RPG Publisher Spotlight: The World Anvil Publishing

The awesome collection of people who are Geek Native’s patrons voted The World Anvil Publishing into the RPG Publisher Spotlight.

I got in touch, and Tommaso De Benetti did me the huge favour of a quick response. Two weeks later, I’m only now writing up the article. Sorry, Tommaso! I blame the season of good cheer and festivity! Thankfully, Scotland is glowing a gale tonight so I’m cowing inside.

In this article we touch on the fatigue Tommaso (and I) have seen coming into crowdfunding and… which World Anvil do you think we’re talking about? There are two! This World Anvil publishes the (free to download) Monad Echo SRD, the 5/5 rated Broken Tales and equally praised Dead Air.

Getting to know World Anvil

I’ve already introduced The World Anvil Publishing a little, but who better do it than Tommaso himself?

Also, apologies; since the company seemed to be in Italy, Tommaso would be there too. I was totally wrong, and World Anvil’s logistic feats are even more impressive than I imagined!

Who are The World Anvil Publishing?

We are a small indie publisher specializing in TTRPGs, we like to say “with a European twist”, which to me basically means “not games made by committee”. I’m a firm believer in having a strong vision and standing behind it, even if it means that it might not be a game for 100% of the audience (that’s not to say that we don’t take the audience into account, and our community is very helpful with that). But sometimes I think people don’t know exactly what they want, and it’s our job to show them something that will excite them, or to make choices that other publishers would shy away from. The company was founded by me and my business partner in 2020, but the label has been active since 2015. We weren’t formally a company before 2020. Sooner or later we’d like to try our hand at other tabletop products like board games, and in that sense we’re already doing some hybrid experiments. 

I live in Finland, the rest of the team is based in Italy. 

What are you best known for?

Broken Tales, no doubt. It’s a horror game about fairy tales, where both the stories and the characters in those stories have been “broken” and have become something else. Players interpret the fairy tale villains, who are now the good guys working for the Church, in a sort of 18th century version of Suicide Squad, trying to solve mysteries related to other fairy tale characters gone mad. 

It started out as a game we wanted to give away for free at events, turned into our bestselling game, and was nominated for both Product of the Year and Best Adventure at the ENNIEs, no doubt in part because of its eye-catching design. The game resonated with a lot of people and we found an unexpectedly strong audience in the LGBTQ+ community because of the outsider undertones of the game.

Being a successful World Anvil

I asked at the start of this article whether you knew which World Anvil would be featured and, of course, the truth is you can’t tell from the name alone. You need context. The other is a website for worldbuilding so perhaps there were enough clues this time around.

In Tommaso’s answers below, he talks about SEO, which is a digital marketing skill set with a dodgy reputation but in this context just means “success in Google”.

There’s another World Anvil in the TTRPG space – a worldbuilding tool – do people ever get you mixed up?

All the time. This has been an issue for a long time, and I even had a chat with the nice guys who run World Anvil a few years ago to see what could be done about it. As far as I know, we were born almost at the same time and were unaware of each other for a while. The compromise we found was that we would add “publishing” to our name, since World Anvil is a worldbuilding platform and not interested in publishing games per se. It’s an okay solution, but people still confuse us and World Anvil has a strong SEO presence on the web, so the whole thing is not ideal. That said, I like the name, and while I’ve sometimes thought about rebranding, I haven’t found a very good reason to do so. People will find us if they want to.

How hard is it to publish in both Italian and English?

Very, because it creates massive overhead. For example, while working on Dead Air: Seasons, we were developing 6 books at once, plus 4 accessories, half in English, half in Italian. All our authors at the moment are Italian, so the Italian text comes “for free” in a way, but the problem is working on both languages at the same time. For our next game, Bitter Chalice, we’ll try an English first approach, see how it goes and then possibly revise our strategy. 

I must point out that none of us do this full time, so as you can imagine, the multiple languages fill every second of our free time.

TTRPG industry trends

Even as Tommaso reminds us that no one on the team has this as their full time job we should acknowledge just how impressively professional World Anvil’s products have been.

I’ve long been impressed and, perhaps incorrectly, bundled some of that with the innovation I’ve seen from Italians on TTRPG Kickstarter.

Plenty of clever and imaginative RPGs have come out of Italy in recent years. Why do you think that is?

I recently had the same discussion with one of your colleagues at Rascal. I think they’ve always been there, if anything we have an overabundance of releases compared to the relatively small number of players. Seeing other people’s success with crowdfunding has given a lot of teams the courage to try to reach an international audience, and most importantly, has convinced them that it is worth translating the games. I have no doubt that Italy is full of creative talent. The problem is often the language barrier or the lack of resources to show what people can do. 

Are there any trends worthy of comment you’ve seen in the RPG community as a whole?

I’m a little concerned about the fatigue I’m seeing in the crowdfunding space. It’s absolutely obvious that many games wouldn’t happen without it, but lately there’s been an onslaught of projects and I can see, even in my own community, that people are skipping over the absolute hits because… it’s just too much. You can’t buy everything and you can’t play everything. I’m not sure how to solve that problem, I know for sure we wouldn’t have been able to fund our games without crowdfunding, it’s just a risk I can’t take for something that is still a glorified hobby for now.

I’ve backed and bought The World Anvil books and have been impressed by the production quality. How much do you think that matters to the commercial success of a game?

It’s everything to me. I’m a collector first, and when I ask you for the money that I’m going to ask you for my game, you can be sure that I’m going to do everything in my power to give you something that you can’t wait to get your little hands full of fingers on. Very often we could have done things cheaper, but if it’s not something I would put in my library, it doesn’t get released. 

The future of World Anvil Publishing

The quickstart for Valraven: The Chronicles of Blood and Iron is out via DriveThruRPG and free. That’s a new game (not as new as Bitter Chalice) inspired by mature fantasies like Berserk, Dragon Age and A Song of Ice and Fire.

Since World Anvil also takes the time to publish an SRD, I wondered what else the company knew about that might be brewing elsewhere.

What can you tell readers about Valraven: The Chronicles of Blood and Iron that they might not already know?

I can tell you that it took us a long time to find a place for it because it’s an absolute beast to translate (500+ pages in what used to be three books and is now two), and also because it was one of the first games to use the Monad Echo system, so I wanted to make sure that this new edition would come with all the improvements we’ve made over the years. I’m currently translating it, and while I’m always afraid of falling behind schedule, I also know that no fantasy game that’s been released since its release comes close to Valraven if you want a game that reminds you of Berserk for tone or Game of Thrones for scale. So I think it will find its audience. 

Have you seen anyone use the Monad Echo SRD in ways that pleased you? Any third-party games you’d recommend?

Our community has been active with it, and one of these experiments has been released (Ruin, which you can download for free here). There’s something else the community has been working on that looks promising, but the truth about games is that it’s easy to have a cool idea, but hard to make it happen. At least one proposal was pretty far along, but it’s not done yet. 

We’ve had people ask if they can use it for their game (the answer is YES, it’s CC4.0), but I haven’t heard back.

What’s next from The World Anvil Publishing?

Our next game is Bitter Chalice, which is a bit of an experiment: it’s a very large campaign based on the exploration of an increasingly rich map set in and around the cursed city of Vathan. The campaign comes with its own rules, but the world is meticulously detailed, and the idea is to have this exploration experience that will remind people of the atmosphere in Hollow Knight or Elden Ring. 

After that, we have four other games signed and a couple more we’re trying to close. If the bureaucracy doesn’t kill us first, our lineup will be full until 2027. I also hope to be able to work on this stuff full time one day.

Lastly, is there anything you want to talk about? There are sometimes interesting anecdotes from your history or new projects you want to feature.

We have a lot of free material and quickstarts on TheWorldAnvil.com, so if people want to check out what we do, they can find hours and hours of free TTRPGs to play there.

Quick Links

• The World Anvil Publishing’s website.
• The World Anvil Publishing’s Discord.
• The World Anvil Publishing’s Instagram.
• The World Anvil Publishing’s Facebook.
• Kickstarter: Bitter Chalice