Previously, the game has worked in such a way that in each chapter there's resources at stake. The Scourge is coming, and your epic hero needs stuff to fight the Scourge off.
It works on two scales: first, it gives your main character a chance for re-rolls in character scale play; second, it gives you dice on the table to roll against the inevitable invasion.
What I've been thinking about is how to color the stuff on the personal scale. It's easy enough to say that those dice are a serious abstraction for the overall resources of the colony, like labor and industry and level of technology and stuff. But what about the personal scale? Initially I thought of it as a relationship with one or more factions involved with that world. But that doesn't totally line up with how epic stories work. Heroes have connections on all kinds of levels. Companions, gangs, fleets, whole worlds.
So naturally I'm looking at Trollbabe, and I'm thinking about how the scale effects work there. In case you're not aware, when the stakes increase, you can take relationships on an equivalent scale. So if a person's well being is the stakes, you can take a relationship that's a person. When teh stakes are a whole village, you can take a village as a relationship.
The thing that doesn't totally map to Galactic quite right is that there's no real benefit to having the aid of a community in Trollbabe vs. having the aid of a single person. They each equal a re-roll attempt, and they each suffer the consequences of the re-roll being botched.
I think in Galactic there need to be some differentiators. If your connection to a whole world is one person, it's different when that person is harmed than when your relationship to a world is the world itself and the world is somehow harmed.
My idea, overall, is that you can call upon the aid of your connection for a re-roll as much as you want in play, but you generate 'strain' in the relationship. At an appropriate point in play, either at the end of a scene or at the end of a chapter, you roll against the strain and determine the negative consequences of relying so much on your connection.
What I'm thinking is that maybe there's different consequences at different scales. A person suffers differently than a world, and the character has to do different things to fix it.
The other thing I'm weighing is the idea in Trollbabe that you have to have a personal-level adventure before you can then do a group-level adventure. I'm not sure how that'd work okay with how I have things now. I could maybe say that if the resources are d4, that's a person, and if it's a d6, that's a group, and so on, but I'm not quite sure how that'd work either.