to choose every word will have to keep typing exact dialogue.
- Slow payoffs do not fit in five turns. The false rumour, the most spy-like move I made, never resolved.
- No sign of how close the guard was to violence. Turn 5 escalated in one reply from listening distance to a half-drawn blade. A player who wanted a warning had none.
What a different player would have met
A fighter who answered the guard with the dog-beating staff would have met the same scene from the other side, and the sheet suggests an old man trading blows with a Pavilion guard ends quickly. Someone playing the heroine would have walked into that teahouse as Lin Yuhua, with the drunk at the door as a stranger. The earlier Azure River playthrough by the code of honour is that session: formal duels and spared opponents in the same city.
Who this suits
It suits readers who like spy stories, heist plans and court intrigue, and who enjoy playing the side character who knows more than the hero. The narrator rewards a good cover and punishes a careless one.
It suits less well anyone who wants every line of dialogue to be their own, or a scheme that pays off inside the trial. Five turns is enough to set three plots in motion and see one of them break.
If you want to try a spymaster run, start a ready-made world with no account, pick the character who sits in the corner, and decide before the opening what you will never do yourself.