TSR The Full & Glorious History of NuTSR

Because the Saga of TSR3 has been ongoing for a while, with many landmarks, I thought I'd do a quick timeline for those who haven't had the time (or, frankly, inclination) to keep up with the whole palaver.

As multiple entities refer to themselves as TSR, I will use the nomenclature (1), (2) etc. to distinguish them. However, all the companies below simply use the term "TSR".

The principle people involved with this story are Ernie Gygax (one of Gary Gygax's children), Justin LaNasa (a tattooist, weapon designer, and briefly a politician who refers to himself as Sir Justin LaNasa*), Stephen Dinehart (co-creator of Giantlands with James Ward), and -- later -- Michael K. Hovermale, TSR3's PR officer.

Also linked to TSR3 is the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Much of TSR3’s commercial business appears to be conducted via the museum.

• 1974. TSR1 creates D&D.
• 1997. TSR1 is bought by WotC (WotC is bought by Hasbro in 1999).
• November 2012. Jayson Elliot registers the TSR2 name as a trademark to launch Gygax Magazine. Luke and Ernie Gygax are involved.
• November 2015. Gail Gygax sues TSR2. Luke and Ernie Gygax are forced to leave. Gygax magazine is forced to close by Gail Gygax. The company continues to sell the Top Secret RPG under the name TSR2.
• October 2020. The Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum claims ownership of various TSR logos and tries to license them to OSR publishers.
• June 19th 2021. TSR3 announces itself with a press release. It claims to be the original TSR1 back again, under the leadership of Ernie Gygax, Gary's son, announcing that "the band is back together". Also involved are Justin LaNasa and Stephen Dinehart. Their flagship product is "GIANTLANDS" by James Ward and Stephen Dinehart.
• June 22nd 2021. TSR3 announces it is rebooting Star Frontiers, a game which WotC owns and is currently selling online. They registered the trademark back in April 2021.
• June 24th 2021. Ernie Gygax does a YouTube interview, and I transcribe it. The interview begins a controversy which rages online and includes digs at newer gamers, WotC, and trans people.
• June 25th 2021. It transpires that TSR2's Jayson Elliot forgot to renew the trademark registration, at which point his former partner Ernie Gygax, along with Justin LaNasa & Stephen Dinehart, swept in and grabbed it before notifying him. They offer to let him use it for a nominal fee.

• Late June 2021. TSR3 embarks on an astonishing social media campaign where they tell people who don't like Gary Gygax not to play D&D, call a trans person on Twitter 'disgusting', thank the 'woke' because sales are up, insult Luke Gygax, and more. They also block or insult those who question them on Twitter.
• Late June 2021. Various companies distance themselves from TSR3, including Gen Con, TSR2 (who rebrand themselves Solarian Games), GAMA, and various individuals such as Luke Gygax, Tim Kask, Jeff Dee, and more. TSR3 responds to being banned from Gen Con by claiming that they created the convention.

• June 30th 2021. TSR3 blames the widespread pushback it is getting on WotC, accusing it of mounting a coordinated assault on them. In the same tweets they claim that they created the TTRPG business. Ernie Gygax and Stephen Dinehart then deactivate their Twitter accounts. Months later it transpires that this is the date they received a C&D from WotC regarding their use of their IP.

• July 2nd 2021. TSR3's Twitter account claims now to be run by a new Public Relations Officer called Michael.
• July 6th 2021. TSR3's Michael has not been heard of since he announced himself prompting a widespread online search for him.
• July 7th 2021. TSR3 rebrands its website 'Wonderfiled'(sic) as Stephen Dinehart publicly blocks WotC and Hasbro on Twitter and announces he is "breaking up with them" because of politics.

• July 9th 2021. Yet another TSR website appears! This one we call TSR 3.5. TSR3 has split into two -- Wonderfiled (later Wonderfilled), and TSR Hobbies. Stephen Dinehart runs the former, which features the GIANTLANDS project, while Ernie Gygax and Justin LaNasa run the latter.
• July 9th 2021. With the new TSR3.5, the company claims that an unnamed individual was running the Twitter accounts of the company, it's affiliate companies, and the individuals involved with the company, and that all posts on any of those social media accounts should now be considered "invalid".
• July 26th 2021. TSR3.5 announces TSR CON to be held on the July 4th weekend in the Horticultural Hall at Lake Geneva, WI, the name location as Gen Con launched in 1968. TSR announces that "TSR CON will always be here" (it never takes places there).

• September 27th 2021. TSR3's Michael K. Hovermale shows up here on EN World.
• October 14th 2021. Michael Hovermale announces that their Star Frontiers game became available and then sold out before they could announce it. Nobody can find anybody who bought this product.
• October 15th 2021. LaNasa calls EN World a 'very big company' and publicly accuses me of making all this up. I publicly ask TSR's representative, Michael K. Hovermale, three times what I've allegedly made up, but get no reply.
• October 20th 2021. TSR Con is moved from the July 4th weekend to March 24-27, the exact same dates as Gary Con. The venue is moved from the Horticultural Hall to the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum. A graphic on its website promises that they will not be checking vaccinations or asking people to wear face masks.

• December 6th 2021. A record is found showing that WotC is taking action against TSR3.5 - an administrative procedure to cancel its registration of the trademarks it is using, citing - among other things - fraud.
• December 7th 2021. After a long quiet period, TSR3.5 launches an IndieGogo campaign to "stop Wizards of the Coast". It files for a court declaration of its ownership of the TSR trademarks. The crowdfunding campaign will go to fight the legal battle, with any left over being donated to the Gygax Memorial Fund.
• December 9th 2021. TSR3.5 voluntarily dismisses the suit it filed two days before. The IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign is still running.

• December 11th 2021. The president of the Gygax Memorial fund publicly declares that they were never consulted, and would refuse any donation from TSR3's crowdfunding campaign. TSR3 quietly removes the references to the GMF from the IndieGoGo page.
• December 29th 2021. TSR3.5 refiles its lawsuit, this time in the correct jurisdiction. LaNasa and TSR ask for a trial by Jury.

• January 8th 2020. Wonderfiled[sic]'s Stephen Dinehart threatens to sue Twitter user David Flor for his negative review of Giantlands on the platform.
• January 10th 2022. TSR3's Justin LaNasa sends TSR alumn Tim Kask a profane message, telling him to "Go suck Lukes/wotc/balls you f*****g coward" and accusing him of having been fired from TSR for stealing.
• January 11th 2022. Michael K Hovermale claims that the first edition of TSR3's Star Frontiers: New Genesis game was released and has sold out. He says “It was a very small limited run released and sold on the DHSM [Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum] website. It is no longer available, and probably won’t be reprinted.” As yet, nobody has publicly revealed that they bought a copy.
• January 14th 2022. Michael K. Hovermale resigns as TSR3's Chief Creative Officer and Public Relations Officer after 6 months in the position.
• March 4th 2022. WotC strikes back with a lawsuit naming TSR, Justin LaNasa personally, and the Dungeon Hobby Shop museum. WotC seeks a judgement that TSR hand over all domains, take down all websites, pay treble damages and costs, hand over all stock and proceeds related to the trademarks, and more. TSR has 21 days to respond.

• March 22nd 2022. TSR gets an extension on that WoTC suit. Two waivers of service of summons granted to both Justin LaNasa and the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum. He now has 60 days from March 4th to serve an answer or motion, or suffer default judgment.
• March 26th 2022. TSR CON takes place at the same time as Gary Con. TSR claims " lol, actually we asked just about every one of the 800 people stopping by, TSR CON, and about 60% had no idea Gary con was going on, and we tried pushing them to go over and attend."
• March 28th 2022. TSR3 posts images of 'rebound' copies of AD&D 1E books it is selling for $650 each.
• May 17th 2022. Evidence emerges of Nazi connections via TSR3's Dave Johnson. Public Twitter posts include concentrated hateful imagery and messages over a long period of time.
• May 17th 2022. DriveThruRPG removes all Dave Johnson Games titles from the platform.
• May 17th 2022. A jury trial date is set for the TSR/WotC lawsuit for October 2023 (few suits like this actually make it to trial in the end).

• July 19th 2022. A leaked version of a beta version of TSR's 'Star Frontiers: New Genesis' game emerges on the internet. The content includes racist and white-supremacist propaganda, including character races with ability caps based on ethnicity, and various homophobic and transphobic references. Justin LaNasa immediately threatened to sue blogger Eric Tenkar, who shared the information publicly ('Mario Real' is one of LaNasa's online pseudonyms). Various evidence points towards the document's genuine nature, including an accidentally revealed Google drive belonging to NuTSR.
• July 22nd 2022. A video shows a Google Drive that appears to be owned by nuTSR, which contains a list of enemies of the company, usually with the word "WOKE" in caps being used as a pejorative.

(screenshot courtesy of the @nohateingaming Twitter account)​

• August 30th 2022. Wizard Tower Games announces that they have received a subpeona from WotC regarding TSR and Justin LaNasa. Former NuTSR employee Michaal K Hovermale confirms that he has also received a subpeona.
• September 5th 2022. Justin LaNasa sends out customer data, including addresses and credit card numbers. LaNasa responds by publicly claiming the evidence is photoshopped and slandering those who revealed it as liars.
• September 8th 2022. WoTC files an injunction to prevent LaNasa or his companies from “publishing, distributing, or otherwise making available Star Frontiers New Genesis or any iteration of the game using the Marks”.
• June 8th 2023. NuTSR files for bankruptcy. The case between WotC and NuTSR is postponed until March 2024.

Have I missed anything important? I'll continue updating this as I remember things, or as people remind me of things!

To the best of my knowledge, TSR3 is not actually selling any type of gaming product.

*if anybody has any link to LaNasa's knighthood, please let me know!

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Websites
Various websites have come and gone. I'll try to make some sense of it here so you know what site you're actually visiting!

• TSR.com is the original TSR website. For a long time it redirected to WotC. The URL is no longer in use. (WotC)
• TSRgames.com was TSR2 until summer 2021. The site is still running, although TSR2 is now called Solarian Games. (Jayson Elliot)
• TSR.games was TSR3 until summer 2021. It now goes to Wonderfiled(sic)'s website. (Stephen Dinehart)
• TSR-hobbies.com is TSR 3.5, launched summer 2021 by Justin LaNasa and Ernie Gygax. (Justin LaNasa)

 

[jdrakeh]

I'd suggest strongly that the name "Gygax" still has some strong magnetism with Old School fans, and while they're not the majority of the hobby, they're not trivial either.

I think the name Luke Gygax specifically has some pull. He's the organizer (owner?) of GaryCon, a well-respected old school gaming convention, is heavily involved with Troll Lord games, and genuinely a well-liked, all-around good fellow. The name Gary Gygax still pulls some weight with OSR types, as well. Not only did he co-create D&D, which earns him some respect, but a fair number of old school players still recognize his playstyle as a laudable one. The name Ernie Gygax? Ehhhhhh. I think he's been doing a really good job over the past several years of burning away most good will and influence that he might have once had. I think, at this point, he's mostly known for a horribly mismanaged Kickstarter and rolling with Justin LaNasa.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Honestly, I don’t know how much pull it really has.

Even though AD&D introduced to the hobby in 1977 and hooked me for life, I never looked for any of Gary’s work outside D&D. And I say that as someone who once had a collection of RPGs exceeding 150 different systems. (Now about half of that.) I hadn’t heard of Luke and Eric at all until maybe a decade or so ago, beyond possibly some blurbs on the origins of certain NPCs, items, or spells.

Hell, it wasn’t until the 1990s or 2000s that I even paid attention to the names on the books,p, and sought out the works of next-generation designers, like Cook. And even now, I’d be hard pressed to name more than a half dozen from memory.

I know that probably makes me an outlier, but by how much, I cannot say I have even an inkling. Besides online communities, I almost never hear other gamers mention designers by name.

Companies or particular game systems, OTOTH, are different. I know I’ve purchased things from certain companies or for certain systems almost on autopilot. I know people have told me that a game is from a certain company. So I suspect that level of branding is a bit more persuasive, and is probably a major driving force behind LaNasa et alia clutching at the coattails of past RPG royalty.

Generally I agree, but anywhere I see OS or OSR discussed much, you hear Gygax and Arneson name dropped a fair bit. At least IME.

 

[darjr]

Here are two products that use Star Frontiers IP:

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

A couple few zines have been there for a while.

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[John Dallman]

Even though AD&D introduced to the hobby in 1977 and hooked me for life, I never looked for any of Gary’s work outside D&D.

I started playing both OD&D and AD&D in 1979. While Gary's importance in their creation has to be acknowledged, his ego problems in the early 1980s and the low quality of his work (e.g., the first Unearthed Arcana) after the first burst of creativity meant I was never much of a fan.

 

[Staffan]

Honestly, I don’t know how much pull it really has.

Even though AD&D introduced to the hobby in 1977 and hooked me for life, I never looked for any of Gary’s work outside D&D.

I've looked at some of it, and at least to me it's not that impressive. I was going to write a longish rant about my experiences with Dangerous Journeys and reading Role-Playing Mastery, but it just read as mean. But all in all, Gary Gygax's strengths were not as a game designer.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Generally I agree, but anywhere I see OS or OSR discussed much, you hear Gygax and Arneson name dropped a fair bit. At least IME.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. But I’ve absolutely never seen or heard OSR discussions anywhere but online.

 

[Shakeshift]

I started playing both OD&D and AD&D in 1979. While Gary's importance in their creation has to be acknowledged, his ego problems in the early 1980s and the low quality of his work (e.g., the first Unearthed Arcana) after the first burst of creativity meant I was never much of a fan.

Unearthed Arcana is a huge step down for Gary Gygax as a writer and as a businessperson. It showed how badly he was phoning in his work. Comeliness? Making the paladin a subclass of the cavalier? Adding in magical elfin chain in UA when the 1e DMG specifically said it did not exist were a handful of many such mistakes, along with badly broken XP tables for the Cavalier (Negative XP tables? Seriously?) and the 1e barbarian which is about as broken and unattractive as you can get. Plus all the minor mistakes with magic item tables.

The 1st edition Unearthed Arcana does not exist in my campaign. I prefer to pretend Gary Gygax never wrote it, because the quality is so much lower than everything else. I do not allow it to be used in my campaign. I don't even allow it at my gaming table. Don't even get me started on Oriental Adventures either. His idea of ninjas is embarrassing. The only Gary Gygax works that honestly matter are from the 1970's.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Unearthed Arcana is a huge step down for Gary Gygax as a writer and as a businessperson. It showed how badly he was phoning in his work. Comeliness? Making the paladin a subclass of the cavalier? Adding in magical elfin chain in UA when the 1e DMG specifically said it did not exist were a handful of many such mistakes, along with badly broken XP tables for the Cavalier (Negative XP tables? Seriously?) and the 1e barbarian which is about as broken and unattractive as you can get. Plus all the minor mistakes with magic item tables.

The 1st edition Unearthed Arcana does not exist in my campaign. I prefer to pretend Gary Gygax never wrote it, because the quality is so much lower than everything else. I do not allow it to be used in my campaign. I don't even allow it at my gaming table. Don't even get me started on Oriental Adventures either. His idea of ninjas is embarrassing. The only Gary Gygax works that honestly matter are from the 1970's.

Um, Gary didn't create most of that stuff.

 

[Shakeshift]

Um, Gary didn't create most of that stuff.

Really? I'm looking at my Dragon Magazines and I'm seeing, "The Chivalrous Cavalier" (issue 72), "Social Status and Birth Tables: New For AD&D Play" (issue 70), "The Big Bad Barbarian" (issue 63), "Split Class For Nimble Characters: The Thief-Acrobat" (issue 69), "New Druid Spells...Naturally!" (issue 71), "New Spells For Illusionists" (issue 66), "New Magic-User Spells" (issue 67), and "Official Changes for Rangers" (issue 94). I could go on, but I stopped at eight articles because I've already made my point.

ALL of it written solely by Gary Gygax and incorporated into Unearthed Arcana.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I’m not saying you’re wrong. But I’ve absolutely never seen or heard OSR discussions anywhere but online.

Well, the last period in my life where I'd have been having extensive discussions regarding RPGs not online, the OSR didn't exist yet.