Serakah: Spirited Sanctuaries

The initial idea for the world of Serakah came much earlier than the setting guide began being written. In the summer of 2024, between my sophomore and junior year of school, I was the head administrator for UChicago's West Marches campaign run through the Tabletop Tuesdays RSO. West Marches is a yearly TTRPG campaign that is structured a bit differently than traditional tabletop games: in our framework, each player creates and controls a character as normal, but rather than having a set-in-stone roster, game master, and schedule, West Marches allows for a bit of a looser commitment. In-narrative, each character is part of some guild or organization within the world where they can be sent out on missions when available, forming a rotating cast of characters each session.

Practically, it is run through a Discord server, where players can write up session proposals in the #quest-board channel, listing the time and place, along with how many players it can support, and a short description detailing the tone and expectations. They then create a thread off of that message (essentially a sub-channel) where players available at the date and time can sign up for a slot in the session. See an example below:

Each year, over the summer, a contingent of the players work together to create the following year's campaign setting. In 2024, ten of us worked together to ideate a world that would become Serakah. Our last world's adventures had spanned an entire continent, with huge regions that all had their own things going on. We had decided to not flesh out any individual region, leaving the world incredibly open-ended for game masters to be able to support whatever session idea they might have. One day could be an innocent carnival where the GM prepared a series of minigames for prizes, and another could be a ruthless domineering villain bent on oppressing an entire region. The tonal variety was, at times, jarring. 

While a very fun campaign overall, we felt like there were some very critical decisions we could make early on in the worldbuilding process to fix some of the problems of the previous year. We began by setting clearer tenets for what we wanted the setting to provide for the campaign, and after some discussion as to what we would like to explore, we defined those tenets: this world would focus on community, impermanence, and spirituality. We also decided to reduce the scope of the world itself. Where the last campaign had taken place within an entire continent, this campaign would be much smaller, set within just a few thousand square miles. Finally, we reduced player level-ups such that at the end of the campaign players would only reach level 12, rather than the godly heights of level 20, to allow for more breathing room between levels and a slower power scale overall. 

With these thoughts in mind, we then began building, and Serakah started to take shape. We liked the idea of a non-western fantasy setting, and found ourselves doing a decent amount of research on the various tribes of ancient South America, their cultures, religion, iconography, building techniques, etc. We found this to be an incredibly rich design space, taking these concepts that were quite novel to us and folding them into our fantasy setting, as well as seeing how we could map certain concepts to structures that already existed within Pathfinder. Rather than players traversing on horseback, what if llamas were the standard mount? Instead of a pantheon of deities proved to be real in the ways they shape the world, what if the valley's religions were more focused on the worship of great world-defining concepts such as the sun in the sky or the rainfall after a drought, and how does this difference change how classes like the Cleric function?

The following year showed us how correct we were in our approach. Serakah felt incredibly cohesive from session to session, and each session felt like an extension of the themes we had sought out, as opposed to establishing themes of the world for itself. We had found that previous campaigns tended to "lose the plot" a bit by spring quarter, due to many GMs running out of their "obvious" ideas for the setting, and beginning to reach toward sillier and more wacky influences; I was certainly guilty of this as well. This was not the case in Serakah, however. Spring quarter sessions still felt very true to the setting, indicating that we had built enough into the world to support a year's worth of different adventures. By the end of the campaign, I felt so creatively fulfilled. The setting felt so rich and real, and the stories I was able to tell in it changed the way I viewed collaborative storytelling. Many of the other players shared this sentiment, and though its time had come, setting Serakah down felt incredibly bittersweet.

During the summer of 2025, UChicago sent me to GenCon with a comped ticket with one of my Serakah co-writers, Alex Duarte (UChicago graduate '25, B.A. in Media, Arts, & Design), as essentially a test run to determine whether the convention was worthwhile for the university to be sending game studies students to. While there, we filled our days to the brim, going to lecture after lecture, and walking around the convention floor for hours talking to various game designers, publishers, manufacturers, and influencers. As both of us were fans of Pathfinder as a TTRPG, and with Starfinder releasing its first sourcebooks, we found ourselves by the Paizo (Pathfinder's publisher) booth more than once. 

While there, we talked to various different writers and game designers for Pathfinder and Starfinder, and they provided us with some really fantastic insight on what being a writer/designer for a tabletop system like Pathfinder was like. They walked us through design choices, timelines, co-writing, publisher expectations, and generally shared really interesting tidbits and anecdotes. They advised that one of the best things we could do to break into the scene was just to write. They told us to write adventures, player aids, sourcebooks, homebrew classes, anything that we wanted to. Being able to point at work that we had done within the space was so crucial. We heard similar advice when talking to other third party TTRPG writers, so we got thinking, and that night, we called up our close friend and Serakah co-writer Izzy Martino (UChicago graduate '23, B.A. in Creative Writing) who had proposed the initial idea and was the lead worldbuilder the previous summer. Outside of the hotel lobby, in the dark, the three of us unknowingly had our first meeting for what the project would become.

In August of 2025, we began to talk logistics. I was preparing to enter my fourth year of undergrad at the beginning of October, meaning that I had the option to go through the Media, Arts, and Design major's Capstone sequence, essentially the major's thesis. This was a space to produce a large-scale project with guidance from the university while being incredibly open-ended. After talking with the team, we agreed that this was a great opportunity to give the project some structure and expectation. We also agreed, though, that the project was much too vast in scope for a six month timeframe, so we conceptualized what would eventually become Spirited Sanctuaries, a book that captured roughly 35% of what we wanted to write, settling on an estimated 60-80 pages. The book would be largely settlement-focused, with each of the three of us tackling one settlement. The largest central settlement, Tomalhuiyo, we chose to wait on because we figured it would be significantly longer and more difficult to delegate work with. Our breakdown for the book was:

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Settlement 1 (Hara Bosak, written by Izzy)

Chapter 3: Settlement 2 (Upasuru, written by me)

Chapter 4: Settlement 3 (Poc'oric, written by Alex)

Chapter 5: Character Options

We wanted our introduction to the book to be somewhat comprehensive for the other important parts of the setting, such that GMs would be able to run games in the setting even with it only being a slice of what we wanted to deliver overall. In terms of who wrote which settlement, we came to agreement pretty much immediately; each of us conveniently had overseen a different settlement when we wrote the first draft, so it only felt right to fall into similar roles for the book. 

We also looped in Ashlyn Sparrow, a professor at the university who was familiar with our work, the university's resources, and the games industry as a whole, who agreed to be our advisor on the project. I worked with the three of them to schedule a weekly time for us to meet, created a Google Drive folder and ported all of our old documents into it, and built up a Discord server for us to keep things organized in. We had our first logistical meeting, where we determined the rough subsections within each settlement's chapter, and created a rough timeline of the next couple weeks. With a skeleton and a plan, we began to write.

As we began to write, we pretty quickly began to understand what the writing would entail. Writing summaries and bulleted lists was much easier than creating, and communicating, detailed histories and cultures. Izzy, as the person of the three of us with the most experience with technical writing, got right to work, making quick work of the first parts of Hara Bosak. Alex and I struggled a little bit more, realizing how intimate of an understanding we would need to have of these settlements in order to be able to write about them. Even with what we had written the year prior, I had only a very basic understanding of its government structures, exports, cultural mentalities, and most of all, its history. Instead of writing, then, I began doing research. 

I began to fall into a rhythm. I worked through Upasuru's history, beginning as a small salt mine settlement and growing into a proper city bit by bit, building a skeleton, doing some research, building out a bit more, back to research, back to writing, and so on. As I wrote out the history, I began to catch stray thoughts as I had them and logged them into the other categories to be written. I drew out basic city map layouts (something we should have done from the beginning, to be honest), created a mood board in our shared Miro board, By the end (about six weeks or so from when we had begun writing), the rest of the chapter was clear to me, and after that the process was simply hammering out section after section. 

At the end of the autumn quarter, the Media, Arts, and Design capstone students were to give a progress presentation to various faculty in the department, for the opportunity to receive a small grant. We thankfully received a $500 grant, and I began budgeting. Going into winter quarter, we were looking good on writing progress, but because of the structure of Poc'oric, Alex didn't think that he would be able to finish writing the settlement before our deadline, so we decided that it would be best for him to jump into a support role as Izzy and I finished up our chapters, and begin structuring Chapter 1, which was more of a general summary of the setting as a whole. 

As I budgeted our grant money, we decided that we had enough to commission two to three art pieces. It was important for us to hire from our peers, keeping the project "in-house" so to speak, but this came with the drawback that university students tend to be busy, so we settled on commissioning two pieces, as we wanted our artist to have plenty of time. With two pieces and two settlements going into the book, it only seemed natural that we have an art piece for each settlement. We ultimately decided on @birddcandle, an artist that I was familiar with as we were coworkers together. We were quoted at around $75 a piece, which gave us plenty of budget to work with. 

Ash advised me on a couple different options for printing the book, so I reached out to get information about quotes, timelines, and expectations, and ultimately decided on the university's print shop, PSD Design Arts. Being on-campus, we wouldn't need to pay for shipping, and it was easy to stop by and ask questions as we had them. 

As tasks continued to add on with each weekly meeting, I quickly realized that our Discord channels were no longer sufficient for keeping things organized, and so I began a spreadsheet that could hold as much detail as was necessary. As we laid everything out that we still had left to do, there was more than a little bit of concern that we'd be cutting it close with our deadline at the end of the quarter. We decided that it was better to pull the trigger early, and so we asked for an extension on the project, with a new due date for the capstone showcase at the end of April. We were granted the extension, which allowed us to stretch our timeline considerably. 

The next few months were a complete blur of action. As both the project manager and a writer, I would go from writing a small section, directly into a meeting about logo options, checking in with our artist, drafting book layout options, researching fonts, and talking through color palettes. If that wasn't enough, I also had decided fairly last-minute that I wanted top-down maps of both settlements in the book, and so began working on those using Canvas of Kings, a map-making software available on Steam. Little by little, though, items were completed, and progress felt smooth and steady. By the end of winter quarter, we had a full finished draft of the book, and sent it to Ash's sister, who had offered to edit it for us. By the beginning of spring quarter, we had received edits and notes, and began combing through, rewriting, and reformatting. Izzy and I also began to learn to use InDesign for creating the book layout. 

In order to ensure that we had the physical books by the capstone showcase at the end of April, we set our hard deadline for submitting the files to the print shop to be the end of the first week of April, as they had assured us that the turnaround time was no longer than two weeks. And when the first week of April came, everything had been edited cover to cover, each chapter's InDesign file was finished, the art was done, the maps were complete, and the final PDF was compiled together and submitted. We cheered and celebrated, and later that month when the physical copies were ready, we celebrated once again, having this physical token of our work in our hands. All three of us have been using books like this one for quite a while, so seeing it on our shelves with officially published content felt surreal.

Toward the end of the school year, there were a few opportunities to present our book. Of course, it was presented at the capstone showcase, MADD EXPO, where it was seen by many students and faculty for the first time! It got good traction, with many spending a decent chunk of time leafing through the book and asking questions.

It additionally stood out as one of two analog games presented at the university's first annual Slice Fest, a presentation of work-in-progress games for people affiliated with the university, judged by professionals within the game industry for prizes. While we did not win a prize at the showcase, one of the judges was interested enough in the game that they bought a copy of the book! 

This was also a good practice opportunity for pitching our book to publishers, as that is a route we are actively considering for the full book. We learned a lot, made some great connections, and got amazing feedback both on the book itself, and also on our presentation, which we were complimented on for its design and conciseness. 

In June of 2026, we made the book available digitally on itch.io, listing it for $5, and making the first chapter available for free. Within 24 hours it had over 100 views and had been added to a collection of Pathfinder 2e supplement material. After the first few days of it being listed, the attention on it wound down, but our goal was more than anything to get eyes on it and put it out into the larger world. We are happy with how it has been received!

As of writing this, I am running a playtest for the book with new players to Pathfinder and taking lots of notes. We're early in and we've already learned a lot about what works and what needs revising. Meanwhile, Izzy, Alex, and I are all still hard at work writing for the full book. I've begun structuring Tomalhuiyo, our massive capital city, Alex is back in the swing of writing Poc'oric, and Izzy has begun work on an entirely new area of the jungle that was not in our first iteration of the setting. 

As this is entirely a passion project with no set end date to rush toward, the progress has certainly been a bit slower since finishing Spirited Sanctuaries. We still have weekly meetings, though, and each week we continue to have things to talk about for the project. All of us are certainly still passionate about it, and are excited to see it get past the ultimate finish line, far in the future when the entire book has gotten the same treatment that Spirited Sanctuaries did. If you would like to support the project, check it out on our itch page, and for questions or comments, reach out to serakahrpg@gmail.com!