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!

---

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)

 

[Deset Gled]

And faking his death?

Yet he's still using the same name on Discord, so he's clearly not trying very hard.

For those who might be confused by this comment, Nashville P&P made this post on June 24th:

Friend has passed.​

Nashville Publishing
Jun 24

David Wayne Johnson Obituary (2022)

View David Wayne Johnson's obituary, send flowers and sign the guestbook.

obits.ocregister.com

The obit in the link is for another person named Dave Johnson who lived near our infamous bigot Dave Johnson. From the photos and family info of the deceased, it's obvious they're not the same person. Theoretically, it could have been a relative (cousin or farther).

One other minor update: the Morgan Yarto twitter account was shut down over the weekend. Before it went away, he had posted a screenshot of his computer that left a few clues tying the account to Michael Yach. Over the next couple of days he made a number of posts that got removed, including a nazi flag image and homosexual pornography. And now it's gone completely. It's unclear to me if this was an implosion and the account was removed by the owner after he accidentally doxed himself, or if twitter took it down. There have been rumors from Chad Revenge and Tenkar that subpoenas and/or deposition requests have started coming from Hasbro, so this recent flurries of activity from NuTSR could just be Lanasa having a stress tantrum.

 

[jdrakeh]

And faking his death?

Yeah, about that. The David Johnson in the featured obituary died in March. And David "I Love Nazis" Johnson has definitely been veeeeeery active since then. So he's as good at faking his own death as he is at maths (i.e. not very).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

As Michael Rappaport might say, “The first thing to remember when faking your own death is SHUT THE FORK* UP!”




* but with slightly different verbiage

 

[Willie the Duck]

They don't really seem interested in running a successful business endeavor anymore. It feels more like they have given up on that so they can focus on winning some kind of dumb, one-sided, losing argument on the Internet.

I've gotten that impression for quite some time. Or at least any business model they had had almost immediately been reduced to milking the rest of the cringeworthy types for donations/purchases of half-baked product (or product no one expected to ever materialize) who would give them money predominantly to 'own the wokes' or whatever. It seems like chances for an actual game company making money off of people buying games to actually play them ended just a little after Ernie opened his mouth for the first time on pronouns and such (and, if not then, certainly by the time WotC telegraphed that they were going to make a lesson out of them).

That 'un-claimer' wasn't written to entice new customers. They didn't write all of that in order to draw in investors, or attract advertisers. They wrote it for a reason, I'm sure, but I have no idea what that reason could possibly have been. Perhaps they think that blowing every dogwhistle they can think of is a kind of 'advertising' or something?

I think it was for a while. I'm sure the donations rolled in hot and heavy (especially heavy, as the amounts were undoubtedly of the 'loose change' variety) early on when nuTSR first took their stand and became a darling of the people you really don't want to get roped into a conversation with at your FLGS. I think it is possible that they thought that this was, if not a vehicle to an actual full-time living level income, at least the 'worse per hour than coffee shop job, but you get to do what you love' level that people like Pundey seem to get out of being a gaming talking head. I think once 1) the initial fanfare abated, and 2) it became clear that this wasn't really a 'silent majority' situation, they should have realized that this wasn't a serious business model.

At this point, I suspect they feel self-painted into a corner*. Can't turn back the clock and end up successful game makers. Could walk away and get day jobs (maybe), but with the lawsuit hanging over their heads, it might feel like wasted effort. Doubling down on the awful may well feel like the only 'productive' use of their time at this point.
*well, they wouldn't see it that way, of course. Personal responsibility doesn't seem to be a strong suit.

 

[Jer]

I think it was for a while. I'm sure the donations rolled in hot and heavy (especially heavy, as the amounts were undoubtedly of the 'loose change' variety) early on when NuTSR first took their stand and became a darling of the people you really don't want to get roped into a conversation with at your FLGS. I think it is possible that they thought that this was, if not a vehicle to an actual full-time living level income, at least the 'worse per hour than coffee shop job, but you get to do what you love' level that people like Pundey seem to get out of being a gaming talking head. I think once 1) the initial fanfare abated, and 2) it became clear that this wasn't really a 'silent majority' situation, they should have realized that this wasn't a serious business model.

I think you give them more credit for planning than is deserved personally. I think these are just people you don't want to get roped into a conversation with at your FLGS who think that large groups of people secretly agree with them on all of the hateful things they post but are "afraid" to say so because of reasons. They probably continue to think that their views are popular and their supporters are just too scared to be vocal about it.

As I've aged and because I'm dumpy white man in America random other dumpy white men feel free to just say horrible things to me about women, gay people, minority groups, etc. when they think that they are alone with a fellow dumpy white guy who must also think the same way they do. The number of times I've told guys like that "sorry I'm not a Nazi so I'd like you to shut up and go away" in the last few years continues to shock me despite all of my experience saying it shouldn't be all that shocking. The worst is when it happens somewhere where you're trapped with them - like on a flight - and they won't shut up.

 

[DLIMedia]

As Michael Rappaport might say, “The first thing to remember when faking your own death is SHUT THE FORK* UP!”

* but with slightly different verbiage

Things would be so much better if they did just that. And yet, here we are.

 

[Morrus]

Wait, what? Have I read this thread right? The author of Star Frontiers: New Genesis has faked his own death and is now continuing to work under a pseudonym? I'm not sure I've understood what I'm reading here.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Wait, what? Have I read this thread right? The author of Star Frontiers: New Genesis has faked his own death and is now continuing to work under a pseudonym? I'm not sure I've understood what I'm reading here.

Faking one's own death isn't exactly new territory for nazis...

 

[monsmord]

Wait, what? Have I read this thread right? The author of Star Frontiers: New Genesis has faked his own death and is now continuing to work under a pseudonym? I'm not sure I've understood what I'm reading here.

I'm not entirely sure he does, either.

 

[DLIMedia]

Wait, what? Have I read this thread right? The author of Star Frontiers: New Genesis has faked his own death and is now continuing to work under a pseudonym? I'm not sure I've understood what I'm reading here.

Upon further review... We don't think he's officially faking his own death. He posted an obituary of a "David Wayne Johnson" in the same town our Dave Johnson lives in, but we're not sure there's any relation. Given how unsympathetically he posted it, and that he posted it three months after it happened, seems to suggest he's posting it just because of the name similarity in an attempt to make a joke.

And, as has been proven time and again, they're not very good at making jokes.

Changing "Murfreesboro Publishing" to "Nashville Publishing an Printing", and removing his name in favor of yet another pseudonym of his, seems to be a bad attempt at disassociating himself from what he's trying to do. It's not the first time he uses a pseudonym.

Then again, who knows for sure?