Creating my own setting [Star Wars flavored]

[Arith Winterfell]

I've been trying to work on a setting for both my GURPS games and writing material, but I've been drawing a blank and am looking for ideas/suggestions.

I've read over many of Mailanka's articles about his work on the Psi-Wars flavored setting and found them helpful. I've especially focused on and taken to heart the idea of adaptation instead of copying when it comes to building my own setting. I'm especially cautious about this stuff as I'm aiming to use this as material for future novel writing perhaps and want to change things enough that while its still fun, it doesn't stand out terribly as "just a Star Wars clone."

That said, I also know that players need points of reference! In order to make a setting that grabs player interest and allows them to quickly jump into a setting with a general idea of tone and world you need references that players will understand from their own experience. So you could say I'm using Star Wars as a reference point / starting point. But struggle to figure out ways to change it and expand on it in order to make it my own.

So one of the biggest changes the setting has is there are neither Jedi or Sith, there are just people gifted with various psychic abilities (called being "Shroudtouched" instead of "Force-Sensitive"). The Shroud is not like the Force. It's a literal known parallel dimension that interacts in some unclear way with human consciousness allowing humans to manipulate reality in various ways. The setting lacks the mysticism surrounding The Shroud that Star Wars has surrounding the Force.

That said many of the powers are similar to Star Wars / Dune with telepathy and telekinesis being most present, but clairsentience in various ways is present too. However, here is no real tying of powers to emotional drive or serenity. Teleportation powers are unheard of. The presence of such powers are relatively rare, and various governments often desire to control such individuals for the governments benefit.

Also, there is more technology interaction between psychic powers and technology. There are pieces of tech that can help jam psychic powers, drugs to disorient and mess with powers, and even some creepy mix of biology and technology (like experimental vat grown cyborg computer technology) that can produce psychic power effects.

The galaxy lacks any overarching government, be it Republic or Empire. Cultures are so diverse and divergent that things tend to be separated into a variety of governments all local at the planetary or star system level. This is also due to the difficulties in maintaining shared calendars/time measurements, and general order at interstellar distances. Time Dilation, different orbital patterns around different stars, different cultures, all make large scale interstellar organization a major headache for a would be Empire or other government. As a result, you do have grand Republics or dictatorial Empires, just on small scales of maybe a handful of star systems at most. And if you move far enough in space from one you might be able to outrun your past.

In general you have a frontier flavor of the Outer Rim from Star Wars. Despite there being Hyperspace travel, things remain a chaotic frontier in my systems. Many systems are also sparsely populated (relatively speaking) as peoples spread out over countless star systems in a chaotic ungoverned fashion rather than at the command of unified world governments.

The general archetypes of the setting (in my mind) are largely similar to Star Wars (in fact this is where it probably SHOULD most resemble Star Wars as the archetypes are how people guide building their characters) so you have the usual character types, rogue with a heart of gold, predatory space pirates (maybe?), bounty hunters, diplomats, the Shroudtouched (whatever form that takes), nobility, scoundrels, criminals, etc.)

Any further ideas of where to take this setting?