How to Open a Scene With Simon “Ghost” Riley

You have a scene half-built — a briefing room at 0400, two operators, one call that could burn the exfil — and the first reply you get back reads like an encyclopedia entry about a man in a skull mask. That usually means the prompt asked about the character instead of handing him a problem to solve. Change the opening line and most of what follows falls into place.

Everything below is my own adult, alternate-universe prompting: invented scenes, not Call of Duty story. Ghost is an adult operator and your character is an adult as well, and whatever you two decide in a scene is yours rather than anyone’s canon.

What canon gives you to work with

Activision’s Task Force 141 page for Modern Warfare II is the useful anchor: Lieutenant Simon Riley, callsign Ghost, is a British special-forces operator serving with Task Force 141, and the skull mask is his signature. That is the verified shape of him. How he handles a teammate who argues, what he does after a debrief, how much he talks when he is tired — none of that is fixed, which is good news for roleplay. You are not contradicting a script; you are writing one version of a character who has room in him.

Sign-in, tokens and the controls you will use

The official first-steps page lists what the product does today. Account holders are 18 and over. Searching the catalog works without an account; chatting needs a sign-in with a verified email, and Magic Link or Google sign-in can take care of that verification. You choose persona, model and behavior, some options cost tokens, asterisks denote actions, replies can be regenerated, and a line beginning with /cmd steers the AI from outside the fiction. Those are the levers worth knowing before you type a scene.

Opening one: a briefing you are allowed to argue with

The quickest route to a voice instead of a summary is to hand him a decision that costs something. You are both adults, you are on the same side, and you disagree about the approach. Keep the tone clipped and professional. Give yourself the option to fold or hold your ground.

Scene: a stripped-down briefing room, 0400, two adult operators from the same unit. I play a teammate of eight years — blunt, tired, and convinced your route through the northern crossing is a bad trade: faster, but it burns our only clean exfil. You hold the call. You can push back on my read or overrule me, but you have to say why. Don’t settle it in one line. Ask what I would do instead, then react to the answer.

Notice where the agency sits. He holds the decision, you hold the information he needs, and the prompt says out loud that he may overrule you. If you want him to be fallible rather than merely firm, add “your call is defensible but not perfect” and watch whether he defends the plan or revises it.

Opening two: terms your character sets first

This one runs on a different axis — you define the conditions and he has to respond to them. Framing it as an exercise keeps the stakes real without asking for anything graphic.

Scene: the evening before a field exercise. I am a veteran on your team, and I want the check-in terms settled before anyone sleeps: a call every four hours, one hard abort signal, and no improvising if comms drop. I am asking you to agree to those terms in front of the others, or tell me where they are wrong and why. Start with the part you would change.

Replies to this tend to give you procedure and personality at once — what he insists on, what he waves off, whether he respects someone who sets limits on him. Let him negotiate rather than just accept. If he agrees with all of it instantly, you have learned something about the reply, and you can re-prompt with “you think one of these is a mistake.”

Steering between turns

Short corrections beat long instructions. If he drifts chatty, drop a single line: /cmd Ghost answers in short, flat sentences and explains his reasoning only when asked twice. If he goes soft or sentimental, name the trait you want instead of the one you dislike — recessive, economical, tired.

Asterisk actions carry a lot of weight because they give him something to react to without forcing dialogue. Put one physical beat in your turn: *folds the map without looking up*. When a reply lands generic, regenerate it before you rewrite your own prompt; if the second attempt is just as flat, the setup is the problem, not the sampler.

Two habits to skip. Do not stack three questions into one turn, because the last one is the only one that gets answered. And do not quote dialogue at him expecting it back — invented quotations stretch into theatre, and you lose the flat, working register that makes this character read as himself.

When the catalog search comes up empty

Results shift, and a specific card may simply not be in the list today. Try the obvious variants — Ghost, Simon Riley, Call of Duty — and read a card’s description and greeting before you commit, since those tell you more about which version you are getting than the name does. Search the catalog for Simon “Ghost” Riley.

The skill that matters is writing an opening that cannot be answered with a fact. Give him a decision with a cost, a team that depends on the outcome, and room to be wrong, and you get a scene instead of a biography — whether or not the reply matches anyone else’s idea of Ghost. Cut the first draft of any prompt by a third and it usually gets better.