Hi Obsoletion and welcome to the forums!
Glad you like the game so far. We felt like there should be a game like this but nobody was making it. Ultimately we decided to take matter into our own hands and here we are ; )
Regarding save scumming, i recently read quite a long discussion on this on rpgcodex.net but i am not really sure what to make of it. Generally we want players to play the game in the way they want to do it. Its a bit like cheating in the old days. If you want to do it there is no developer stopping you but i think cheating ruins a game for you.
We are not decided but i think we will allow free saving during any stage of the game in normal mode. To prevent save scumming we could keep the seeds for the saves so that the results of a role will be the same no matter how often you reload.
On top of that, an ironman mode would be cool where you only have one save and no saving during combat for the “hardcore” crowd.
Anyways, we can assure you that the game will be challenging as the possibility of failure and making the best out of your mistakes is an integral part of our game design. Failing writes the best stories ;) (of course as long as the game is not unfair in any way but just hard).
Regarding your other question, we have no e-mail list set up but we will dish out updates every week so if you want to get the latest news just subscribe to our RSS or follow us on any of our social channels and your good! The pre-alpha will probably be open, so no worries about not getting in.
Cheers!