Welcome to the third in a series of Design Diaries for Rocket Club by the game’s creator, Em Hubbard:
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Let me introduce you to Margaret. She’s a mixed up creature, part plant being from a distant galaxy, part ghost of a human kid who died 150 years ago. She looks like a plant with long narrow upward pointing leaves, and long roots that serve as legs. The Rocket Club raised her from a seed, only later learning that the seed came to earth on a crashing alien ship and just happened to merge with the consciousness of 13 year old Margaret who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was eventually able to project a ghostly image of her human self using strings of gooey blue alien substance.
As a fan of sci-fi, I love complicated aliens. Give me one of the weird critters from Scavengers Reign, or a Heptapod from Arrival, over a lizardman in a shiny space suit any day. I like aliens as a thought exercise. How different from us can a being from across the galaxy be? What incredible things can they do? How do they see us? And in all that difference, what can we find in common?
In its earliest form, Rocket Club’s aliens were made by rolling twice on two tables with six entries each. One table would tell you about the alien creatures, and the other would describe their ship. I believe that creative constraints can be freeing so I always enjoy a bit of randomness to spark ideas. This version didn’t give you much to go on. You might end up with aliens who are “brutally destructive” “carnivorous beasts,” whose ship is “hidden from sight” and “surprisingly small.” Maybe a picture is already forming in your mind. Maybe you’re wondering what sort of brutal carnivores could fit in a surprisingly small ship.
I liked the starting point of random (sometimes dissonant) descriptors, but I wanted more options. So I developed the Threat Maker. To include a lot more possibilities, I moved away from dice rolls, instead using a deck of cards. The deck allows for much more nuance and additional details beyond the alien and the ship.
You start by dealing out a row of five cards. The first two represent characteristics of the alien creatures. There are a lot of possibilities here, divided into categories, like “Horrors” and “Infiltrators.” The third card determines why the aliens have come to earth. The last two cards describe the aliens’ ship. Any face cards that happen to pop up during the process are set aside and become individual alien characters. It’s a simple process that produces a lot of information while leaving ample room for interpretation.
There are times in the process when you’ll end up with conflicting results. Sometimes this is by chance, and sometimes it’s intentionally baked into the process.
You might draw two cards to describe the alien creatures that don’t seem to naturally fit together. For example, you might get the seven of clubs (Heavily Armed) and the six of spades (Insubstantial). The first prompt immediately makes me think of big cannons and lasers, but the second feels like a ghost. How can a ghost be heavily armed? Or how can a cannon be insubstantial? An answer doesn’t come quickly, but solving that problem makes a (hopefully interesting) creature that I wouldn’t have thought of without those conflicting cards.
Jokers directly and intentionally inject conflict, deceit, and other complications. Whenever I run through the Threat-Maker I hope for jokers! They do different things depending on where they land. If one pops up as one of the Creature cards it could give you two conflicting types of aliens, or an alien creature transitioning into a new form. A joker as the Motivation card means two competing ambitions. The unlikely possibility of two jokers in a row would explode into a wildly complex set of conflicting ideas. It hasn’t happened yet as far as I know, but I think it would be a great creative challenge to overcome!
The Threat-Maker can really be a game in itself. Sometimes when I’m bored I’ll grab a deck of cards and deal out a new invader. It’s a fun creative exercise, and I usually end up with an exciting new villain (just now I took a break from writing this and built a predatory fog creature obeying the commands of a mysterious entity in a bioluminescent ship hovering above the town.)
If only I had time to play a game for every alien threat I’ve made!
Ready to jump into your own Rocket Rig and start testing the boundaries of science? Learn more about Rocket Club here or sign up for a playtest at this link!