The Morning Routine
The adventure For A Rainy Day opens a trilogy for The Agency—a sequence I’m currently continuing through playtesting Self Checkout. The long-term plan is to publish all three parts as a single, multi-session arc: something that can anchor a campaign rather than simply kick one off.
But before any conspiracy unfolds, before any dead drops or damaged psyches surface, there’s the morning routine.
And that, strangely enough, might be my favourite part.
Three Fragments of a Life
It probably warrants stepping back and considering how Sanction handles character creation.
The system uses a stripped-back lifepath approach. Every character is defined by three formative elements:
- A Past — an occupation, a background, a fragment of upbringing.
- A Diversion — the life-altering incident that knocked everything off course.
- An Influence — a goal, a motivation, or the faint trail they now follow.
Those three fragments grant abilities, but more importantly, they offer hooks. Small, suggestive pieces of text. Just enough scaffolding for the player to build from.
In The Dee Sanction, this represents the Agent’s original profession, the occult society that led them astray, and the forbidden book that rewired their thinking.
For The Agency, the Past is the division they trained in back at headquarters, The Factory. The Diversion is the event that derailed them and pushed them into professional purgatory. The Influence? A magazine subscription—something aspirational and faintly absurd. A lifestyle they might reach, if they survive long enough to collect a modest service pension.
It’s bleak. It’s bureaucratic. It’s hopeful in the smallest, saddest way.
And it works.
The USB Stick on the Train
From just those three fragments, personalities start to coalesce.
Maybe someone trained in Psych Evaluation—but left a USB stick on a train. Unencrypted notes. Sensitive assessments. A career-ending mistake.
Now they spend their days data-crunching milk deliveries to unrented properties in early-2000s Swindon. Exiled to the administrative margins (Ipswich or Milton Keynes usually). Sustained by glossy travel magazines promising warmer places and different lives.
You don’t need pages of backstory. You just need a bruise you can’t explain, a stain you can’t wash out, and a newspaper clipping tacked to your cathode ray tube monitor.
Who Gets to the Office First?
But even then, something more is required to bring the team into focus. That’s where the morning routine comes in.
Before the mission briefing. Before the inciting incident. Before the first wrong decision.
I ask: Who gets to the office first? Where do you stop on the way in?
The answers are never the same.
One character slept in the back of a van. Each morning, he applied generous deodorant, grabbed a newspaper from the newsagent, and walked briskly to a car park where a breakfast burrito vendor never needed to ask his order.
Another drove in—what car? Why that one?—and made a ritual of getting a proper coffee. Freshly ground. A small act of control. And from the same breakfast vendor.
Which naturally led to the question of why not get coffee at the office? Why does the third character never remember to replace the instant coffee jar in the office? What distracts them? What’s more important than remembering something so simple?
And just like that, they’re talking to each other. Everyone at the table has a connection in character and threads of a story they’re building as players.
They have a common purpose built on irritation, routine, and horrible habits.
Dysfunction by Design
The process does several things at once. It maps out the squalid office without directly describing it. It sketches the team’s social web. It highlights the fact that they function—and absolutely do not function—as a cohesive unit.
I always nudge toward the dysfunctional edge. There’s a reason these people are here.
Over time, the details accumulate:
- Failed relationships
- Breakfast rituals
- Wives and children
- Broken headlights
- Milk cartons and confectionery
- Walks in the park
- Liaisons in unexpected places
The pre-generated characters never feel repeated—even when they visibly are—because the routine reframes them each time. In a game about small failures inside large systems, each player charts something special from the mundane.
It Just Works
There’s nothing revolutionary here.
It isn’t new. It isn’t especially clever. It’s not even mechanical.
It’s just permission.
Permission for players to inhabit their characters before the plot arrives. Permission to define themselves through coffee, commuter habits, and poor life choices.
And from those ordinary beginnings, the extraordinary intrudes.
Every time.
And I don’t think I’ll ever tire of that.
The article was originally posted at Substack on February 23, 2026. Substack has become the infrequent home for my rambling about games, gaming, game mechanics, game moderation… just game stuff. You’re welcome to comment, subscribe, and follow me on Blue Sky if you feel like it.
You can find the whole in-print Sanction range at All Rolled Up and monitor the wider world of Sanction through the website or DriveThruRPG.
