Evil Hat’s new game about kids fighting off aliens started as a one-pager

How does a game go from one page to a whole book? How does it move from something you might sell on itch.io into the development cycle of a gold standard publisher like Evil Hat? Em Hubbard has some of the answers. Their new game Rocket Club began life as a single page and is now on its way to becoming a full honking book.

Featuring an original system all about how action and emotion are tied up together, Rocket Club portrays science-obsessed pre-teens stepping up to save their town from aliens. Not quite Paper Girls, not quite Super 8, but somewhere around there. It’s about kids messing around in garages, making friends, and figuring out who they are while the sky is falling.

Arising out of the claustrophobia of pandemic lockdowns, this game was just a simple exercise to rediscover the joy of tabletop game design and play. But when Hubbard played it, they found themselves wanting more — more of the world, more of the feelings, more of the game. With a lot of help from Evil Hat and consultants like Avery Alder, the game is getting there — it’s currently in open playtesting and is being streamed on multiple channels.

Rascal sat down with Em Hubbard to talk about how their game made this journey and what developing a game with professional support looks like.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Manuel: Can you just tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to be designing an RPG? 

Em Hubbard: I work as an art professor, so I teach art classes. I really think of myself more as a visual artist than anything — a painter. I've been playing TTRPGs for a very long time, since I was a kid. There was a really long break where I stopped and I came back to it after my son was born. He's 10 now, but when he was a tiny, tiny baby, he did not want to sleep without someone holding him. So, I spent a lot of hours holding a little baby in the dark and started listening to actual play podcasts. That was what brought me back into it again. 

I dove in and started playing some games again. I rediscovered the love for it after many, many years. And I came to writing games during the first part of the COVID epidemic. I was fortunate, I had a steady paycheck, and worked from home and was mostly just kind of lonely and bored. So, somewhere along the way, I heard an actual play of Grant Howitt's The Witch Is Dead, which was a one-page game, and I was like, a one-page game, that's such a cool idea.

I can come up with a story that I want to tell, and then I can make a one-page game of it. Me and my friends can play it, and then I'll put it away and forget about it... And that was actually where Rocket Club started. It was one of those one-page games that I put together then.