I spoke to Riley Rethal about game design, finding the joy of Star Wars, writing games like fan fiction, being too radical for Broadway musicals on Twitter, and how Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is a movie that is mostly about trying really really hard not to be about grief.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length from a conversation on June 24, 2025.
Alex: The Kickstarter for Galactic and Going Rogue just got its thousandth backer yesterday. What do you attribute that success to? Do you think that’s because a new edition of a game, or because it has an existing following, or something else entirely?
Riley: When I published Galactic second edition back in 2021, people were really excited about that, which was awesome. I published the game on May 4th for no particular reason and then when it came out people were really excited about making supplements. So I ended up hosting a game jam on Itch and that’s how Jess [Levine] made Going Rogue. So [the game] has definitely had a lot of fans since the beginning, which is really cool. Originally Jess talking about her [home] game of Galactic is what pushed me to finally make the second edition in the first place! So there’s feedback between people playing Galactic, and also specifically between me and Jess with Galactic. And I have to say that one of the big things that has made this Kickstarter so successful is just Jess in general. She’s amazing. She’s been doing everything while I just sort of made one of the games. She’s done everything for the Kickstarter. She produced the actual plays, and has been organizing everything and is doing all the finances, and doing all this marketing stuff. So huge shout out.
Alex: I was talking to Aaron Voigt a couple weeks ago, and he described it as the best Kickstarter launch he has ever seen.
Riley: And that is all Jess! That was not me, I’m just there. She goes, “Hey do you like this?” and I go, “Yeah that’s awesome!”
Alex: Both of you are really quick to shout out your collaborators. I talked to Jess last week, and she was heaping praise on David [Bednar], on sata, on you. It seems like a very good community that you have between the people on this project.
Riley: Absolutely.
Alex: In general,it’s not super common for indie games to get a second edition, and now you know you’re sort of calling this a third edition. It’s more common to get adventures and supplements. You and Jess both talked about how the second came about as a result of her [home game]. What is prompting this third edition right now?
Riley: People have been asking — as in people who like the games, and also my good friend Jess — for a while to do a joint book for the games. And Jess came to me maybe two years ago and asked me about it, and I said, you know, I don’t really have the time to devote to it right now. So it’s been something that other people have been asking for, even just for a print edition in general, because Galactic and Going Rogue never had one. Probably a year ago, Jess was like, “Hey, what if we did one with Andor season 2?” and then when Andor season 2 was announced, it was like, “Oh my god, that’s really close!” and so we had to jump into action to really get that.
Riley: In general, it would be cool to have a Galactic and Going Rogue print edition. I’ve been getting the occasional Itch comment on the Galactic page for it. The last couple have been very funny. They’re like, “You should do a print edition.” I’m like, “Hmm, yes. Wouldn’t that be interesting? Watch this space!” Before the Kickstarter was announced.
Alex: You mentioned not having a lot of time to devote to this between juggling a full time, as well as writing these games. How do you balance that?
Riley: Really, I wrote a lot of games in 2019, which was the year of me writing an insane amount of games, which is when I was still in college. How I balanced that was probably not putting as much effort into schoolwork as I should have. (laughter) I’d really like to get back into game design, and I don’t even know if it’s really because of being in school, or now having work, as just my brain will focus on something. It’s been a lot of prose writing, I’ve been writing a lot of fan fiction the last couple of years. The balance for me is that if I’m excited about it, I’ll do it. But I’m not the kind of person who’s gonna force myself. You know, I’m not like, “I’m going to write this game because I need to write this game.” I have a job, so I just do games for fun, and if I don’t feel like it, I don’t.
Alex: That makes sense! Speaking about Galactic specifically, there are a lot of games that try to emulate Star Wars, some of them even officially. What makes Galactic special?
Riley: Galactic is sort of born from me not really caring about Star Wars but also thinking Star Wars is really interesting. I started writing it in late 2019 after I saw Rise of Skywalker. I saw this with with my family, specifically sitting next to my brother who does not care about Star Wars at all and we were just kind of laughing our heads off the whole time. It was a very fun theater experience for me as someone who [had that relationship to the francise]. It felt like a parody of all the stuff I think that’s dumb about Star Wars, but I came out of that movie being like, “Okay the Force is really interesting, the rebellion is really interesting, there’s something here.”
Riley: I had just written Venture, which was my first Belonging Outside Belonging game. I wasn’t really planning on writing a second one. I wasn’t like, “Oh, what’s my next BoB project gonna be?” But it felt like the perfect thing to create a framework for people to then look at and say, “What is our Star Wars Story going to be?” I really wanted it to be what I was interested in, which is taking these archetypes, listing them out, and then giving it to someone and saying, “How are you going to make this? What’s your Star Wars?”
Alex: Jess mentioned that a realization that she had about Galactic was that unlike many of the official games, there wasn’t a big focus on the enemies that you’re fighting, or the stats of the stormtroopers. It’s about the relationships.
Riley: (laughing) Yes. Unlike other Star Wars TTRPGs, this one’s about the characters. Generally in stories and in the way that I think about life, it is very much about characters and their motivations and their relationships. That is always what I’m going to gravitate towards. In Venture, my first BoB game, that was taking Dungeons and Dragons classes and asking, “What about those are interesting to me?” And there is no setting element for monsters in that game. You can make monsters, but the game doesn’t really support that, you’re gonna have to do it on your own.
Riley: I’m very much [about] “This is a story about people talking to each other, we’re [going to look at] what is interesting about what these people want from each other, how they interact, what their history is”. It’s my personal fan fiction, it’s what I would want.
Alex: You’re not interested in the monsters, as much as the people interacting with them. Going Rogue was created as part of the Galactic Jam, which you mentioned earlier. How did it feel to have someone build on top of your game?
Riley: Oh it was really cool! There were so many cool entries into the Galactic 2e jam, and it was really, really cool seeing them. Because that’s exactly what I was trying to do with Galactic in the first place! To write a Star Wars fan fiction and see other people take that and be inspired to make their own stuff. Generally it was awesome, and with Going Rogue, I was just looking back a couple weeks ago at messages between me and Jess when she was working on the game. I was just saying, “This is awesome!”
Alex: Did you know each other before that?
Riley: Yeah. I couldn’t tell you exactly how, but I think it was because of the doikayt and the Jewish TTRPG stuff that we’ve done, and the Star Wars came later. She had tweeted about playing Galactic, and that made me say, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to do a second edition”, and then she made a game about that. It’s a fun little cycle!
Alex: In general, what should people expect when they pick up either one of your games or, since you described your games as fan fictions, one of your fan fictions?
Riley: I’m very interested in creating characters and exploring their relationships, as I said. My style of games is hard to define because I come to TTRPGs with a different mindset than a lot of other people. I’ve called myself an anomaly that should never have gotten this far, because I am averse not just to D&D, but to a lot of the sort of traditional kind of games where there’s a GM and everyone else plays an individual character who has to take initiative in a situation. My joke is that I don’t want to play an individual character who takes initiative — I have to do that every single day of my life! My fantasy is playing the narrator I want to be at that higher level instead of trying to navigate the world as a person who has to react to circumstances and [declare my actions], I like to be the storyteller and point out the motifs.
Riley: Jess ran a panel that I was on at Big Bad Con about GMLess games, which was so funny, because a lot of it was people asking [questions] with the assumption that GMless games are the thing that’s weird. You know, “How do I make this feel normal for me, a person who plays more normal games?” and I’m like, “Are you sure? What is uncomfortable for you about GMless games is what I like about it.” I don’t know how, but I would love to get more people who don’t have to get through the Gauntlet of Dungeons and Dragons to come out the other side being interested in indie games.
Alex: How do you feel about story games, like Microscope?
Riley: I love them. A friend texted me a few weeks ago that Ben Robbins is your favorite game designer’s favorite game designer. I was like, well, in that case I’m the favorite game designer, because I love [his works]. The game I’m working on right now that I’d really like to publish at some point this year my friends and I started in 2020 and then just sort of forgot about it. It’s a Les Mis–inspired game that is very much inspired by Ben Robbins’s games. There’s a little bit of Follow, a little bite of Kingdom, Microscope, plus Firebrands, and Stewpot.
Alex: Speaking of musicals, one of your games that you released, A Riot Starts, inspired by Hadestown. Can you talk about where you found inspiration there?
Riley: Hadestown is a musical — I guess people know what it is now because it won the Tony and everything — but it is a musical based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I got into it in 2016 when it was doing its off-Broadway run at the New York Theatre Workshop. I have lots of feelings about the changes that were made for Broadway, most of them negative.
Alex: Changes from the original studio album?
Riley: Yeah, it was a concept album that was released in 2010, and then it went to off-Broadway in 2016, and then Broadway in 2019. I saw it right when the the tickets were released. I saw it right when the tickets were released… a few days before the soundtrack came out. So I got to experience all of those changes live. It was a very weird experience to be in awe of a Broadway show, and also so disappointed.
Alex: Disappointed by what?
Riley: They made this whole thing about how really the problem is that Orpheus doesn’t trust Hades, and that’s why he looks back, and the problem is that he should have trusted this guy, and it’s like what are you talking about? There’s one change I really like, that is very “The Riot Starts”–coded, which is that they change the song If It’s True from being a sad lament of Orpheus, to him being like, “Let’s do the revolution!” but then the next song they don’t change at all! So it’s Persephone being like, “Oh my God, Orpheus was so sad.” And it’s like, “No he wasn’t. Were you watching?” There are so many other changes — I’m sure I could find a lengthy Twitter thread where I wrote up everything very beautifully.
Riley: The Riot Starts, though, is a game I wrote before I knew about all of that, which is asking what if Orpheus stayed in the underworld and tried to foment a revolution instead? So all of the playbooks are based on different Greek Mythological archetypes, there’s an Orpheus one, there’s Eurydice, there’s an Antigone one, and it’s got some interesting mechanics. I was working on a second edition at one point. I actually made some physical copies when I went to see Hadestown and gave them out at stage door. I never heard anything back. I don’t remember if this was before or after the Hadestown Twitter account unfollowed me for tweeting about the political messaging in it.
Riley: Oh! One more thing! My Twitter bio since at least 2019, possibly before then has had the line, “Let the worlds we dream about be the one we live in now.” This is a line from the New York Theatre Workshop version of Hadestown. It’s a song they added for that, so it’s not from the concept album, but it’s a pretty famous line. They used to have it on merch at Broadway. But they fucking changed it! It’s the big toast in the song, Orpheus says, “Let the world we dream about be the one we live in now” and they changed it in the Broadway one to — because apparently this was too radical — “To the world we dream about and the one we live in now”. Why? Why would you do this? Imagining a better world is too radical for Broadway.
Alex: I pulled that that, but I’m going to try to bring this back to Galactic —
Riley: Listen! I love stories about revolution and in Galactic, it’s called the Liberation!
Alex: Jess talked to me about how she designed the playbooks in Going Rogue, and how those tie into the themes of revolution, and of changing the [galaxy] in a meaningful gesture. What were your goals when designing the playbooks of Galactic, did you have an overarching theme you were looking for?
Riley: Jess has all of these amazing insightful things to say about how while writing Going Rogue she was working through these thoughts about leftist organizing and all of this stuff and all the different theory that she read for it. And I’m like, “Well I made a Star Wars game! It’s kind of about Star Wars!”
Alex: People like Star Wars!
Riley: People do like Star Wars, I’ve heard this. It’s very funny, because I’ll tell people, “Yeah, I didn’t really like Star Wars until Andor. Pay no attention to the two editions of a Star Wars game I wrote before Andor came out.” Star Wars has always been a series that is about writing fan fiction and expanding the universe. So much of its appeal has been taking something from that universe and saying, “What would I do with that? What else is there?” I was writing Galactic based on that idea. Like, the idea of an X-Wing pilot is very cool, that’s just a vibe. How do I let people experience this vibe, how do we expand this vibe?”
Alex: I assume you’re familiar with the famous story of Timothy Zahn, I think. One of the official Star Wars authors, when writing the extended universe books, was just given all of the RPG supplements for the Star Wars tabletop RPG.
Riley: I’ve definitely heard that. I have not engaged with a lot of Star Wars media. My Star Wars knowledge is basically, I’ve seen the original trilogy, I’ve seen the sequel trilogy, I’ve seen Andor, and I listened to A More Civilized Age. So I probably have less of a knowledge of Star Wars than you’d expect from someone who’s written two editions of a Star Wars–inspired TTRPG.
Alex: A beloved Star Wars RPG!
Riley: Wow. I’m flipping my hair, you can’t see it. I did really fun actual play, and at the end, they were really surprised to find out that I’m not a huge Star Wars fan. A lot of my games are written about stuff that are things I’m not a super huge fan of. It’s more stuff that I think is interesting and that I’d like to be a bigger fan of. But maybe it misses the mark. I wrote a Pacific Rim game. People love Pacific Rim, I think it’s fine.
You can find Riley’s games on Itch. The Kickstarter for Galactic and Going Rogue ends in a few days.