Brontë RPG

Not a Bronte Role-Playing Game, although that might well be interesting. I guess most people would want to play Emily... There is in fact a Jane Austen RPG, so it is not impossible to image a Bronte RPG. Although the constriction of the lives of the Bronte's, which as the cliche goes "produced" their imaginative fiction, wouldn't be much fun.

Instead I want to suggest the Bronte's invented an RPG, or a proto-RPG. One of the famous things about the Bronte's is how, as children, they created their own fantasy worlds. In June 1826 their father gave to Branwell Bronte some toy soldiers. Charlotte Bronte tells what happened next:

Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers Emily & I jumped out of bed and I snat[c]hed up one & exclaimed this is the Duke of Wellington it shall be mine!! [Wellington was the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and he had defeated the French leader Napoléon Bonaparte at the famous Battle of Waterloo.] When I said this Emily likewise took one & said it should be hers when Anne came down she took one also. Mine was the prettiest of the whole & perfect in every part Emilys was a Grave looking fellow we called him Gravey. Anne's was a queer little thing very much like herself. [H]e was called Waiting Boy[.] Branwell chose Bonaparte.

A year later Branwell and Charlotte would create the imaginary kingdom of Glasstown, a colonial fantasy city in West Africa. They would later create Angria, an extension of Glasstown. Emily and Anne would start their own project, the kingdom of Gondal, rejecting the violence they found in Branwell's and Charlotte's world ('Angria' could obviously signify 'anger').

These creations involved creating plays and a vast amount of writing contained in small 'matchbooks'. The writings are also taken as what Charlotte called 'a long apprenticeship in writing', as juvenilia, before the 'mature' and 'real' works they wrote as novelists (Branwell being, of course, the dissipated non-writer). I am not going to re-evaluate these writings, but suggest that rather than read them as transitions into fiction we read them as proto-RPGs. Branwell and Charlotte are both game designers and game masters (GMs), Branwell shifting from war games (he destroyed a lot of models) to this RPG (Branwell is an Amerithrash gamer...)

This is not only to shift the notion from "apprenticeship to play" (Robertson, 1998), but also to specify what kind of play. Although started when Charlotte was ten, Branwell nine, Emily eight, and Anne six, this play continued into adulthood.  In 1845 Emily (aged 27) and Anne (aged 25) "passed the two days of a train journey role-playing together, pretending they were a whole class of royalist prisoners escaping from Gondel" (Moon, 46). Michael Moon uses role-playing in a general sense, but his remark struck me as one we could make specific.

So, rather than being a childhood addiction to "romance" (in the general sense, including that of quest narratives and fantasy), this might be an addiction to constructing an interactive fiction in the form of an RPG. More sympathetic critics, as Michael Moon points out, have seen this "never-ending story" (a quote from Jane Eyre), as an act of mourning for their dead siblings and mother. The soldiers were given a year after Maria's death (the elder sister).

Michael Moon also concentrates on Branwell, the one who did not become a writer and so did not transcend the "infernal world" of Angria. Branwell is the destructive character, but also in rebellion against the children's choice, suggested by Charlotte, that they become Genii and rule over the toy soldiers. Branwell's compulsion to write, his 'spoiled' or 'wasted' life, become a kind of model of the RPG player and the associations with military masculinity, sensitively explored by Moon. (I should admit here my own childhood fascination with toy soldiers and my own destruction of such soldiers in various "wars".)

Therefore, we could imagine this game as the creation of what would later become RPGs. It is not so much a transition to the "realism" of adult writing, or simply something "childish", but a particular kind of creative work, a particular kind of art. 

Further Reading
Michael Moon, Darger's Resources (Duke University Press, 2012), Chapter 2
Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte (Virago, 2006)
Robertson, Leslie. "I. Changing Models of Juvenilia: Apprenticeship or Play?" ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 24 no. 3, 1998, pp. 291-298. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/esc.1998.0004