The reality of rebellion in Galactic and Going Rogue

Star Wars’ resurgence in popular culture over the last decade has been met with mixed reactions, to say the least. With the final episodes of Andor, a show about a disillusioned rebel surviving and fighting against an inescapably powerful fascist regime, premiering on Disney+, a service that is on the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions list for donating millions of dollars to Israel, the disparity between the content of the franchise and it’s real-world application has never been more stark. 

Despite the reactionary fanbase that has risen around it and the corporate machine which has stripped its radical storytelling for theme park-style entertainment, George Lucas’ original trilogy full of revolutionary politics based on the Vietnam War has been a source of inspiration for millions of people, including countless game designers. From the various official RPGs, to Ninth Level’s Rebel Scum, to Tim Denee’s recent hack of Twilight: 2000, tabletop designers have taken the narrative’s anti-fascist core and given players a space (no pun intended) to explore those ideas. 

Riley Rethal and Jess Levine’s recent crowdfunding campaign contributes to that lineage with the second edition of Galactic and its expansion Going Rogue. A Belonging Outside Belonging game, Going Rogue's second edition won the 2023 CRiT Award for Best GMless Game of the Year for its deconstruction of Star Wars’ archetypes through a framework that mirrors the complex and collaborative nature of organized revolutionary action. Levine’s addition to the game, Going Rogue, makes that deconstruction all the more explicit, asking players to sit with questions of sacrifice, cynicism, and compromise as they face down not only an all-powerful empire, but the goals and motives of their fellow rebels. 

After having the opportunity to play Galactic, Rascal spoke to Levine via email to ask her about Galactic’s politics, how it builds on the ideas presented in the source material, and if she has her own answers to the questions she asks players to explore. The first installment of this interview focuses primarily on the impact of Star Wars on this game and the benefits of GMless storytelling to explore revolutionary themes. The second dives deeper into how Levine's politics and experience as an activist has informed how she approached making Going Rogue. The result, unsurprisingly, is a mini-manifesto on Star Wars, leftist organizing, and the importance of being honest with ourselves about the power of play and protest.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Rowan Zeoli: This duology states that it hopes to succeed where Star Wars as an IP has failed, could you expand on what you mean by that and how it informed your design?

Jess Levine: To do a good adaptation you have to love the original, and hate it. There’s so much I love in Star Wars, but also [there are] key ways it fails. It sucks that not only are the Jedi child-kidnapping sexless ascetics, but also their way of interacting with the Force is confirmed morally correct at a metaphysical level, to the degree that basically every alternate Force tradition inevitably experiences a genocide, and are often held responsible for it. The way that having emotions and connections to other people is depicted as a path to evil is incredibly regressive — just imagine the galaxy if Anakin had been allowed to fuck! 

When I made Going Rogue, I felt so frustrated by Jyn Erso as a character. I should love her — a female protagonist and teenage liberation fighter with no male love interest, who bypasses the Rebellion’s most liberal elements to stage to strike the Empire at the ultimate personal cost. Sadly, she’s also a nonsensical amalgamation of tropes strung together by unearned character development. Rogue One has two Jyn Erso’s — the cynic and the rebel — and at one point, she simply transforms from one to the other, with no cause or character development. This suborns her plotline to a male character (her dad) and denies her an internal world — something Star Wars does to a lot of its women.

With The Leveraged [playbook], I discarded the second Jyn. It advises players to “Explore the tension between the leverage that compels you to complete your assignment, and your own organic desire,” and “Look for narrative opportunities to play into your character’s principles and grow their commitment to The Liberation.” I’m begging the player, please ask the questions that the movie didn’t. Explore your Jyn’s internal conflict. Find how the seed of their sacrifice is present in what they’ve believed from the beginning. 

The prompts help you identify what principles a cynical character might hold for seemingly selfish reasons that could in theory be universalized, connecting them to the struggle for liberation — “everyone deserves a chance to free themselves, the children deserve a better world than you ever had, cops deserve what’s coming to them.” It offers a real arc. We actually see a better realized version of Jyn’s plotline in Andor (though of course, not from a female character.) Cassian in Rogue One may have inspired The Spy playbook, but Cassian at the start of Andor is The Leveraged, coerced into fighting for the Rebellion at first by desperation, before eventually finding his own reasons to take up the fight and become The Spy.

"Everyone deserves a chance to free themselves, the children deserve a better world than you ever had, cops deserve what’s coming to them."

More than any specific quibble, I think what’s most important about the design of Galactic & Going Rogue is that it offers tools for players to have their own arguments with Star Wars. It’s Star Wars-inspired, but it isn’t Star Wars. It draws guidelines, but also leaves blank spaces, in which players can expand what is possible in ways Riley and I could never imagine. This is part of why the short stories in Look Up to the Stars — a setting supplement book we’re producing for the crowdfunder — are in a separate book and will explicitly tell the reader which two to three “desires” the author chose for the pillar they’re writing about. I want to make it clear the short story doesn’t depict the game world, but a game world, as a demonstration of how players might translate their table’s chosen desires into a personal galaxy.

Zeoli: With that idea that Star Wars has failed, why continue to explore the genre and its adjacent archetypes?

Levine: I love the idea of taking the sorts of genres and story tropes we all love and putting the tools to design and dream them in the hands of people at large. It sucks that many of our culture’s most iconic stories are literally the legally enforced property of corporations. Finding ways to take what we love about them into our own hands, and discard what we don’t while we’re there, is something I think is worth doing.

Secondly, I do love Star Wars! It’s fun! I like a lot of bad media. I think we can be critical consumers of media, watching and talking about problematic things without letting that become us, and I think that games as a medium are an especially great way to do this. 

Star Wars does also contain the kernel of some very beautiful things. At its best, the relationships between the characters can be so compelling, and I think often of George Lucas telling an interviewer that the rebels are the Viet Cong and the Empire is the American empire! In a world where Disney owns Star Wars and Disney+ is on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions priority target list due to their support for Israeli genocide — and the universal limitations on the political potential of art — there’s a limit to how revolutionary Star Wars can be. But that doesn’t stop us from using the genre, archetypes, and glimpses of something better in art that is not the property of Disney. In fact, I’d say that’s a good reason to do so — as long as you also understand that art isn’t organizing, and honor the BDS boycott, and so on.

Zeoli: How does the Belonging Outside Belonging framework play into the themes of the game in a way a traditional GM'd game does not?

Levine: There are many advantages to both that engine and GMless play in general for Galactic & Going Rogue. When Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum designed Belonging Outside Belonging, it was intended to represent communities on the fringes of society — typically, on the fringes of some sort of right-wing power structure. A revolutionary movement lives in that space, and the tools that engine offers for exploring messy interactions between characters are great for depicting the difficult emotions and relationships that form in such a high-pressure isolated environment.

To me, a lot of GMless games — and Belonging Outside Belonging especially — have a “writer’s room” feel, where a group is pitching ideas for the direction of the story, getting feedback, collaborating, and coming to unanimous decisions. There’s something so fun about games that adapt movies and TV somewhat resembling the methods by which they were made! 

"I think we can be critical consumers of media, watching and talking about problematic things without letting that become us."

Finally, Riley and I just both love playing screw-ups. GMless games invite you to be a willing participant in your characters’ own failures. Belonging Outside Belonging’s vulnerable/weak moves give us explicit opportunity to have our characters make mistakes, and to design the sort of mistakes Galactic & Going Rogue characters would likely make into the game itself. These sorts of flaws are what make characters compelling, and I love having the tools to do so. 

If we were more focused on the “hero’s journey” you see in the mainline Star Wars movie, in which a single prodigy goes out to conquer evil, perhaps a GM’d game in which players focus on overcoming challenges presented by the world would make sense. But Riley and I are much more interested in the people of the Liberation, and their relationships to each other. Whether it’s the charming but flawed heroes of Galactic or the troubled martyr of Going Rogue, we’re more interested in exploring how these characters feel, what motivates them, how they grow and how they relate than we are what set of skills will allow them to escape the trash compactor. The trash compactor is a setting in which character moments can happen, not the moment itself.