Adapted from a conversation on June 18, 2025. This interview has been edited and condensed.
I spoke to Jess Levine about Going Rogue, the Star Wars–inspired TTRPG on Kickstarter now.
Alex: You are currently knee-deep in the Kickstarter for Galactic and Going Rogue.
Jess: Yeah, it’s been running for three weeks now and the community response to it has been just absolutely amazing and really nice for me as an artist.
Alex: Why this game right now?
Jess: Well, being completely frank, it made sense to do it when Andor season two was coming out because, well, the people who would be interested in that show would likely be interested in ours, in our game. But more than that, it’s something Riley [Rethal] and I have wanted to do for a very long time to try and get these games into print. We literally had people asking on Itch, “Are these available in print? Have you considered printing them? Have you considered printing them together?” We had already talked about plans for that when people were saying that. And we kind of just needed a reason for it to be now. And so when Disney announced that they were premiering Andor in April, it was like, well, I guess I have six months to get a crowdfunder together. And that was also interesting and difficult because shortly after that, we found out that Disney Plus had been put on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions priority target list. And we had to do a little bit of a — well, we were planning to theme this kind of whole release around Andor season two’s finale. What do we do with that?
Alex: It’s interesting that you felt affected by that, given that you’re not a licensed product.
Jess: Oh no, not [a licensed product] at all. I think that Riley and I, we are both anti-Zionist Jews and feel very strongly that we have a responsibility to handle this well. And we don’t want to accidentally create Disney Plus subscriptions by getting people excited about Star Wars or Andor season two, which is only available on Disney Plus at the moment.
Alex: That sounds like an ad.
Jess: It’s quite the opposite! We felt that it was very unlikely that there is anyone who would find out about this game and go, “Huh, well, I should check out this whole Star Wars thing!” But that alone wasn’t enough, because there’s enough of a risk of that that we don’t want to take. But we also realized it was an opportunity to make people aware, which has actually borne out that way. We’ve had multiple people say, “I did not know that [Disney] was on the BDS list”. And even a few say they’ve canceled their subscriptions, and to sort of indicate to the tabletop gaming community, especially after everything that happened with the Big Bad Boycott. It felt like a good way to be like, hey, we can and must forefront our politics in how we conduct ourselves and our projects, especially if we are claiming that our games have a politic. And so what we have done and what we have committed to was anywhere that we mentioned Star Wars proper, any social media thread, any mail that we send out, et cetera, we will also mention that Disney Plus is on the BDS list and not to subscribe to it. So we use it as a platform to get eyes on that, because I think we’re more likely having people who are interested in Disney Plus shows come to us more than we are sending them to Disney Plus.
Alex: Was there a tension there, or a fear of biting the hand that feeds you, given that you are, to some extent, riding on the coattails of Andor?
Jess: Oh, absolutely. Every day I worry that I’m going to wake up to the cease and desist letter from Disney. And that is just a risk that we have to take. And we feel that we are ethically responsible to do this, even if it does come with those risks. Like we considered calling off the project altogether. But I think that risk is just like an unquestionable necessity to both of us, even if that is true. And as far as if biting the hand that feeds is also pissing off fans, good riddance. If that’s someone’s reaction, they’re not the sort of person we want playing these games.
Alex: Backing up to the creation of this game, there are a lot of games that try to emulate Star Wars, some of them even officially. What makes Galactic special? Why did you build Going Rogue on top of this game in particular?
Jess: One, I’m a huge fan of the Belonging Outside Belonging engine. It’s a system by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum for their games Dream Askew and Dream Apart. And I think it is a really, really cool GM-less engine. I like lots of Belonging Outside Belonging games. So it was cool to see Star Wars done in that. And also that Riley emphasizes an aspect of it that I think is so important and so fun, which is the relationships. They are far and away the defining part of Galactic. I had the realization in this process that very little of Galactic has to do with the enemy. Whereas a sort of more trad RPG book and other ones that you might find for Star Wars, you’ve got, you know, huge blocks of stats of all the different people that you’re going to shoot at and all of that.
Alex: Your Stormtroopers.
Jess: And in Galactic, it’s a lot more, how do you relate to the people around you and how is that difficult and messy? I think that some of the most fun things about, especially the mainline Star Wars movies, are actually the character relationships. And I think leaning into that for a tabletop game is very fun. I also was just frankly obsessed with the game. I played in early COVID lockdowns. Me and three friends, including satah and Rhiannon, who are both on the project, were playing. We started a game of Galactic online and we got so obsessed that we wrote 150,000 words of short fiction between the four of us in the universe about our characters.
Alex: Has that been published?
Jess: No, that is all internal fanfic for us. We talked about it, but it was deeply a personal and in-the-moment thing. Those characters are very real and strong and my friend to me.
Jess: So that’s the kind of passion that Galactic brought out of me. And how Going Rogue happened is that I, for the release of Galactic 2e, which happened in part because I told Riley that we were playing that game and Riley was like, “Oh, I’ve always thought about making a second edition of Galactic. Here, let me throw that together and your group can playtest it.” Riley didn’t even remember that until a recent interview!
Alex: Incredible!
Jess: So Galactic 2e comes out, and Riley releases a game jam, the G2e jam. And I was like, huh, I’ve never made a game, and I’ve always wanted to. In retrospect, I recognize some of the GMing that I’ve done is kind of its own form of game design. But I’d never formally made a game. And so I was like, I love Galactic. I love the system, but my favorite Star Wars at the time (this is pre-Andor) was Rogue One. And I was like, Galactic is not great for telling the type of story that Rogue One is because it has a different tone. Galactic is charming heroes and not troubled martyrs. And so I was like, what if I take this system and turn it into something that tells that story? Originally it was just going to be like a few playbooks and the “everyone dies at the end” sacrifice, which spoilers for Going Rogue.
Jess: But one of the main mechanics of Going Rogue is that all the players know that their player characters will die at the end of the story. And specifically that they will sacrifice themselves in an act that is narratively guaranteed to move the galaxy closer to freedom — to matter. You’re sort of playing in the dramatic irony of that, playing to find out what brings your characters, who often start as cynics and loners, to be willing to do that. Very specifically, they become willing to do it voluntarily because they think it is the right thing to do.
Alex: I can imagine how that framing would affect the tales that you’re telling.
Jess: It does! At first, [the game] was just going to be that fate, and some playbooks, but it’s really expanded since then. [The first edition of Going Rogue] was just made for the G2e jam. No one played it who wasn’t seated at my kitchen table with me. That was my first release, and after I made my second game, I thought, “I know what I’m doing now. Let me go back and make Going Rogue better”. I expanded it into nearly its own full game. I say nearly, because in playtesting, what I discovered is that it wasn’t actually compatible with Galactic.
Jess: For Going Rogue, you are expecting there to be a lot of conflict between your player characters, which, which could be a difficult thing to navigate. I originally had the idea that you can combine these playbooks and just throw them in [to the base game]. I did a lot of work in their design to make sure they play off of each other in ways that lend themselves to eventually finding a point of connection and becoming willing to work with each other and invested in each other. Each of the playbooks has questions that you ask to your left and right to connect you to a player. Like why are you willing to give me a chance to prove myself? Or what lie did you catch me in, and how did that make you feel? One of my proudest pieces of design is that all the playbooks but one have this sort of forced choice with those questions. In Galactic, there are four questions with every playbook, and in Going Rogue, there are three. And there’s a very specific mechanical reason for that, which is that two of the options offer a chance of connection. A question like “How did I make I make you feel a fleeting sense of hope?” And one of the questions can create something that’s more likely to be negative, which is like the “What lie did you catch me in?” question. And by having three options, you have the sense of choice, but fundamentally one of them has to be something that gives you a thread to pull on for why you eventually might connect with each other and be willing to get along. And that comes out of a playtest where the characters never cohered into a group that wanted to work together, and it wasn’t fun for anyone.
Alex: You’re kind of thumbing the scales a bit.
Jess: Exactly! It’s a piece of game design I’m really proud of for it being sort of gentle and subtle, but still effectively allowing for that. But you don’t get that if you combine it with playbooks from Galactic, because each of them are designed to do that with those other playbooks, and you might have a character who just doesn’t have those connections. You could swap in one, but beyond that, it starts to lead to a place of conflict with no resolution.
Alex: Is that something that you and Riley work to resolve?
Jess: No. Going Rogue was originally thought of as an expansion, but it has become the other game in the book. It’s taking Galactic and building off of it in certain ways. But really they are almost two playsets for the same system. And there’s precedent for this, and specifically there’s very relevant precedent because of Dream Askew / Dream Apart, the game that established the Belonging Outside Belonging system. Avery [Alder] was working on this game about queer people on the edge of societal collapse, a sort of post-apocalyptic, magical realism world, and Benjamin Rosenbaum was working on a game about the shtetl, the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe in the 1800s and early 1900s, Jews living on the edge of empire. And they realized that thematically these games are very similar, which also meant that mechanically they would work very similarly. Benjamin Rosenbaum says in the book that he was like, “I’ve been trying and failing to make a system for this work, and then I read Avery’s system and I was like, ‘this is what his game needs!’” and so he adapts his concept to that system, and the two of them publish that game in tandem in one book, Dream Askew / Dream Apart. And it’s so fun for that to be in the lineage of this engine, because that’s kind of what we’re doing here as well.
Alex: You’re returning to roots as a system.
Jess: Yes, exactly. And Riley did that with Venture & Dungeon, which was with Jay Dragon, who did Wanderhome, one of the biggest Belonging Outside Belonging games. Riley and Jay got together and made who systems and put them in one book for Venture & Dungeon.
Alex: Moving on, I backed Galactic and Going Rogue and my hair came back in. Could that be related?
Jess: Oh yeah, absolutely. All of my products can do wondrous and amazing things — (laughter) No, I would never claim that. Honesty in advertising is something that is important to me. In fact, someone on the comments on Going Rogue — speaking of whether or not they are separate games — was like, “Hey, this refers to some of the teaching text from Galactic, and the traits, but this is marketed as its own game.” I got that [message] and I said you know what, you’re right, and I got permission from Riley to add the stuff that I was referring to into Going Rogue and released that to [buyers]. I said in the email, mea culpa, I’m sorry, this should have been in there, or should have been marketed differently.
Alex: Speaking of advertising, if I’m following the timeline correctly, both Galactic and Going Rogue first editions existed before Andor, but you list that as an influence. Is that happenstance, or how did that come about?
Jess: It’s really funny that you asked that right after I talked about honesty in advertising. I definitely play fast and loose with the term “inspired” there. Because no, these were definitely both developed prior to Andor. I got a comment on Itch that called it “positively oracular”, in terms of being an oracle in its ability to predict what Andor would be. I was Cassian Andor’s number one fan long before the show existed. The first thing I wrote was the Spy Playbook, because I’m Lesbians for Cassian Andor number 1 fan club. So I’m playing fast and loose in the sense that I got the themes that Rogue One was gesturing towards and would be, in fact, kind of arguing with the things I don’t like about Rogue One and drawing upon my own experiences of anti-fascist street action. That’s how I got there, and I think it’s that combination of things that allowed… when Andor came out, I did a thing where I statted a bunch of Andor characters in the Going Rogue playbooks, and I didn’t have to change a thing.
Alex: You could say that you are Cassandra-ian Andor.
Jess: Yes! Being a Cassandra is a plague I experienced in a few places in my life. It’s also the case that in the time since Andor, Andor does influence the game because it influences the play culture, it influences the Actual Play. In this new third edition, we are making some improvements, and I’m sure my experiences of Andor will be in my mind as I do that. But largely, there isn’t a simple way to say, “If you like Andor, this is Andor, because we predicted it from [Rogue One].” As far as any sort of Star Wars property where if you like it, you’ll like these systems, it’s Andor because the sort of person that appeals to are the sort of people who will be most interested in this game.
Alex: That makes sense! You recently talked to Rascal about these games. Is there anything you were hoping to mention in that interview that you didn’t get a chance to mention?
Jess: I’d like to talk about my contributors, and specifically the way that — one of the nicest things about getting to run a project of this scale is that it means I then have the resources to pay very cool people to bring very cool things to my game. And that has never been more evident than the size of the team that we have for this, and the talent that we have on it. That’s just incredible. There’s a version of this crowdfunder in which it is much less expensive to produce, and I make the same amount of money as I would have made for something with less work,but less cost. But not every project can you put more work into and it will be more successful. There’s just limits on scale depending on, you know, how marketable the project is and how many people already are interested in it. Like, whether or not it gives back is different. Doing it at this scale is so exciting because it means getting to pull in a bunch of really cool people. And also, more specifically, it means getting to pull in people who have been really important in the history of these games. And that’s the thing that I’ve been really focused on as we have 30 contributors, but as many of them as possible, I made people who have been ride or die for these games from the start. Who did early actual plays when no one had heard of them. Who helped me playtest it. Who talked about them over and over again. And [it’s my way of saying] thank you so much for making this game what it is. Let me give you a chance to be paid to make it even better, and go in front of people. And that’s been just a huge priority of mine in this.
Alex: Earlier you mentioned relationships being important to the game, and I did want to ask if that translated to the process as well, since this is a project with so many collaborators.
Jess: On top of everything I just said, no game is made alone, no thing is made alone. Auteur theory is fake. I can’t speak for Riley, her influences, and the people she worked with, but I can speak for myself. And my original Galactic crew has an unbelievable influence on these games. And people that I playtested with, or people that I talked to about these games have such an influence. Very specifically, I want to shout out satah who was in that Galactic game, and is also the design consultant on Going Rogue. Some of the new things in second edition wouldn’t exist without them. In second edition, I added the Loyal, which is a kind of K2SO or Chewie playbook. Part of the Loyal’s mechanics is that the bond between the Loyal and one other player character is a pillar of the game. [In] Belonging Outside Belong, setting elements or pillars are things that represent the world around you so you can do GM-less play.
Jess: You act as these forces in the world. In Galactic, [you have] the Liberation, AKA the Rebellion, the Mandate that you’re fighting against, the Scum and Villainy, [which is] all of the criminals, the Space Between, the mystical force that binds everything together. And the [Loyal’s] bond is a pillar that only exists if you’re using the Loyal playbook. And it says that the relationship between these two comrades is so deep that it is an element of the world and affects the world. And that is how I feel. And that would not exist without satah. The first thing I do when I have a design issue is hit up satah’s Discord DMs. They’re also the editor for The Scum & Villains Expansion, if we hit that stretch goal, and the editor of both the actual plays, is a performer in one [of them], and is the creator of the play sheet, the setting sheet, and so much more. This would not exist without them. There is no one save Riley and myself who has had more influence on these games. While I’m here, I also want to encourage people to vote for the Crit Awards, which are TTRPG awards voting this month. [satah’s] podcast Folio, is up for an award. It’s a multi-guest solo RPG podcast, where multiple guests separately record their plays through the same solo game, and satah edits them together, so you hear each of them going through that process at the same time, almost like a conversation. It’s nominated for Best Upcoming Actual Play, and they were nominated for Best Tech / Producer, very well deserved.
Alex: Go vote in the Crit Awards!
Jess: I also want to shout out David [Bednar], our artist. The original Going Rogue 1e cover is embarrassingly bad, and you can’t find it anywhere. When I went on A More Civilized Age to run the game, David drew fan art of the Going Rogue characters we made on that podcast, and I loved that fan art so much. I didn’t know David at all, and I messaged and was like, “Can I pay you to turn this into a cover for the game?” And he was delighted, and that was two or three years ago. His work was so good, I came back to him for The Scum & Villains cover, and now for this crowdfunder, it has been amazing to be like, David, can you illustrate two books, and four covers for me? Now I get to take all of these people who did something really cool and say, “Let’s take this thing we love and make it big!” I love seeing everyone get excited and jazzed together; to see things turn into passion projects for people. The trailer was not supposed to be anywhere near the animated short that it is, and then David — thank you, David! — was like, “so I know you just asked for a couple different frames. My day job is as an animator and I rigged them.” I was like, Oh my God, David! It’s just delightful to get to do this with these very talented people.