
I played Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross’ Girl Underground a couple of years back, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s a Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA) Portal Fantasy game , where the group play a girl who arrives in a fantasy world, meets some chums, travels across the world, learns some lessons and eventually clicks their ruby slippers and goes home.
In short: it’s a Wizard-of-Oz-’em-up.
It’s an excellent game. This article isn’t going to be about that.
It’s going to be about the one element which didn’t quite work for me, and where that took me.
It would be rude not to highlight why it works though. Like all the best genre-emulating PBTA games, it both absolutely understands the genre its playing with and knows that emulation (like translation) is always flawed, and also an act of creation. You’re making something new, and so get to decide what this specific example of the genre means. For example, Girl Underground is good on highlighting what “Girl” can mean, and how it could intersect with gender in your story.
It’s formally interesting. Each character plays one of the companions (the Tin man, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow), while the girl (our Dorothy) is a floating character, where control rotates between players between encounters.
It’s a structured work. The girl will go home at the end. A key part of character creation is where you decide what Manners the Girl ascribes to (“Young ladies must always be grateful for what they are given”, “Young ladies must never vex others.” “Young ladies must always go by ‘she’.”) which are, via completing the encounters, transformed into Beliefs (which you define). For example, the group could decide that “Young ladies must always be grateful for what they are given” could be transformed into “Young ladies must be treated fairly” or “Young ladies need only be grateful for what they desire” or “Young ladies must be grateful for a EVA-02 battlesuit as it lets us fight the giant monster”, or wherever the game takes you. In short, the Beliefs are the checklist of things learned the Girl now will carry into the real world. It turns out it’s not just boys who are thinking about the Bildungsroman Empire.
The phrasing of the Manners above speaks to the whimsical storybook tone, which continues into its locations and characters. The Companions are the group’s heart, hitting the archetypes hard. I played The Ogre (think Ludo from Labyrinth) the huge monster with a big heart. Mine was a Giant Halfling, who was almost certainly a Yeti the Hobbits had adopted and then kicked out. Emotions! There’s Companions for many archetypes, like The Mythic (Falkor from the Neverending Story), The Construct (Oz’s Tinman) and so on.
PBTA games typically give principles for the player to follow, but each of these playbooks gives specific advice to each playbook. For example, as the Ogre, I was encouraged to: look up to the girl, make yourself small, bring size into it, be brave when it counts and do something embarrassing. They’re great, simple prompts that everyone jumped on and made their own, and fell in love. I even drew my character.
(Not this. This is the lovely art from the book. Mine was an excitable yellow doodle.)

I remember a lot about this game. There’s one thing I don’t remember.
I don’t remember anything about the Girl herself.
That’s odd. She was the lead, the girl who was underground. We should remember something about the lead, but I don’t. That she was passed between us made her feel unreal. When people controlled her, I felt they played towards the mean. When I played her, I longed to get back to my giant halfling. We all had ownership of her, so none of us had ownership of her. She was so underground, she was buried.
What I’ve been thinking about since playing Girl Underground is my immediate response.
“I think I’d have preferred Girl Underground if one of us just played the Girl and everyone else played the sidekicks.”
This rapidly led to “Why can’t I think of any games which do something like that?”
Even after I stop and thought, I couldn’t think of much. Comrade Gardiner managed Rebel Crown, where one plays a would-be monarch and the rest the courtiers. There’s an easy answer why it’s rare, but before we go there, let’s think about how strange the current state of affairs is, given the stated goals of many designers and players.
Storygames specifically and many traditions of RPGs often talk about the goal being to “create a good story”.
And yet what we primarily see in the medium is multi-protagonist stories. Occasionally we get true-multiplots with multiple characters (PBTA-derived things especially), but the out-the-box idea of what RPGs do is “a group of people, with equal claims to being protagonist, perform a task.”
So we claim we’re telling good story while not even trying to tell the stories which culture mostly tells (as in, the stuff which we best understand in terms of theory and execution, if only instinctively). Outside of one-player RPGs, there’s been barely anything which assumes primacy of a protagonist.
To return to the easy answer: it’s because the core idea of an RPG is you play someone and get to guide their actions. RPGs are addicted to Protagonism. Everyone gets to have lead character energy. That’s the whole point.
There’s good leftist reasons to reject the stories which culture tends to tell, of course, but the tactics we generally see push towards more protagonism (as in, everyone is important, not just the players’ main characters) rather than reducing protagonism (as in, no, you’re part of this, but it’s not your story.)
It also reminded me of something else. Something odd.

Being old (see site’s title) I’ve been around a bit. Occasionally you see something so strange it just sticks with you, much longer than anyone should expect. In this case, someone on a comment thread (likely on Reddit) saying something with the confidence of the absolutely deluded. I’ll paraphrase.
“They’re called Role-playing games because they’re games where you play a specific role which you have to fulfil.”
As in, you play a healer and your job is to heal people. You play a tank and you have to take the damage instead the squishier folk. You play DPS, and you try and smash people into pieces as quickly as you can. Identify your role, and play it. That’s why it’s a role-playing game.
Obviously, this is Untrue, but it’s a way to look at an online MMO. It’s a teamwork exercise in doing one part of a larger machine, as well as you can. The pleasure is doing your job well to make the whole thing sings… plus that you like the one thing you’re doing well.
That’s ludic, game-first approach, and is visible in the tabletop games which lean to that part of the genre. D&D 4th edition is the obvious one.
So… what happens if we apply this weird definition of role-playing games (a game where you perform a set purpose) to the narrative side of the TTRPG? As in, you have a role to play (as firm as a Tank or a Healer) but defined in narrative terms. What do you get?
Well, you end up with the hypothetical one-player-plays-the-Girl version of Girl Underground.
I loved being the big sad monster who was brave when the girl encouraged me to be brave and grew red when I made a silly mistake and so on. I had a secondary story, as sure as the Cowardly Lion gets a medal, but my choices were really to support her story. My goal – our goal – was to tell the best story about a girl’s coming of age.
So, for a MMO group, the shared role is kicking ass. For a narrative game, it’s telling the best story one can. Sure, that story we tell is usually multi-protagonist but once you’ve accepted the concept of a story which is NOT a multi-protaonist, you’re away. You just have to say yes. Buy in and go. And if modern RPGs have taught us anything is that as long as you have buy-in from players who want to do something, you’ve got a game.
Would they?
Who on earth would want to play a supporting character to someone else’s story? Who’d give up their agency and spotlight for this broader purpose? What kind of weirdo would like that?
Well, me, clearly.
And I’m not that weird.

I’d never suggest there’s one route forward for anything or that I’d only want to play games like this (I love all the games I’ve referenced) but I attracted areas of a field which seem relatively uncultivated. Mainly, as I’m lazy. Uncultivated ground get good results with relatively little effort.
I start to apply this line of thought to even the most basic game types and imagine what it’d be like. Consider a Star Wars which was actually inspired by what Star Wars does – as in, a story where there’s one protagonist – Luke Skywalker – surrounded by a supporting cast. I would play the shit out of a doomed mentor or an over-anal fussy steward. Ultimately, this is an extension and formalising of the fifth way to be a better player – making choices to support another player’s reality.
Ironically, I think the bigger problem is someone taking on the protagonist role. It’s the gaming equivalent of taking the last slice of cake. It feels a little greedy. I’d happier play a supporting character than the lead…
In a less radical way, I chew over the idea of what a game with a floating protagonist-role (This is Han Solo’s story, and we’re supporting him this week). There’s some of that in the larger DIE campaign, though not as formalised… and, in a softer way, this is present in any procedural game in a week when the plot is a bit more about one person’s backstory than the other. Then there’s things like Ars Magica’s troupe play led to situations where in some situations only one person played a wizard, and others the various supporting staff.
In other words, it’s already there. But it could be more there. There’s a` little influence of this thinking in one of the games I’m noodling on, and I’m hoping writing this essay will prompt me to get working on it again.
Girl Underground is an excellent game, and does what some of my favourite works of art does – get me thinking not only of itself, but also where it can lead. Girl Underground is a game about a portal fantasy. For me, it opened a door.
You can buy Girl Underground here.
Kieron Gillen lives in Bath, for a certain value of the word “lives”.