Girl Underground, one of the most popular campaigns among the projects from last February’s Kickstarter Zine Quest initiative, is an RPG zine in which you play one of the titular Girl’s strange traveling companions as you journey through a whimsical realm. It’s not a direct adaptation of a mass media property, instead it is “inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Spirited Away, Labyrinth, and similar tales.” Using the Powered by the Apocalypse RPG system, you portray one of the strange companions and, at certain intervals, you take turns playing The Girl. In this fantasy game, The Girl is a 12-year-old from the late 1800s or early 1900s (or whenever you feel works best) that came to the Underground (think Oz or Wonderland) to explore this world, “question how girls ‘ought’ to behave,” and complete a quest before returning home.
Why Cover This?
I’m a fan of RPG zines. When Kickstarter’s zine initiative was announced, I did a great deal of coverage for EN World and the Tessera Guild spotlighting it. During the Kickstarter campaign, 1,531 backers pledged $16,243 against a $500 goal to bring this zine from Hedgemaze Press LLC to life. Written by Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross, Girl Underground was one of the hits lifted up by an audience eager for this type of Powered by the Apocalypse RPG. It stands as the campaign with the most backers of any of the 2019 Zine Quests and it’s in the top five for funding. Through that, this 48-page black-and-white with a green cardboard cover zine came to life.
Safety and Openness
This zine spends a considerable portion of its word count ensuring everyone has a safe, fun, positive, and rewarding experience while playing. For safety/comfort options, they recommend Brie Beau Sheldon’s Script Change. This toolkit lets you do more than skip issues like the X-Card, it allows you to consider your options in a more granular way.
Other areas of openness include The Girl’s gender and how it’s a decision for the table. “During character creation, discuss if you want to explore gender identity in your game.” There’s an invitation to cast as wide a net as you’d like on the identity of The Girl. These options, among others, make the game inclusive and open to all players.
Let’s Talk About Your Manners There, Buddy!
As a group, you’ll create the issues going on in the Underground, moods and difficulties for The Girl and her companions to deal with. These obstacles should be broad like “gloom, lies, greed, exclusion, theft, division, royalty, or curses.”
This game is based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, subversive stories written during an era of codified female etiquette that resulted in righteous female rebellion. To capture the spirit of that rebellion, the table will write eight manners – rules meant to stifle young women – on index cards and, through The Girl, obliterate each one, shredding it, and allowing The Girl her freedom.
Manners, these oppressions, are an incredibly important part of the game as the people and places that are introduced should be based on the selected Manners. For instance, a Manner might be “Young ladies must never talk back to their elders” which could lead to an overbearing elder that is wrong and must learn from The Girl and her companions. Another option is “Young ladies must never take up too much space” and being placed in a tight space that they must break free from.
The zine notes that Manners may be uncomfortable and could ruin the experience for some. Thus, when creating them, they must be discussed openly and any that would harm the experience for any player should be tossed.
As Manners are overcome, positive Beliefs replace them. Beliefs offer a great mechanical advantage for The Girl, when using her Stand Strong in Your Convictions Move, they add one die for each Belief that applies, roll them all and choose the highest two dice. In PbtA, that’s a power Move.
Powered by the Apocalypse and Gameplay
This game runs on Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Powered by the Apocalypse system. For those that are not aware, the system requires 2d6 plus a stat against three tiered ranges. Roll too low, the GM gets a move. Roll in the middle, you succeed but there’s a cost. Roll high enough and you succeed outright. The bigger consideration is the conversation, the players have more narrative control over what happens in a PbtA game than some.
For The Girl, she moves between players any time they wish to pass her on to another player or you introduce your strange companion to the scene.
There’s a section of the zine, “The Game,” that outlines the flow of the game including expected times to complete each section. Three pages that diagram exactly how to go from getting together to picking everything you’ll need to the aspects of the journey and conclusion. There’s two pages of example play. This game is meant for new, and lightly experienced, players to step in and pick up the dice with a solid understanding of what they’re getting into.
Among RPGs, this one requires a Story Guide (GM) of no small talent. Obviously, with any RPG the GM has to be talented (and they are), but this one calls for some extra work. The world and story must present obstacles that relate to the Manners and those obstacles have to be options that can be defeated by The Girl’s beliefs. That’s a lot of parts that need to come together for a GM that will learn the Manners and setting at the start of the session.
Strange Companions
As mentioned, each player plays The Girl as well as one of her companions:
- The Beastie: Something between Aslan and the Cowardly Lion or your own take
- The Construct: The Tin Woodsman
- The Faun: Anything from a mermaid to a genie, something magical but pseudo-human
- The Mythic: A dragon or phoenix or another epicly fantastic creature
- The Ogre: Any type of gentle giant
- The Runaway: Peter Pan and the Lost Boys
Locations
The zine includes a number of locations to be the Underground. These have titles like: The Adventurer’s Tomb, The Bizarre Bazaar, The Dragon’s Den, The Fairy Ring, The Hall of Ten Thousand Masks, The Painted Circus, The Restless Wreckage, The Slumbering City, The Teahouse, The Throne of the Crowing King, The Whispering Willows, and The Wolfwood. Each is unique and help to recreate that turn of the last century fantasy world.
Should You Play?
Where this game knocks it out of the park is that Alice and Dorothy are the stars of their stories. That focus makes many games dull for the players “stuck” playing the Cheshire Cat or the Scarecrow. By sharing the role of The Girl, no one hogs the spotlight, and everyone gets a chance to shine. If you’re looking for a way to tell a fantasy tale akin to those classics where you are a group fighting against society in the surrealist fashion, Girl Underground is for you.
Girl Underground from Hedgemaze Press
By Lauren McManamon and Jesse Ross
Available at DriveThruRPG
NOTE: This article includes affiliate links to DriveThruRPG. As a DriveThruRPG Affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases.
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