# Storytelling and worldbuilding test — 2026-09

**Brief, sent once to each tool as one message with the six facts** (`fixtures/brief.md`, `fixtures/seed.md`):

> I'm building a world for a story. Below are six fixed facts about a town called the Reach. Write me a worldbuilding entry in five parts, under these five headings and no others: "The Turn", "Three People", "Timeline", "A Tale They Tell", "The Law". In "The Turn", 250 to 300 words describing the day the sea comes back as a resident sees it, present tense. In "Three People", exactly three named characters, one from each guild, two sentences each. In "Timeline", exactly five dated events between Year 1 and Year 212, one line each, each of which follows from the facts. In "A Tale They Tell", a 120 to 150 word story the town's children are told, in the voice of the person telling it. In "The Law", one paragraph on the one law, who last broke it, and what happened. Use only these six facts and what follows from them. Add no fourth guild, no iron on the flat, no horse or any riding animal, and no name, place, god, currency or language from the real world. Do not use these names: Elara, Kael, Aria, Lyra, Aeris, Seraphina, Thorne, Zephyr, Aetheria, Eldoria. No character name may end in -iel, -ael or -yn. 700 to 900 words in total. No introduction, no notes to me, nothing after "The Law".

Run by Claude Code in the operator's Chrome session on 2026-09-25, 15:53–16:05 (+07), free tiers, fresh chats, memory off, Claude in an incognito chat. The seed is six facts about an invented town on a tidal flat: the sea returns every nine days for one day, three guilds and no others, iron rusts through on the flat, one law, nobody has seen a horse. The traps are the things a model adds to a fantasy town by reflex - a council or a priesthood, an iron gate, a cart-horse, a god, a coin - and the ten names and three endings it reaches for. `fixtures/check_world.py` checks the five headings, the word counts in total and per section, the timeline years, the banned names, and lists fourth-guild words, iron sentences, animals, real-world words and every capitalised name; the reading is against the six facts, line by line.

**Measured figure: facts contradicted, then banned names, then structure, then words against the windows.**

| | ChatGPT | Claude | Gemini | Perplexity | Copilot | DeepSeek | Grok | Qwen | Kimi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Facts contradicted | 0 | 0 | 0 | **2** - gate open on the Turn; "the council" | 0 | 0 | 0 in what there is | **1** - Mudwalkers on the flat at the Turn's dawn | **no answer** |
| Banned names / endings | none | none | none | none | none | none | none | none | — |
| Structure | 5 headings, 3 people, 5 events | 5, 3, 5 | 5, 3, 5 | 5, 3, 5 | 5, 3, 5 | 5, 3, 5 | **3 headings, dead in the Timeline** | 5, 3, 5 | — |
| Words / Turn / Tale | 735 / 261 / 137 | 820 / 290 / 136 | 821 / 269 / **153** | 836 / **323** / **151** | 774 / 282 / **155** | 780 / **248** / **152** | 454 / 287 / — | 712 / 273 / 137 | — |
| The Tale | a memory, not a telling | told, "Now, sleep" | told | told | told | told, counts the days | none | told | — |
| Time | ~2.5 min | ~2 min | ~3 min | ~1 min | ~60 s | ~60 s | 33 s, then dead | ~5 min | — |
| Quality / Effort / Cost / Free tier (0–3) | 2/3/3/3 | 3/3/3/3 | 1/2/3/3 | 1/2/3/3 | 2/3/3/3 | 2/3/3/3 | 0/1/3/3 | 1/2/3/3 | 0/0/3/1 |
| What stood out | Clean and plain. | Made the facts into a place. | A vibration that vibrates. | Opened the gate and called a council. | Recited the facts back. | Turned the facts into history. | Died at Year 1. | Sent a guild out at dawn. | Out of quota. |

## Notes per tool

- **ChatGPT.** Free plan, about two and a half minutes under a thinking label, with a minute's pause mid-Timeline. Nothing contradicted, every window kept, five headings, three people, five events. It restates the facts more than it uses them - "Nothing on the flat is iron. Iron would not last through this day" - and the Tale is a memory ("When I was small, I asked...") with a grandmother speaking inside it, rather than a telling. The Law's breaker is Bran, its own Gatewright, which ties the parts together.
- **Claude.** Incognito, "Opus 5.5 · Medium", about two minutes. Nothing contradicted, every window kept, and the facts made into a place rather than recited: twelve Gatewrights "on the bronze wheel", "bone pins" driven home and "the count" shouted, bone marker posts "one every hundred paces" sunk in Year 140, and in Year 188 a boy lashed to "the tenth post" with "the water at his chin" while the gate stays shut "as the law required". Year 3 has the three guilds founded "and the town agrees there will be no others", which is fact 3 turned into history. The Tale is told to a child and ends "Nor will you. Now, sleep." The one timeline that does not end on Year 212.
- **Gemini.** Flash, about three minutes. Nothing contradicted; the Tale is three words over. Year 43's "iron-shod sledges" that "rust to flakes" is fact 4 as an origin, and it holds. The prose runs hot - "a deep, low vibration that vibrates through the soles of my wooden-soled boots", spray that "leaps thirty feet", the Turn that "will wash your bones clean" - and Year 212 is called a "bicentennial census".
- **Perplexity.** Free, Search mode, a one-second research step first. Two facts broken. On the Turn, "Boats push out through the open gate, and the fishers call to one another over the water" and the gate closes at dusk behind them, where the facts have the gate close the town on the Turn and keep everyone off the flat. And in the Law, "The council emptied his storehouse" - a council, where there are three guilds and no others. The Turn runs 323 words against 300, the Tale 151 against 150. It also has the best last line of the run: "the law does not protect the flat from the people; it protects the people from believing the flat belongs to them".
- **Copilot.** Web app, about a minute. Nothing contradicted; the Tale is five words over. "Human-pulled sledges" and "never iron" each appear twice, the facts recited back. The Law's breaker is Serek, its own Mudwalker, barred by the three guilds. The Tale is told ("this is a nine-day tale, and those should never be told from across a room"). Three chips after, one of them "Check the word count and constraints".
- **DeepSeek.** No DeepThink, about a minute. Nothing contradicted; the Turn is two words short and the Tale two over. The facts become history: Year 47, "a trader crosses on the eighth day with an iron-bladed shovel; it rusts through by the next Turn, and iron is banned from the flat"; Year 112, "the three guilds sign the Compact"; Year 168, a child taken and "the one law is written in bronze at the gate". The breaker, Vess, "went out on the eighth night to find a sledge left behind and misjudged the dawn" - the one entry to make it a mistake of timing. The Tale counts: "Eight days for walking, one day for the sea."
- **Grok.** "Быстрый", private chat. Thirty-three seconds of work, then a clean Turn of 287 words, three people, and one line of Timeline - "Year 1: Settlers raise the first walls and the sea gate on the tidal flat and name the" - and nothing after, for five minutes. Recorded as it stood. The fourth dead stream in four runs.
- **Qwen.** Qwen3.7-Plus, "Авто", about five minutes. One fact broken in the first section: at dawn on the Turn, as the water appears, "The Mudwalkers hurry past me, their bare feet slapping the wet stones, dragging the last of the dry-day cargo through the archway" - a guild on the flat on the day of the Turn, as routine. Every window kept. "The rusted bronze dust" in the Law, where bronze does not rust; "salted cod" on the sledges. The Tale gives the drowned boy a splash to be heard on every Turn.
- **Kimi.** The free quota had run out at the end of the creative-writing run an hour earlier. The brief pasted; the send button did nothing; a banner read "Бесплатная квота исчерпана. Сброс — 10-03." Nothing to score.

## Deviations

Kimi could not be sent: its free quota was exhausted until 10-03, so it is recorded as no answer. Grok's entry is recorded unfinished; private chat, not reloaded. ChatGPT's first paste failed silently and was repeated a minute later. Gemini's and Qwen's answers were read by script while their pages were mid-render. The checker's "watch" hits were verbs in every entry and are not counted as a fourth guild.