In By Appointment, the player characters are the household’s ghosts: an accidental staff assembled across centuries. While there’s a dose of Downton Abbey to the setup, it’s primarily Ghosts with the visible by default setup of Rentaghost.

Directness, Desire and Promise are the character’s Resources. We’ll come to Charity later.

Directness

Ghosts have had plenty of time to lose patience. That wouldn’t be proper at all.

Directness represents decisiveness, physical certainty and the capacity to impose yourself upon a situation. It covers straightforward action, confrontation and those occasions when thinking about something any longer is unlikely to improve matters.

Directness rarely mean violence. The maid who simply tells the visiting medium to leave might be exercising precisely the same Resource as the Saxon warrior throwing himself at an intruding revenant. Both of them are exerting a firm sense of purpose and identity to get the job done, and that’s very much the essence of Directness.

There’s a sense of place as a community here, as well as the strong sense of identity.

Desire

Death does not stop you wanting things.

Desire measures passion, curiosity, ambition and an understanding of what motivates others. It drives persuasion and temptation, but also creative acts born from enthusiasm rather than careful consideration. There’s a wish to see order, a drive to collect achievements, an ardent focus on the poetic, and a singular need to keep everything just so.

Ghosts perhaps possess Desire more intensely than the living. They cannot eat the meal, kiss the handsome visitor, drive the sports car or finish raising their children. They can still desperately want to. When you’ve been around a few generations (a few hundred, for that matter), it’s the continued sense of yearning, love, or ambition that keeps you pressing on.

Or needing the TV switched on at 7.30 so you can catch the latest episode of Eastenders.

Promise

Some things survive death.

Promise measures duty, restraint, loyalty and the capacity to remain true to something despite pressure to do otherwise. A promise might have been spoken aloud, sworn before God, assumed through employment or simply made privately. Where Desire drives, Promise persists.

For a ghost, Promise can become existential. Perhaps the reason some spirits remain is that there is something they still believe they must do.

What is the game actually about?

While the Resources are mostly about the individual ghosts, the group have a purpose in their home. That’s what the game is about.

The living owners might change across centuries. Generations arrive, grow up and leave. The ghosts persist. Their adventures concern protecting their home and its occupants from wandering supernatural intrusions, troublesome interlopers, occasional burglars, heartless developers, paranormal investigators, family disasters and things dug up during renovations that should very definitely have remained beneath the orangery.

A By Appointment campaign—unlike the TV inspiration—can straddle time, popping back and forth. This might actually be an opportunity for troupem play and a dose of West Marches¹ for ghosts; you can have adventures at different points in time with players trying out ghosts at different points in their existence. If a player can’t make it one week, maybe have the adventure deal with a time before they “arrived” or after they’ve departed.

The home lies at the heart of things and the household rules.

1. I have touched upon the West Marches-style game in my Substack in reference to The Dee Sanction, so for the purposes of extending my reach and locking in your interest, I’ll link you to my post and you can follow me down the rabbithole from there, via The Dee Marches.

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What Desires drive your character and to what end? I look forward to reading about it in your RPGaDay post.

#RPGaDAY2026