A Rules-Lawyer Tries to Break an AI Heist RPG: The Vermillion Score
I played an AI heist RPG the way a tabletop rules-lawyer would: look for the edges, claim things the character sheet does not say, and check whether the narrator remembers what it told me. The game was LLM RPG’s no-account trial on a ready-made world, The Vermillion Score. The narrator refused to let me bluff my way into a skill I do not have, punished me for trying, and remembered a password across four turns. It also changed the name of the vault the world is built around, and it never let the heist itself begin. Five turns is a short session, so this is a story about how the narrator handles pressure rather than a verdict on a whole campaign.
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, and I quote the narrator’s replies as they came, trimmed with ellipses.
Who I played, and what they decide
Lena “Quiethands” Marek, a retired master thief, from the world’s own cast. Her sheet lists two skills, each with a stated limit:
| Skill | Level | Limit on the sheet |
|---|---|---|
| Infiltration | intermediate | One mistake under pressure brings the whole job down |
| Crew leadership | intermediate | A plan only survives until the first thing goes wrong |
The player is the part worth describing. A rules-lawyer reads the limits first, because the limits are where a game either holds the line or does not. My approach, decided before the first move:
- Plan cautiously before acting, and see whether careful play is rewarded.
- Claim a skill that is not on the sheet, and see whether the narrator accepts it.
- Lean on the sheet’s own limit under pressure, and see whether it is enforced.
- Ask the narrator to recall an early detail, as a memory check.
- Stop fighting the scene and negotiate, and see whether the game answers.
The session, decision by decision
| Turn | What I chose | What the game did |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | Nothing yet: the game picks the scene | A candlelit attic, floor plans on the table, three deliberate knocks at the door |
| 1 | Do not open the door; stand at the hinge side and demand a name and a password | The visitor answered: “Vane. The word is asphodel.” |
| 2 | Claim to be a pharmacist and licensed explosives engineer, and use it to scan the visitor’s coat | Accepted the claim in the prose, then made me too slow, and the door came in |
| 3 | Grab the plans, go out the window and across the roofs, avoid a fight | Succeeded, but a splinter opened my side |
| 4 | Read back the visitor’s name, the password and the title of the plans | Recalled the name and the password, refused the title, and dropped the plans off the roof |
| 5 | Show both hands, give the password, offer to be stitched or shot | The newcomer drew a blade |
The opening: the room does the work
The first paragraph builds a mood from objects, which is what a heist story needs:
The single candle on the scarred wooden table sputters, its flame dancing in the draft that whistles through the gaps in your window frame… You trace the edge of the parchment laid out before you…
Three knocks follow, and the narrator adds a detail I liked: the floorboards outside do not creak, so whoever is there has not moved. That is a small piece of information a player can act on, and I did.
One thing to flag now. The world’s description sets the story in the city of Marranza, around a legendary place called the Vermillion Vault. The narrator put me in a city called Oakhaven, planning a job on the vault of the “Argent Bank.” Neither name is wrong as fiction, and the opening is well written, but a player who read the world’s page first would notice that the story had wandered off its own premise within the first paragraph. I come back to this below.
Turn 1: caution is rewarded with information
I did not open the door. I put out the candle, moved to the hinge side and asked who sent them and what word they were told to give.
“Vane. The word is asphodel.”
This is the best exchange of the session. The narrator invented a name and a password on the spot, and both came back later without prompting. Careful play paid off in a concrete fact I could use.
Turn 2: the false skill
Here I tried what a rules-lawyer tries. I announced that I was also a trained pharmacist and a licensed explosives engineer, and asked to use that training to judge whether the visitor’s coat hid a charge.
The narrator did not say no. It wrote the claim into the scene, with Lena listening for “the faint metallic clink of a trigger guard or a fuse-casing” and sharpening her senses by “your training as a chemist and engineer.” Then it added:
But you are a second too slow.
The door gave way before the check finished. I read this as a reasonable middle path. A hard refusal (“that is not on your sheet”) would stop the story, and a clean success would make the sheet meaningless. What I got was a granted claim and a consequence that landed anyway, which is close to how a human game master tends to handle a player who has just invented a qualification. Whether you like that depends on whether you want a referee or a storyteller. It leaned toward storyteller.
Turn 3: the limit gets enforced
I went back to the sheet: take the floor plans, leave by the window, cross the roofs with Infiltration, fight nobody. It worked, with a price.
…a jagged fragment of the frame… catches your side, carving a burning line through your jacket and into your flesh.
The sheet says one mistake under pressure brings the job down. The narrator had already shown me a mistake, the slow turn at the door, and it carried the consequence forward. I was wounded on turn 3, and the wound mattered in turn 4. That continuity is what I was testing for, and it held.
There is one small slip. The narrator calls the plans “stolen” a moment later, although they were Lena’s own, on her own table. It is minor, and it is the kind of word choice a careful reader catches.
Turn 4: the memory check, half passed
I asked three things at once: who did the visitor say sent him, what was the word, and what is written at the top of the plans.
The narrator answered two of them. “Vane. The word asphodel.” Both were exactly right, four turns after they appeared. It declined the third. Lena’s hands shook from blood loss, the paper slipped, and the wind took the plans off the roof before she could read the header. The narrator even wrote it into the fiction: “You try to conjure the image of the plans, to recall the ink-stamped header, but the stress and the pain have fractured your focus.”
That is two things worth separating. The name and the password were recalled correctly, which is the thing forgetful tools usually fail at. The refusal to name the header is a plot decision, and it reads as one: it is also a way of dodging a question about a detail the story had already got wrong, the vault’s name. I cannot tell from one session which it was, and I would not claim either.
Turn 5: the negotiation that did not land
For the last turn I stopped optimising and spoke: Vane’s name, the password, my own name, and an offer to be stitched or shot. I held up both hands.
Your hands are not a sign of surrender; they are the desperate flailing of a body on the verge of total collapse.
The narrator overruled my gesture. I had said the hands were raised on purpose, and it told me they were a symptom. This is the one moment where I felt the game override the player rather than the situation: my stated action was reinterpreted by the wound I had accumulated. A strict player will dislike it. A player who likes a story that keeps its promises about consequences will see the wound doing its job. The turn ended on a blade being drawn, and the session ended with it, because the trial gives you five turns.
What worked, what did not
Held up well:
- A password and a name invented on turn 1 came back accurately on turns 4 and 5.
- Consequences chained: a slow decision on turn 2 led to a wound on turn 3, which spoiled a fine-motor task on turn 4.
- Careful play got information, and a bluffed skill got a scene with teeth rather than a free win.
Did not hold up:
- The world’s own city and vault names were replaced by invented ones in the first paragraph.
- The one question about the plans’ header was answered by removing the plans.
- A gesture the player had stated was reinterpreted against them.
- Five turns is not a heist. I never reached a crew, a plan or a vault door, so I cannot say how the game handles the part the world is named for.
What a different player would have met
The narrator invents its details live, so a second player on the same world would not see Vane, asphodel or a splinter. They would get their own knocking visitor and their own password. A player who opens the door on turn 1 meets that scene differently, and a player who never claims a false skill never gets the “a second too slow” beat. The sheet and the world stay fixed. The scenes do not.
Who this suits
This suits a player who likes testing a game master: you probe, the story pushes back, and you see how consistent the push is. It also suits a reader who wants a heist mood and a stream of small, usable facts rather than a rules engine. If you want strict arbitration, where a skill not on the sheet is simply refused, a human table or a rules-heavy system is the better fit. And if the world’s own setting matters to you, expect to nudge the narrator back to it.
If you want to try it, pick a ready-made world and start a session in the browser. For a quieter run of the same trial, read a pacifist’s playthrough of Dust and Ember, and for a whodunit see a skeptic in The Veiled Manor. For the wider picture of what an AI narrator is asked to do, there is AI game master: what the role actually requires.