Seraphim and Sanctuary open beta
Electi is proud to announce the open beta for Seraphim and Sanctuary. Massive crawlers fight to reclaim a dying world, and you are in command. Experience a tabletop game in which your choices on the battlefield affect your unit stats and abilities and unfold a massive narrative.
This is a beta, so we ask that you please share your findings and suggestions on our Discord server.
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From Author M.R. Giardina (@CommissarHark on discord):
Hail and well met, Kaptains and Hetman-Majors. My name is M.R. Giardina, but you can call me Mr. G (or, Hark if you know me on Discord). I'm here today, with the help of Greg Horton and Electi Studios, to introduce you to the barren and broken world of Myria. Now I say barren because Myria is technically dead. Some time back, a group of alien creatures known only as the Seraphim went there and conquered the planet almost overnight. They wiped out its armies, destroyed most major cities, and began strip-mining the planet for its natural resources. Even the oceans were sucked nearly dry, and the forests were pulled up. Then, without a clear reason why, and nothing other than a massive flash of sickly green light to the West, they pulled up stakes and left.
The world they left behind was resource-poor, atmospherically unstable, and suffered from an almost nonexistent water cycle. The governments, what little was left of them, tried to rally their people around a handful of smaller cities that had been spared the brunt of the fighting. New capitals were declared, and emergency powers snapped into place. Rationing, conscription, and mass recycling, all of these policies became the way of survival for most people. As the old nations struggled to maintain their grip, new nations formed around them, creating a conflict of differing ideals: do we adapt, or do we cling to what little we still have? This is the world of Serpahim and Sanctuary, my new 6mm scale narrative skirmish wargame.
I started writing SaS back in 2020 right in the midst of that first awful year of COVID. I had been laid off at my job as an accountant, and to cheer myself up, I picked up the Steve Jackson OGRE set with the plastic miniatures. I had always wanted to get into wargaming at that scale, ever since I was a little kid looking at detailed dioramas in various museums here and in the UK. While I sat at the dining room table trimming models off of sprues, and carefully gluing teeny tiny turrets to tank hulls the size of micromachines my wife remarked, sarcastically, "And I bet you're gonna write a game for them too, right?"
I had been working on homebrew rules for a game called This is Not a Test, by Joey McGuire, since 2018, and had really gotten into the idea of doing something more with my game writing. She was always teasing about how I would find a concept I liked in another game, and find a way to convert it to TNT. I'm pretty sure by the end I had written something like eight splat books, in the region of 60,000 words bringing ideas from games like Necromunda, Scrappers, and even Dracula's America into the post-apoclyptic world that Joey had made. It was fun, but it was bloated, and I wanted to try my hand at something wholly unique. Something that had only my fingerprints on it. So I took her challenge; not for the last time either.
Within the first month, I had worked out a preliminary set of rules. The basic concept of gathering resources and building units in the course of the actual turn was inspired by my love of RTS Games throughout my teen years and early twenties. I had always enjoyed the post-game phases between missions in the various narrative games I played, but I wanted the missions themselves to have more meaning than simply, "go here, shoot the thing, or push the button. Kill them before they kill you." There's nothing wrong with an objective marker, mind you, but I liked the idea of a meta-game where you needed to think several missions ahead with the decisions you were making. Do I hold back and gather resources for a push next game, or do I rush their Utilities and cripple their economy? Competitive Starcraft became a source of inspiration for these idea, but taken a few steps further than they usually do. Not as rapidfire and twitch based, more about the grand strategy of a true military campaign.
We started testing the game in the Fall, and it all just sort of came together. I wrote the original Alpha after only a few weeks of bug testing, and I've been tweaking it ever since. When I brought it to Greg, he and Kyle looked it over and tried it out. Seeing my game played by other people with minis they threw together specifically for that purpose is still one of the coolest experiences of my life. They gave me some amazing feedback and we tightened things up even further. Streamlining here, thematically tuning there, and cutting a bit of fat where it was needed. We polished it and polished it and now, here we are.
That's where you come in. The first phases of testing are finished, and now I need you kind folks to break my baby. I want to put out the best product I can, and to do that I need to know where it's weak. I need to figure out what it's lacking and what it has too much of, and how to make SaS the best game it can be. It's hard to find those problems yourself when its something you've poured so much into, so I'll leave it in your capable hands to tell me just where I may have let nostalgia get in the way of function. The Beta Packet contains the basic rules in a skirmish format. It doesn't contain the core factions of the game, however, instead we opted to use archetypal Tropes to represent the kinds of strategies and commanders usually present in RTS games. Nor does it have the full campaign rules. We're looking to get the flow of play and product sorted out, so don't despair: with the full release, there will be much more to enjoy.
That about sums it up. Now, let's spin up the reactors, get our production facilities online, and set out into the vast lands of the dying world to duke it out for the scraps left behind. FOR THE STATE!
