This game is a clean, to-the-point adaptation of quintessential Star Wars rebel stories, those of the Original Trilogy, the Sequel Trilogy, and even side media like Star Wars Rebels and Jedi Fallen Order.

But where TTRPGs like Edge of the Empire, Hyperspace d6, and even the Hyperdrive adaptation of AIRLOCK aim to fit players’ own characters within the literal world of Star Wars, Galactic instead hands players the script of The Empire Strikes Back and dares them to write a better romance between the Scoundrel and the Diplomat, or to consider a different path for the young Nova training on a world of mangroves and fog.

In this context, the adaptation of natures and traits from Wanderhome fits perfectly in the Star Wars ethos. New worlds, new cultures, new people, each with a name, and a story, and a tie-in novel or comic book implied in the margins but only mentioned in passing in this story. Like any proper Star Wars story, from Jedi Academy to Knights of the Old Republic to The Mandalorian, the stories of Galactic focus on the eternal wanderers, the ones lucky enough to visit countless worlds but not lucky enough to find a home quite yet.

Galactic is a meditation of what kinds of stories we expect from Old Star Wars, on what made the Original Trilogy capture the imagination of people who weren’t even alive to see it in theaters.

Because—as much as I’m personally loath to admit it—it’s not the lore of the galaxy, or even the hot aliens (okay, a little bit the hot aliens).

Star Wars grips so many people—grips me—because it’s a story about small people banding together to fight an evil that thinks it has already won, in a world that has mostly given up trying to fight.

As much as those themes were fascinating in the ‘70s, they’re even more relevant in 2021.