Day 8 of the 2026 #Character Creation Challenge and I’m going to use another roleplaying game that was gifted to me. For those of you who have read my past challenge entries, I had a last minute substitution last year adding the Red Dwarf The Roleplaying Game after my good friends gave it to me. So thank you again to Rich and Evelyn who gifted me a physical copy of Rebel Scum 2nd Edition The Antifacist Space Opera Roleplaying Game. As you can probably guess, it’s a Star Wars inspired game with the serial numbers filed off from 9th Level Games. It says “powered by polymorph” at the bottom that I’m not familiar with.
The physical book is an A5 sized publication with 79 pages and was published in 2025. The cover looks like an action figure on a card. A lot of the art on the inside look like action figures, trading cards or comic book covers. The character sheet itself is called an “action figure card back” and is one page. The player always rolls the dice (doing something or responding to something) and the die can explode a its highest number. The rules to create your rebel start on page 40.
First choose a class. Because this determines which card back character sheet that is used (and I had to print one out for the photo listed above) I had already selected The Robot. I could have also picked Renegade, Revolutionary, Rogue or Ronin (aka Jedi). It just hit me that all of these start with the letter R. Weird.
Next I pick a name. This robot shall be called Lifter THX1138. He was a worker droid who was originally assigned to work in a factory and was ordered by some bad guys to kill some civilians just for the hell of it. When he refused, they tried to dismantle him so he went on the run. And its role (the next step) is The Tank, which I think gets a D10. I’m not certain. These instructions are not written out very well.
Shining Star is the next item on the list. This appears to be the thing your character is best at. And it appears to already be on the action figure card back.
Each character stars with two Edges that are listed under the class. It looks like I just mark them on the sheet. They only gave a description for some of the edges later in the book. I really wish that they had been more complete. Sure, some sound self-explanatory, but that’s open to interpretation.
The only other thing listed in the creation list is the Bonds that the character makes with the other characters, but that’s only after the session has been completed. So, I think I’m done? Yea, I’m done. Here’s the sheet.
Afterthoughts:
I love Star Wars. I love roleplaying games that try to emulate the feel of different shows out there. I’ve seen games for fans of Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Cowboy Bebop and others where the serial numbers have been filed off. But I wasn’t really impressed with this book. Sure there’s a lot of back ground is presented here. But a core RPG book needs to explain the system. It needs to answer the questions about how to play the game. It almost seemed like the system was just barely presented. I was impressed with the artwork and the filing of serial numbers in the universe. And I agree with Indiana Jones who said “Nazis? I hate these guys.” But this book didn’t inspire me to want to try to get some friends together and play like the above examples I just linked to. I’ve got plenty of other RPG options to use if I want to play in a galaxy far, far away.
Additional Notes:
On the RPGGeek message board I received a response to the White Lies 3rd Edition entry. Davwj commented “I also got a copy of this and like yourself am quite impressed. Love the new artwork, plus the new ‘Rookie Assignment’ section is another nice addition (including the very Traveller-ish possibility of permanently benching your agent before they’ve even started )” Thanks for the feedback.
Coming Up Next:
Star Trek Adventures- Captain’s Log
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