Bitter Chalice is a bold RPG design playing a bold game of chicken with US tariffs

Every part of Bitter Chalice’s production is audacious. Here is a heavily authored tabletop RPG, packaged in a box, and crowdfunding in the midst of a tariff-wrought concussion felt across the industry. It promises both story and mechanics inspired by the Dark Souls video game series, which is not something an artist invokes lightly. And yet, its creator’s casual confidence in the face of all this mounting adversity and expectation is perhaps the biggest surprise of all.

“We've been working on this for many years. We learned about this tariff bullshit — pardon my French — on April 2. The train was full speed towards opening the campaign,” said Tommaso De Benetti, creative director and one of two members of The World Anvil Publishing. “There's no scenario in which we would have not opened the campaign.”

De Benetti is an Italian living in Finland who, along with co-founder Luca Vanin and a team of long-term collaborators, creates tabletop RPGs when not working his day job as a video game developer and (arguably 24-hour job) as a parent. Like many small press outfits, The World Anvil is composed of part-time side hustles. De Benetti makes sure everyone gets paid, often by sacrificing his own cut — he says a lifetime working as a freelancer taught him “that if you're not getting paid, no job gets done.”