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)

 

[Sir Brennen]

I'm guessing the "press release" also wasn't actually, you know, released to the press. Just a FB post, which isn't how that works.
Maybe they wanted the FB group to proofread it for them first.

I mean, "resumption of production and fulfillment will resume."

Straight from the Department of Redundancy Department.

 

[Shakeshift]

When is their 21 days up for a response to WotC's countersuit?

It was up the Monday after GaryCon ended. So Monday, March 28th. If I had to guess, I'd say that Justin Lanasa filed an extension and so we're in another holding pattern for another 21 days. That would put the new deadline at Monday, April 18th. That's only if Lanasa filed another extension, though. Nobody really knows what happened, and WotC is not in the habit of giving day-to-day updates on their lawsuits, unfortunately.

If I had to guess, Justin will keep filing extensions endlessly until the judge loses his (or her) patience and orders him to stop filing them.

 

[Jer]

It was up the Monday after GaryCon ended. So Monday, March 28th. If I had to guess, I'd say that Justin Lanasa filed an extension and so we're in another holding pattern for another 21 days. That would put the new deadline at Monday, April 18th. That's only if Lanasa filed another extension, though.

I'm pretty sure that someone posted in another thread that an extension had been asked for and granted.

Found it: TSR - Now it’s WotC’s Turn: WotC Moves Against TSR3

 

[CleverNickName]

This whole thread is a ride, let me tell ya. Seems like every few weeks there is something new to report and it's always worth a facepalm, sometimes a chuckle.

NuTSR: "We sold out of our new product before we could even announce it!"
Morrus: "Nobody can find anybody who bought this product."

 

[darjr]

Oh man. Somebody find me pictures that I can put the EN World logo on! Then it will belong solely to me! I SHALL RULE THE WORLD!

You should put the ENWorld logo on one of their logos.

 

[Umbran]

Those people over there are borderline incompetent.

Borderline? With respect, they seem less borderline, and more "living in the suburbs of the capitol of Incompetentia".

 

[Deset Gled]

Um wut? Is the clip art he's using public domain clip art or something? Did they pay a license for it? So many questions...

It's mixture. Some of the images have been made with free-to-use material. Some have pay-to-use stock images, but we have no way of knowing if they were actually paid for. Some are definitely from other media that there's no way they could have realistically gotten the rights to. For example, one had a space ship that was from the movie "Pitch Black".

It's worth noting that when NuTSR published "The Cult of Abaddon" they also used a number of free assets but completely failed to credit the artists properly, which goes against most of the licenses that let you use them for free.

 

[Willie the Duck]

The stupidity reached a high pitch when ...
Those people over there are borderline incompetent. You can't even show them facts and get them to acknowledge them. If you explained to them that the sky is blue, they'd argue that everyone agrees it's green every day. It's irrational.

Of stupidity, incompetent, and irrational, I think incompetent stands out. They seem like they are trying to pull a petty con, and failing at it. The guy at my local commercial street corner who is always 'collecting money for ______ charity is clearly just panhandling,' but repeating the stupid or irrational is actually to their benefit. Likewise, I don't think Lasagna and co doubling down on the stupid and irrational is necessarily itself irrational -- it's worked very well in the past (for others and probably them) -- it just doesn't seem to be working this time (which raises the question is when is it rational to cut line and leave, but that may be nested in what exactly they have to move on to at this point-seems a number of them went chips-all-in on this, to completely mix my metaphors).

WotC is not in the habit of giving day-to-day updates on their lawsuits, unfortunately.

I think it is a good thing that they don't give NuTSR the kind of power over them that they feel they should have to. Treating this as a piddling annoyance is probably to WotC's benefit.

 

[Sacrosanct]

This seem relevant..

Covid may cause changes in the brain, a new study finds.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Shakeshift]

The part that makes me feel that they're incompetent is that when all of this started, Lanasa actually initiated the lawsuit against Wizards of the Coast, thinking that they at TSR3 were wolves and the corporation was a docile sheep waiting to be bullied into submission. I'm sure Lanasa's crack-filled idea was that they'd reclaim Dungeons and Dragons in it's entirety from Wizards of the Coast due to seizing a neglected domain name and they would (via Ernie Gygax) be holding the keys to the entire billion-dollar kingdom by showing the world that the selling of the original TSR to WotC was somehow fraudulent in some way, in spite of how improbable that would be, considering that Lanasa (and Ernie) had no legal claim to any of it anyway. I'm sure though the billions of dollars the company is worth blinded both of them to the realities of how corporations work. I'm sure they both thought they'd be on easy street after a legal battle. Best $300 that Justin ever spent to poach a domain name from someone.

The incompetence is being proven now, especially in light of the lawsuit WotC filed against Lanasa (NOT his LLC's) and the amount of pressure Wizards is getting on social media to squash TSR3 flat. Lanasa can't make a dent in them in the courts, so all he has left is delaying gestures and stalling tactics to delay the inevitable. Basically Lanasa has already lost, and so he's just trying to keep his head above water until the final verdict smashes him to splinters (financially.) Wizards has been carefully monitoring his financial shell game, and they've hired investigators to record all of his blunders and mistakes for posterity when court times does come around. A jury will almost inevitably come to see the side of Hasbro in this case, because Justin is just... BAD at doing his job. He's so careless and lazy.