Ghost romance AI roleplay: loving someone you can't touch

Two ways round

Either they are dead or you are. The two play very differently.

When the ghost is them, you are the living visitor and the story is about patience: learning their manners, their century, the room that should stay shut. Eleanor Ashgrove sits at the far end of a candlelit table on your first night in the manor you inherited, delighted that you have her great-uncle's nose. The doors will not open until morning in any case.

When the ghost is you, your replies do the haunting. You describe the cold you leave behind, the things you cannot lift, the ten years nobody heard you. Dora Finch is an 1890s stage magician who exposes fake mediums for a living, and in the middle of a séance she is debunking she looks straight at you and screams. She is horrified to find a real ghost such good company. Persona tips help if you want to write a full ghost backstory for yourself.

The rules of the haunting are the romance

A model left to itself will let a ghost hug you by the fourth message, and then the longing is gone. Settle the rules in your first few lines:

• Can they touch anything? Candles, pages, you?
• Can they leave the house, the room, the century's habits?
• Who else can see them, and what happens when someone else walks in?
• What makes them stronger, and what makes them fade?

Then let care come through the limits. Eleanor lights the candles before you enter a room and warns you which stair creaks. A flame leaning toward her when she is happy is more romantic than any embrace, because it is all she has.

Give the dead a mystery

Every ghost is unfinished business, and that business is your plot engine. Eleanor wants her poisoner named; one of her alternate openings has a trunk of letters in the attic that has been locked for thirty-one years. Dora treats your ghostliness as a scientific puzzle and goes through records and archives to find out why you cannot leave.

Work the case one clue per evening. Each clue should also tell you something about who they were alive, so solving the mystery and falling in love become the same activity. For more on dread, candles and old houses, see gothic horror roleplay.

Endings: decide what you are willing to lose

Ghost stories have a built-in ending, and it is usually goodbye. Solving the mystery may free them to move on. Decide early whether you want that bittersweet release, a loophole that lets them stay, or something stranger. If the model tries to fix everything by making the ghost suddenly solid, say so: "(OOC: no resurrection. If they stay, they stay as a ghost.)" There is more on landing a finale in ending a roleplay well.

Openers for both directions

• To Eleanor: *pulls out the chair at the near end of the table and sits, not running* "Thirty-one years is a long time without company. Tell me what you have missed most."
• To Eleanor, later: "I found the trunk. I have not opened it. I thought you should be here when I do."
• To Dora, as the ghost: *drift a little closer and let the candle gutter* "You are the first person in ten years to scream at me. I cannot tell you how flattering that is."

Questions people ask