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)

 

[Sacrosanct]

I Hollared at the kid, “What’s 12-5?” He answered without hesitation, “7”

Oh, he’s also 6 years old. So….congrats Dave? Now that we’ve shown a first grader is better at math, I’m almost positive he could write better as well.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

MAYBE there are small stats difference between men and women that could be established scientifically. MAYBE.

But even then, even if one had the data/evidence, IS IT WORTH DOING? In what way does it enhance the game? Make the players happier? This is not the low hanging fruit of game design. It's more like that pizza slice in the back of the fridge that you aren't quite sure where it came from nor how long it's been there. DON'T PUT IT IN A GAME!!!

Part A: We’ve got over a hundred years of sports records around the world and in a wide variety of events that illustrate physical differences between the genders quite well.

Part B: no, it’s probably not worth codification in RPG systems.

 

[Steampunkette]

Part A: We’ve got over a hundred years of sports records around the world and in a wide variety of events that illustrate physical differences between the genders quite well.

Part B: no, it’s probably not worth codification in RPG systems.

OSTENSIBLY... But also no.

Fun story: In the early 2000s a group of scientists decided to look into the fact that Infants and Toddlers of any gender were roughly equal in motor function, but within a year of Pre-School, gender differences would begin to appear.

So they got a whole bunch of parents of newborns to sign onto a motor function study. The infants and toddlers were put through endurance crawling, incline-climbing, and "Hold and Stands" where they'd grip onto a bar in order to remain standing as long as they could before their lil' legs were too tired. Cute!

In the control tests, there were no differences by gender. All the babies and toddlers went through control tests.

The active test involved having the child's parents present.

Almost -every- parent who had a daughter would move to 'rescue' their baby long before the test was done. "That angle is too steep, she'll fall!" "That distance is to long to crawl!" "You're going to make her hurt herself on the bar!"

And they'd let the test be interrupted. THEN show the parent the previous test in which their baby accomplished the same task, already.

Almost -no- parent attempted to intervene to 'rescue' their son.

Why is this relevant? Because your body adapts to how you use it from a young age. And if little boys are allowed to reach the edge of their limits they'll be strong, while girls kept from their limits will not.

Consider Ballet. If you're over 6 years old they don't want to start you in ballet. Why? Because the bones in your feet are basically "Set" at that point. Actual ballet dancers start early, and the results of their training means their feet are shaped differently because the bones of the feet of young children are malleable. Grown adults who do, or did, ballet often wind up needing physical therapy to deal with the foot-pain they signed on for before they could see over the kitchen counter without a booster seat.

Because of this social aspect to gendered expectations, all the data we have over the last 100 years is, at best, flawed.

The only way to find out how much difference is biological versus social would be a massively unethical experiment involving taking thousands of kids away from their parents (and their cultures) and raising them identically in a non-gendered environment so they all get the same levels of physical activity for their entire formative life ('til about 25)

But for obvious reasons we could never -do- that.

 

[DLIMedia]

Posting without comment...

 

[Steampunkette]

 

[Steampunkette]

In before "We got hacked"?

The writing is much better than most of their previous posts, after all. And it says what they've clearly been trying not to say out loud.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

OSTENSIBLY... But also no.

Look at the past 20 tears of professional sports records. The athletes of BOTH sexes coming of age in that time have been groomed to compete from the first time they expressed an interest.

The fastest serve on record for a woman was set in 2020 by Serena Williams at about 125mph. That was what the men’s record was more than a decade ago- it’s currently approaching 160mph for men. And there’s no question the Williams sisters started young.

LPGA participants still can’t touch the range of PGA members. They’ve beaten men in tournament play…but nobody you’ve seen on TV.

Women are closing the gaps in the various track & field sports, but the gap remains. The long jump for men (set in 1991) is about 1.5m longer for men. The women’s record (set in 1988) is barely competitive compared to men’s distances.

 

[Faolyn]

View attachment 252088

So they've removed all the succubi, nymphs, dryads, and other sexy female monsters whose entire MO is to seduce men, right? Because that's putting sexuality in a book for a "3 to 8-year-old"?

 

[Steampunkette]

S'truth, @Dannyalcatraz!

The gap is closing. In part because parents are raising their kids a lot different, today, than 100 years ago. Not -at- the "No gender" mark, but getting closer all the time.

Personally I hope it closes out entirely and we can discard archaic notions about gendered capabilities like Dave wants to enshrine.

So they've removed all the succubi, nymphs, dryads, and other sexy female monsters whose entire MO is to seduce men, right? Because that's putting sexuality in a book for a "3 to 8-year-old"?

Nooooo, of course not! That's not sexuality, that's just hot babes which are a -staple- of all things gaming!

... for those guys.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The gap is closing. In part because parents are raising their kids a lot different, today, than 100 years ago. Not -at- the "No gender" mark, but getting closer all the time.

Realistically, though, physical and biochemical differences will still impact athletic performance. Unless and until women start having the same muscle to mass ratios as men, reaching statistically insignificant differences in height, etc., gender differences will remain.

I can foresee female players making a mark in the NFL at certain skill positions, but the percentage of athletic women who are 6’5+ and 300lbs or more is lower than in men. I doubt I’ll live long enough to see a female professional lineman.

There aren’t many 6’9”+ 250lb or more women out there to realistically expect to see any women playing center in the NBA any time soon. Margo Dydek was 7’2” and 220lbs. She’s got the height, but nowhere near the mass to go body to body with NBA centers.