The world of TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) grows each and every day. Recently, Pixel Circus launched their latest live-play Dungeons and Dragons adventure The Borros Saga: Banesbreak! The adventure is led by DM (dungeon master) Vince Caso as he guides his friends through a time-twisting epic adventure through a world of his own creation. We recently got the chance to chat with Caso and Pixel Circus founders Kailey Bray and Saige Ryan about the series, creating a diverse and inclusive safe space and founding a company during the pandemic!
The first episode of The Borros Saga: Banesbreak kicked off on March 22, 2022, and the Twitch VOD for episode one can be found here. Future episodes of the series will air on Tuesday nights starting at 6 pm PST on the Pixel Circus Twitch channel.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Vince Caso, Kailey Bray and Saige Ryan
Julia Roth: We are so excited to sit down and chat! Let’s kick things off with a little backstory for everyone!
Vince Caso: I’m primarily an actor and a writer. You might know me from such things as The Guild and I have also done a lot of TTRPG in the last decade including We’re Alive: Frontier, LA By Night and now on the Pixel Circus channel, our weekly show Failed Save and our new series The Borros Saga: Banesbreak!
Kailey Bray: Hello, I am an actor, producer, game writer and all-around content creator here on the internet. I have been in this space for a couple of years. I started with Damsels, Dice and Everything Nice which I collaborated on with Saige. It kicked off our journey in trying to make space for what we call celebratory inclusive content. It’s the kind of content that allows you to see what the nerd community is really like. We noticed when we started making Damsels that people were hungry for that kind of content.
Saige Ryan: Hi! I am a streamer, host, producer and content creator and I host over on Smosh, do things for the Wizards of the Coast channel and Black Dice Society. I am also a founder of the Pixel Circus channel! We founded Pixel Circus during the pandemic due to a realization that if I wanted the things that make me feel safe and made my friends feel safe and included, we just had to make it.
JR: How was it to start a company during the pandemic?
SR: I feel grateful and privileged for the experience amongst us. I had just come from working for a large corporation and running their Twitch channel for the better part of two years before it shut down suddenly. Kailey had been working on Damsels, which was her baby and between the two of us, we wanted to start something. So we called Vince (Caso) and asked “can we ruin your world?” I am proud to be entirely independent but it does come with its struggles and stresses.
We have a community that has been so incredibly supportive since we kicked off and we made partner two months into the channel’s existence on Twitch because of them. We felt like people were missing a place to go like Pixel Circus and that showed by the immediate support of the content we were making. Of course, we had some trials and errors where we tried out different show formats and found what works for us.
KB: A thousand percent worth it. With our combined experience and the need to be scrappy and use as many resources as we can. We observed the way these larger companies were able to do it and find ways to make it better with significantly fewer resources is something that I am really proud of. So, we have been able to accomplish so much with a shoestring budget. We are currently one of the only studios in the country doing live TTRPG content at this time.
VC: From the experience of kicking off one of the early shows on the channel during the pandemic, we had to have that scrappy start-up mindset. We decided to try and not be something that we weren’t. We used what we had and focused on the incredible talent that we had access to and produce content people will fall in love with. When we kicked off Failed Save, Saige made overlays and we connected over Zoom and we quickly learned that the production value was second to the stories we were able to create and tell together. Now, fortunately with Banesbreak, we get to have a bit of both!
JR: Sometimes people tend to forget that throwing money at something doesn’t always mean it’s better.
KB: Exactly! We spend a lot of time listening to what our community has to say because they don’t shy away from telling us what needs to change and what doesn’t. Sometimes if you throw money at it, they won’t notice. But if you listen, they will always notice.
VC: Let this be a message to everyone reading this article. (ominous, menacing, deep voice) We are always listening.
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JR: Always! One of Pixel Circus’ main missions is to celebrate diversity and inclusivity in your content. Why is this mission so important to you?
KB: Speaking as someone who is both a woman of color and a queer woman and someone who found it difficult to find work as an actor because I was either not white enough, not Asian enough, not straight enough or not gay enough but too much of those things all the time – there are very few spaces within the entertainment industry to be yourself. We knew that we needed to make that space and it is always on our minds.
SR: A slogan that we use a lot is “All Nerds Welcome.” One of the incredible write-ups that Kailey has done is where she said that we are showing the nerd community as it actually is. When people talk about having a diverse show, we need to remind them that it isn’t hard. It is an intentional effort for people who are not inclusive. We care about it and it is at the top of our minds and we are always being aware of it. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t be a difficult thing. The nerd community is diverse, beautiful and inclusive when you boil it down to the best parts of it.
VC: Some companies will push that diversity button for the brownie points, to say “look at us and all the good we are doing.” For us, it is less about how well we can ride the glamourization of our own image and more focusing on how we can elevate people who are extremely talented. You don’t bring people into a show because of diversity, you bring them in because they are good and the talent we have in front and behind the camera is off the rails.
JR: I really think that is what makes Pixel Circus such a safe place on Twitch and in the TTRPG community. And seriously, thank you for providing us with that. Let’s switch things up a bit and dive into your new series The Borros Saga: Banesbreak! Can you give us a brief overview of the series?
VC: This campaign started out as a home game that kicked off this entire world. This started as two very important conversations back in 2018/2019. It first started with my girlfriend, Ash Ignis, who was encouraging me to get into D&D and try DMing. I had told her about my ideas for this world I was building in my mind and she wanted to learn more. The second conversation was with Saige who had never been in a proper D&D campaign before. So we brought the two ideas together and Banesbreak.
As time went on and Pixel Circus and Failed Save kicked off, our home game took a backseat to other things. Eventually, during one of the production meetings, I went to Kailey and Saige and asked them about bringing Banesbreak to the channel and starting fresh. I made adjustments to modernize the story, add more depth and expand to the new players we have at the table.
JR: How is it replaying a game that you already started?
KB: Vince is blessed with having a table of people with ADHD who don’t remember how the story went!
SR: We don’t remember. A lot of it changed in really interesting ways. For me, it’s a combination of having no recollection of the game and rebuilding my character from the home game. We also have new cast members who weren’t there with us so when it comes to making choices, there are different things we have to factor in.
JR: How was it convincing people to join your game?
SR & KB: (fawning over new castmates) THEY ARE SO COOL!
VC: Oh, very easy! Aabria Iyengar, Ahren Gray and Omar Najam took no convincing. Aabria is with us on Failed Save and knows about this world and has had a great time with us and we have had a wonderful time with her. Omar is someone that I have been trying to work with within any capacity for years. I needed to get him into something because he is so constantly freaking good in everything he does. And then, Ahren Gray is someone that none of us have met before but have seen in other content. We brought him in for session zero and loved his character and what he brought to the table.
JR: Saige, you talked about changing up your character for the show. But you as a person and a player have also changed throughout the pandemic. Has what you learned about yourself during the last few years found its way in there as well?
SR: I think all of my characters have an element of myself in them. I do my best to not put a self-insert because that would make me very soft and sensitive in a scary world. There are definitely elements of Kurse that have been taken from me. It’s a dark world and there are terrifying things happening in Borros. In this iteration of Kurse, she approaches the world with a lot more empathy and softness. I wanted her to be a counterbalance to the character I play on Failed Save who is a hardened, scrappy little criminal.
KB: How did we end up with reverse characters between Failed Save and Banesbreak? I softened up for Failed Save playing a motherly, southern, home cook Tortle who brings people back to life with cupcakes. During the first playthrough at home, I was still new to the table and was more careful and calculated with the choices I made. But now that I know the people at the table, feel comfortable and really leaning into my villain arc as a person in 2022, it has allowed me to let Nila be significantly more gay, brash, unapologetic, direct, caring and strong.
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JR: All six episodes of The Borros Saga: Banesbreak is already filmed. How was it filming this?
SR: It is our first in-person production so it was a huge learning experience. We had to learn how to run a very COVID safe, bare-bones person shoot. For us, our home games were six or seven-hour days so it felt like playing at home again. Even though the cameras were on, we didn’t have a live chat or set end times and it felt incredible. We always had this feeling of being able to keep going at the end of the day.
VC: I will say, by day three, I was army crawling out of the studio. Voice gone. What really helped with black filming was conducting a session zero and allowing the players to play through an adventure that takes place in the future. It got them thinking about how the group would be interacting by that point and how they would make their choices. Then after that, we went back to square one and everyone had an idea of where things could go.
JR: Will we ever get the chance to see that session zero?
VC: We never filmed it. But you will hear about it during that episode. I’ve hosted several canon one-shots that happen off-screen that I reference in the show or NPCs from them appear.
KB: Some of those canon one-shots will be available to our backers on Indiegogo! We are still crowdfunding for the rest of the season. We hit 100% of our goal on Tuesday and are very close to our first stretch goal. We’ve got so many exciting perks for our backers including the canon one-shots and Saige is getting a tattoo!
JR: You guys funded the full season, so we are getting 12 episodes of Banesbreak. Is that the end of the series or are we getting more?
KB: (chanting) Six seasons and a movie! Six seasons and a movie!
VC: I will tell you this, currently planned narratively speaking, there are three complete campaign arcs totaling over 100 episodes and a possible fourth campaign if we chose to delve into it. The content is there and we have every intention to keep producing this story. I think we have all fallen in love with these characters and this story and the community fell hard for them in ways that surprised us at first. Nothing will stop us from continuing this show.
KB: We just want to make sure that we are respecting the time and work of the incredible talent we have in front of and behind the camera. We understand that we are a smaller company and many of them are working with large companies with significantly more resources. We are beyond happy with how much support we have received from our community and backers who have allowed us to come this far and we will continue forward with their support.
JR: Thank you guys for everything! The Borros Saga: Banesbreak is a fantastic series and we can’t wait to check out the rest of the episodes! Before we sign off, can we get a small peek into what fans coming into the series can expect?
VC: The whole story is based on the idea of “what is the power of a story.” Stories that we have grown up with as children. The fairytales, the myths, the legends. How do they shape culture? Did they tell the best story they could have? What if you had to chance to go back and change history? To retell that story for a better outcome? That’s the question we are asking and answering with this show. These heroes have the opportunity to go back and retell one of the most important stories told in Borros and hopefully it will result in something better for this world. We are dealing with time travel, causality and all these tricky little mechanics that we are all excited for you guys to check out!
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Who I Am: A nerd by the strictest definition. I enjoy diving straight into my favorite fandoms without a care in the world. I live on video/board games, fantasy movies and TV, and all things geeky.
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