Star Wars Gaming post-Rise of Skywalker

When it comes to gaming, I have very mixed feelings about "The Rise of Skywalker". On the one hand, it did leave me really keen to run some games in that universe, especially in the years after that final movie, and especially not featuring Jedi (or many Jedi). On the other hand, the films seemed to show us surprisingly little of the universe beyond the immediate environments of the films themselves - somehow, the original trilogy showed us glimpses of a much bigger universe beyond the films themselves (aided, I think, by every single minor character having a toy, a name, and a backstory). The prequel trilogy, for all their faults, showed us a great deal about the wider universe, that was then expanded on at length in "The Clone Wars" and "Rebels".

But when I think about events beyond the sequel trilogy, I've got nothing - the few environments we do see are either retreads from the older films or seem to wind up destroyed by the end of the trilogy. The First Order is in tatters, but the Resistance has no structure to put in its place, so there's just a vacuum.

One advantage that that does have, I suppose, is that it gives the GM an entirely blank canvas on which to draw - you can use as much or as little of the existing lore as you want, change any of it as you see fit, and ignore the rest. Which is good. It comes at the cost of having to do quite a lot of work yourself (and inevitably seeing it get rewritten as and when Disney produce more material), but that's probably okay.

The upshot is that I think I'd be inclined to set a new campaign a good long time after "The Rise of Skywalker" (about fifty years), and posit a galaxy exhausted by war. Have no central power, but instead lots of factions fighting for dominance. This actually leaves things very much like they are in the old "New Republic" era from the previous canon, but even moreso - where the "New Republic" material assumed that the Rebellion would very quickly consolidate their power and become the dominant force, I'd be inclined to go the other way - everyone just exhausts themselves in war without end, leaving huge gaps for others to exploit.

And then into that I'd start dropping some new antagonists (possibly a powerful AI left over from the Clone War), and assemble a rag-tag group of misfits charged with trying to oppose it. And since the zeitgeist at the moment is pretty apocalyptic, that's the direction I think I'd be inclined to take the game.