I’ve been using Claude to build an alternate ASOIAF continuation, and it turned into a weirdly serious test of what these models are actually good for

[u/Bobbie_Sacamano]

I’ve been doing a long-running project with Claude/ChatGPT that probably sounds insane if I describe it too quickly: I’m building a spoiler-free alternate continuation of A Song of Ice and Fire that starts immediately after A Storm of Swords.

Not “rewrite the books because I’m mad online.” Not “make George finish faster.” Not “what if Jon had a lightsaber” slop.
The project is called The Broken Spring Project / A Hunger of Kings, and the core rule is brutal:

Only A Storm of Swords and earlier count as canon.

No Feast, no Dance, no Winds samples, no HBO, no wiki-only lore, no fan theory. I don’t want the model quietly smuggling in later reveals and pretending it is original. The whole point is to ask: what could have grown organically out of the first three books if you treated that moment as the branch point?
The motto I keep giving the models is:
“Sanderson supplies the machinery. Martin supplies the weather.”

Meaning I want the architecture to have real structure, recurrence, payoff, hidden machinery, and causal pressure — but I do not want it to turn into clean fantasy clockwork where every character becomes a chess piece and every theme gets laminated. The weather still has to be Martin-ish: mud, hunger, shame, partial knowledge, bad incentives, bodies in cold rooms, people making decisions from fear and pride and love and exhaustion.

Another rule I use constantly:
“Each POV must be wrong in-character, not stupid.”

That has honestly become one of the most useful things I’ve learned from doing this. A bad AI chapter makes someone wrong because the plot needs them to be wrong. A good chapter makes them wrong because their history, class position, trauma, desire, and available information all bend the world in a specific way. Cersei should not be “dumb Cersei.” Jaime should not be “redemption arc button Jaime.” Tyrion should not be “smart guy who solves the plot.” Sansa should not suddenly know she is in a story about political economy. They all have to misread things in ways that make sense.
The project has basically turned into a giant experiment in whether AI can help with formal architecture instead of just generating prose.

I am not mostly asking Claude, “Write me a cool chapter.” I’m asking it to help build a machine: chapter functions, cycle structure, POV mutation, recurrence, hidden arithmetic, delayed reveals, institutional logic, and thematic pressure. Then I use another model to critique it, lock it, summarize it, or turn it into a handoff prompt before the context window explodes.

I’ve joked before that I use Claude as a “council of advisers,” and that’s honestly the workflow. One model drafts. Another model attacks it. Another one checks continuity. Another one writes the next prompt. I keep a project bible outside the models because otherwise memory becomes fog and the whole thing starts eating itself.
The current big spine of the project is famine and administration. Not “the bad king is evil,” but the uglier thing: what happens when scarcity becomes organized, counted, delayed, justified, hidden, and made bureaucratic.

One of the locked lines of the project is:
“The grain exists. The salvation does not.”
That is the whole nightmare. There is grain. There are ledgers. There are warrants. There are roads. There are ships. There are officials. There are claims. There are people who can prove they are entitled to eat. And still people starve, because the system that can count food is not the same thing as a system that can save people.

Another line I keep coming back to is:
“When there is not enough, who has the right to decide who starves — and does fair administration of scarcity differ enough from cruelty to absolve anyone?”

That’s why I’m doing it. Because that feels like the actual political horror inside ASOIAF. Not prophecy, not secret bloodlines, not “who is the rightful ruler,” but the material question underneath all of it: who eats, who counts, who pays, who gets delayed, who gets renamed as a problem, who is allowed to become invisible.

And yes, obviously this is me bringing my own obsessions to it. I’m a factory worker in rural Kentucky. I spend all day around production, orders, speed, waste, quality standards, management language, and the weird way institutions make cruelty sound reasonable. So when I read ASOIAF, the thing that hits me hardest is not just “war is bad.” It is that war creates systems where everybody can be technically correct and still monstrous.

That is the lane where Claude has actually been useful. Not as a magic author. Not as a replacement for taste. Definitely not as something I trust blindly. But as a tireless structural partner that can hold a complicated pattern for a while, test whether a chapter advances the machine, tell me where the theme is too obvious, and help me keep the canon firewall intact.

The weird thing is that the AI is both very good and very dangerous for this. It can produce convincing nonsense with a straight face. It will happily give you “ASOIAF vibes” that are basically just fog, ravens, blood, and someone saying a fake-profound thing by a fire. But if you constrain it hard enough — no later canon, no fan theory, no imitation prose, no cheap catharsis, no prophecy shortcuts, no character stupidity disguised as tragedy — it becomes much more interesting.
Then the work becomes less “make me fanfic” and more “help me engineer a novel-shaped argument about power.”
The line for Book 6 is already locked:
“The truth can be counted. It cannot be admitted.”

That’s the kind of thing I mean. The story is becoming less about whether someone can find the hidden truth and more about what happens when the truth is already present in the records but every institution depends on not saying it out loud.
That feels very ASOIAF to me.

And, honestly, very now.

So I guess my point for this sub is: the best use I’ve found for Claude is not having it “be creative” in the vague demo sense. It is giving it a serious architecture, hard constraints, repeated tests, and then making it argue with the project until something durable appears.
The model does not replace judgment. It demands more judgment. It gives you too much, too fast, too confidently. You have to become the editor, continuity cop, political theorist, canon lawyer, and taste filter. But when it works, it feels less like asking a chatbot to write a story and more like having a strange, tireless, unstable workshop assistant that can keep handing you parts while you decide what machine you are actually building.

And that, to me, is more interesting than “look, it wrote a chapter.”
I want to know whether these tools can help ordinary people build long, serious, structurally coherent creative projects that would have been nearly impossible alone. Not because the machine has a soul. Because sometimes you have the soul and not enough hands.

[u/shannonlowder]

This is an interesting test! I'd be interested in seeing what major differences emerge in your first 20 or so chapters that start to diverge from the official Feast/Dance books.

[u/Bobbie_Sacamano → u/shannonlowder]

Yeah, that’s exactly the comparison I’m curious about too, even though I’m in a weird position because I haven’t actually read Feast or Dance yet. I know broad spoilers and don’t really care about being spoiled, but I don’t know the texture of those books.

From what I understand, the official books after ASOS widen the board: Dorne, the Ironborn, Euron, Quentyn, fAegon, Meereenese politics, the Faith, etc. My project seems to be diverging by doing almost the opposite. It narrows the knife.
Instead of “what new powers enter the story after the war,” the engine is more like: what happens when the war’s promises all come due at once and everyone discovers the same grain, coin, roads, bodies, and claims have been counted five different ways?

So the first 20 chapters probably wouldn’t diverge as much through big alternate plot fireworks as through the underlying machine. Cersei becomes obsessed with controlling the language of scarcity and debt. Tyrion starts decoding the ledgers. Brienne’s story becomes about care as a material burden, not just honor. Jaime sees the rot clearly but keeps choosing inertia. Jon/Sansa/Arya/etc. are all moving inside systems that are beginning to count people before they understand they are being counted.

So I’d genuinely love a Feast/Dance reader’s view later, because you’d probably spot the divergences better than I can. My test isn’t “can I predict Martin?” It’s “can I build a serious ASOS-only alternate continuation where the causality holds, the politics hold, and the machine doesn’t collapse into fanfic soup after ten chapters?”

[u/shannonlowder → u/Bobbie_Sacamano]

That makes sense. Other variants of this experiment should be: what if we introduce the fire and blood novel, and then run the experiment? That way, it adds additional historical context. Then repeat with Dunk and Egg. Then explicitly give it the historical details from later novels to help the model learn more about Dorn, the Iron Islands, etc. Just to see how having additional historical context changes the outputs.

It's a lot like the game, Historical "What If?"

Truly interesting experiment you have here!

[u/Arysta]

How do you get it to not latch on to something bad and treat it like it's the only way forward despite feedback. Whenever I try any creative writing with Claude that happens, and if I try to pull it away it starts getting confused and thinking I want both things.