#5 Canon.
For the last year, I’ve been running a campaign called Star Wars Saturdays, set in the Star Wars timeline of the original movies.
Each month I run a different game system, usually with completely different players than the previous month. We use the original trilogy of movies as our touchstone and the events of our game sessions are a loose canon we create as we play. Some NPCs become PCs in future games, some PCs re-occur. One PC’s backstory was that he left the Empire because his squad of Stormtroopers were forced to murder a couple of moisture farmers for no good reason. It’s this lovely side story that exists in the Galaxy.
I’ve found the approach works incredibly well. I use the canon of Jedis and the Empire and all that to pull everyone along to create new stories.
This past weekend during Gauntlet Con, I ran Apocalypse World set on Tatooine moments after Jabba the Hutt was killed by “those darn Rebels” and it was a glorious romp through Jabba’s abandoned palace. One of the players told me he literally had never played a Star Wars RPG even though he saw the original trilogy as a boy, and he LOVED IT.