In A Big Year For Avantris Entertainment, Mikey Gilder Talks Actual Play, Game Design, And An Even Bigger Future – The Fandomentals
It’s been a big year for Avantris Entertainment. During the 2026 ENNIE Awards, they took home six awards for The Crooked Moon, a 632-page book for D&D Fifth Edition. This is after their Kickstarter for Neon Odyssey raised over $16 million, one of the biggest for a TTRPG Kickstarter. Before designing games, they got their start in content creation in 2015 primarily through Actual Play. Since then, they have gained a dedicated fan base of over 212,000 followers on Twitch and 2.81 Million subscribers on YouTube. At the very tail end of Gen Con 2026, I sat down with Mikey Gilder, CCO of Avantris Entertainment, to pick his brain about Actual Play.
Ciera “Panda”: When considering Actual Play as a part of the tabletop roleplaying industry, where do believe Avantris Entertainment lands?
Mikey Gilder: It was always my dream to make games, that was my passion. When it comes to the Actual Play, it was super critical and I think it’s all part of the ecosystem. We call ourselves Avantris Entertainment and that was very deliberate. We have our actual play, then we launched the publishing wing and are making games for 5e for now. Who knows what we will be doing? We’ve discussed that we’re very open to additional forms of entertainment. We have a record label putting out music, we’ve done animation now — there’s all these different aspects. The actual play is a critical part of that ecosystem. What it’s really good at is developing the community, especially the most passionate, die-hard and committed, as a format to showcase stories, worlds, and characters in a way that other media can’t.
Of the two greatest mini campaigns we’ve ever had, one was Daggerheart called Dust to Damntation and was sponsored. Also, Studio Agate sponsored us to play Tainted Grail TTRPG: Song Of A Dying World. It’s an amazing system that we probably wouldn’t have looked at, but our fans got a look at it because we were able to tell this incredible story in only three sessions. That what people need a lot of times. They may not sit through a rule book unless they fall in love with the setting in the world and the characters. Those kind of stories help people realize the benefits of the systems, you need to spark the passion to then invest the time. It’s competing for dollars, but it’s also competing for time more importantly. I think that actual plays help — if it’s a good actual play and people are earnest and invested, the audience is going to feel invested and look at those games.
Ciera: You said you’ve always dreamed of being a game designer, can you tell me how Avantris developed into designing games?
Mikey: When I first graduated college in 2011 my friends, Richie [Mikey’s twin and CEO of Avantris Entertainment], and I wanted to go into board games. We had an awesome call with our favorite board game designer Rob Daviau, who created Star Wars Epic Duels, who gave us a rundown of the industry and said, I think you should get more real world experience first. So we did. We got office jobs, and there was a chance that we just lose ourselves in the rat race and just stay in corporate, but Richie and I never did. Then we got into TTRPGs, fell in love with Dungeons and Dragons and telling stories.
We only started streaming because Andy and Kelsey moved to Brooklyn so we have a remote setup of us at the table and them online. We realized we had cameras and everything ready for us to stream and we just did it. We didn’t realize that it would turn into something. I just wanted to play D&D every week, it was an excuse for us to actually beat the calendar and have someone to be beholden to.
We streamed for five years with no audience. In 2022 we finally got in honest because of short form content. As soon as we had any capital to put back into the business, into the stream, we realized we should really be investing in finally making games. That was where the impetus was. We can finally go back to that dream.
Ciera: I noticed during Neon Odyssey’s Kickstarter campaign that you have brought together a lot of small niche communities. The one I knew of was Doig and Swift (Director and Art Director).
Mikey: Any project that we do, at least so far, we’ve gone all out. Our goal is that we want to bring people into this hobby, what I believe is the greatest hobby in the world. The best thing you can do with your friends. That’s the unique opportunity with our platform, we have a skill to find people who have never tried a TTRPG and bring them in. We find opportunities in additional communities, like you said the animation community. We invested very heavily into that animated trailer. The fans of The Midnight, our favorite band. The fans of TWRP who came in the 11th our, like Gandalf in the Two Towers at Helms Deep, to bring in the Starlight Brigade stretch goal. We’re very deliberate about how once we align our theme and ethos of a project, we look at the ways we can tap into those audiences. You can have an incredible time creating real people in a fantasy world and tell amazing stories with your friends. That’s always on the top of our minds, wanting more tangible things that they can interact with. It’s not just that you can watch Legends of Avantris, you can play the game — you’re really living in that fandom sphere.
Ciera: Is there any future plans right now after you have finished the Kickstarter campaign? Maybe something more experimental?
Mikey: We love Dungeons and Dragons, that said, we crave other systems. We’ve started playing other systems of stream and I think that a good testing ground for that is our Patreon. As we start developing more content for that, which is not tied to these massive years long behemoth Kickstarters and books, that’s where we start experimenting. Get a little weird. Probably start making some Mork Borg. Pirate Borg was one of our first and we fell in love with it and we are currently in a campaign called .
Ciera: Outside of Avantris, what do you think about the greater state of actual play?
Mikey: There are some folks that have exploded in certain areas to tell unique stories or have a different perspective. We became friends with the Theatre of the Unaligned and combining actual play with animation and scripted. Even Wizards of the Coast is investing in their own official actual play. There’s a lot of opportunity for that as folks go beyond, ‘here’s what we did in the renaissance period between Critical Role launching and the pandemic era.’ Lets find some new and interesting ways in order to explore that, I think there’s a lot of opportunity there.
You can watch Legends of Avantris on YouTube and Twitch.
Images via Avantris Entertainment
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