The house has stood here forever.

Not literally. In a squint-and-you’ll-what-we-mean sort of Ship of Theseus kind of way.

Bits have burned down, fallen over, been demolished, rebuilt, extended, bombed, modernised and subjected to several regrettable interior designers. But people have occupied this patch of ground since before anyone thought to write down what they were doing.

One way or another, some of those folk never left.

The Way Of Ghosts

Today is the first of four in a sequence handling a new Genre Setup for Sanction. As with all the previous examples, I was inspired by the RPGaDay prompts for this year, skirting around the notion that they might be used to consider (or create) characters by providing you with a way to create some of your own.

We have prompts for Directness, Desire, Promise and Charity. Something about those words struck me with a sense of the country house themes of Downton Abbey, but I didn’t want to take that tack precisely—not least because I don’t really watch this sort of Upstairs, Downstairs-type drama and I wanted a twist.

If you take a country house with a twist and lean into the notion of Charity as being keen to help, I found myself thinking of Ghosts¹. Now, that’s something I could take a swing at, with a touch of nostalgia for the childhood classic Rentaghost², too. A game about ghosts trying their best to help in a world that has moved on a lot since they passed over to the other side.

The setup feels like an opportunity to solve puzzles, engage in investigations, overcome hurdles, dabble in roleplay, brish against character-on-character conflict, and dust the whole lot with some gentle humour (or not so gentle ribald hijinx if your name happens to be Julian Fawcett).

1. This isn’t the first time that I’ve thought that something Ghosts-inspired would make a perfect fit for Sanction. The ensemble cast of varied characters with a different profession, time period and cause of death was just screaming to be transformed into the three stages of a Lifepath (Spoiler! Guess what’s coming in Wednesday’s post). On top of that, the ghosts themselves are highly dependent on each other, despite there own sense of self and certainty that they could make it alone, and they have talents and abilities that ultimately work best when chained together rather than used separately. No ghost is an island.
2. There are two aspects here that connect with my nostalgic reference to Rentaghost. The spooks and ghouls, and freaks and fools that make up the player character party are (A) here to help and (B) visible by default. Against the base principle of Ghosts, we’re not dealing with a group that cannot be seen. Visibility is switched on by default, but the characters can opt to disappear if the need arises.

By Appointment

By Appointment casts the player characters as ghosts haunting an English country house and its grounds. Each comes from a different period and possesses only an imperfect understanding of everything that happened afterwards. A Neolithic craftsperson might share the location with a Regency cook, Victorian governess, First World War orderly and 1980s electrician.

They have become an unconventional household staff, protecting the estate and its current occupants from problems mundane, supernatural and frequently ridiculous.

Directness, Desire and Promise are their Resources. Charity provides something everyone can give but nobody can keep for themselves. But, we’ll cover that in tomorrow’s post.

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How has Directness impacted your character? I look forward to reading about it in your RPGaDay post.

#RPGaDAY2026