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)

 

[Dioltach]

Fair enough, just saying it as I've seen it based on my own experience and what I've seen.

 

[mythago]

To be absolutely clear about US law:

• If I, as an employee, steal money from the company, that's a criminal charge for me.
• If the company steals my wages from me, that I lawfully earned, that's a civil charge, and they generally strongly encourage plaintiffs to settle out of court for just wages, er, "misfiled."

California just recently made intentional wage theft (by an employer) a felony. This is not because California had lax civil penalties for wage theft before (they are in fact serious penalties) - it's because civil fines don't matter to an employer that either writes them off as the cost of doing business, or is an LLC that just dissolves and then re-forms under some other name to avoid the penalties at all. It's especially bad in the restaurant industry.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I think part of being a "man" back in the day was facing up to the challenges that life threw at you and doing the right thing by the people who depended on you. Nowadays the challenges that life throws at people - or at least the people engaging in toxic masculinity - are a lot less prominent, and they find themselves at a loss for a way to define themselves as "men". So they have to find something to distinguish themselves against, something that's "unmanly".

I don’t think the challenges have changed: even 50 years ago, people faced a lot of challenges that didn’t involve going to war, and dealing with loss of jobs, economic crises, addiction issues are challenges that affect a lot of men today.

To use an expression that my father would recognize, whether now or 40 years ago, “it is easier to curse the darkness than to light a candle”. Unfortunately, thanks to social media, if you curse the darkness instead of actually doing anything, there are two dozen people who will give you positive reinforcement.

 

[mythago]

If he lied in these court documents, he could theoretically be sued by WotC for damages caused by lying. This is extremely unlikely to happen. A criminal charge for perjury is even less likely.

The real problem for them is that perjury can harm them in the case they're committing the perjury in. The court could sanction them in all kinds of ways, including finding that they don't get to make certain arguments or that certain facts are presumed against them. Worse, possibly, is that the lawyers who offer perjured evidence are putting their license to practice at risk.

 

[Maxperson]

To be absolutely clear about US law:

• If I, as an employee, steal money from the company, that's a criminal charge for me.
• If the company steals my wages from me, that I lawfully earned, that's a civil charge, and they generally strongly encourage plaintiffs to settle out of court for just wages, er, "misfiled."

Not in California.

 

[RealAlHazred]

California just recently made intentional wage theft (by an employer) a felony. This is not because California had lax civil penalties for wage theft before (they are in fact serious penalties) - it's because civil fines don't matter to an employer that either writes them off as the cost of doing business, or is an LLC that just dissolves and then re-forms under some other name to avoid the penalties at all. It's especially bad in the restaurant industry.

I had no idea just how far California had become a communist-socialist state full of atheists, but now this clinches it. Anti-business to an enormous degree! How am I supposed to run my business selling kitchenware out of house parties if I can't rob my employees of money, dignity, and their few friends?

 

[DLIMedia]

Remember the "stolen valor" claim? I forgot I had this image...

 

[Chaosmancer]

My great grandfather was a a "real manly man" -- He farmed and later worked on the railroad. When WWI rolled around, he was sent to Siberia and built rail tracks to take supplies to the Eastern front (never ended up being used). When WWII rolled around, he was too old to go fight, so instead worked at keeping the infrastucture on the home front running smoothly. He also helping raise the children (changing diapers, washing baby bottles, reading bedtime stories, and answering the hard questions about where daddy was) of the next generation while they all jumped on hot, cramped metal coffins and headed off into the Pacific with no clear understanding of how likely they would ever see home again. He put his shoulder to the wheel, axe to the grindstone, yoke on the beast, and hammer to the nail. He also put food in bellies, clothes on backs, shoes on feet, and then those feet to the schoolhouse steps. He sacrificed dreams and aspirations for love of country, faith, family, and doing what was right. He also was thoughtful, reflective, concerned with the moral implications of his actions, just, and decent to those around him.

He would be profoundly disappointed in these guys' conception of masculinity.

He wouldn't have these words for it, but the point he would make is that manliness as his generation envisions wasn't meant as a way to separate the manly men from the unmanly ones, or even the men from the women -- it was to distinguish the man from the child -- "adulting" by another name. Taking responsibility, doing the hard (and/or unpleasant) work -- because it needed to be done or even to spare others from having to do so, making sacrifices, being able to walk a mile in another's shoes (and after having done so, tossing them a nickel for the wear and tear on their shoes), and so on. Manliness was never, "I'm a man's man, superior to that other guy, and thus I get to.../they ought to.../they shouldn't criticize my...," it was, "I strive to be a man by ______ [act of service or sacrifice]."

I try not to do any 'kids these days' kind of commentary, or framing things as a crises of masculinity. However, if we're going to use the term manly or masculinity as a specific positive attribute, I really wish we were able to reset it as a term others got to bestow on you when you when you committed acts exemplifying adulthood, sacrifice, and hard work; rather than a self-declared capacity defined by metrics arbitrarily self-defined as being more masculine than others of which one wants to feel superior.

I agree with you almost entirely, but I also am going to "well-actually" you a little bit.

See, I agree that "true manhood" (if you will) is far far closer to being an adult than anything else. But toxic ideas about manhood are not in any way new. They are ancient. You find that Beowulf was a braggart and much of his masculine ideal was defining himself by how much stronger he was than others. Enkidu from Gilgamesh was a wild man without culture, and only became a "real man" after having sex with a woman. The idea of "real men don't cry" can be traced to stoicism in ancient greece at least, and the idea that emotions are bad. There is a version of the "Tortoise and the Hare" called "The Hare and the Hedgehog" where the Hare is pompous to his "lesser man" and runs himself to death rather than admit that he lost, an idea that has to have been a response to something in the culture at the time.

I wonder if the reason it seems so much worse these days is that modern society is so stressful for us. So we seek some validation by looking to what people claimed made them strong and manly, and cling to that like a life preserver. Because one thing you can say about toxic masculinity is that it projects confidence, so when you are feeling lost, confused and afraid and you see a man who looks like he isn't, like he is untouchably confident... it is easy to get sucked into that orbit

 

[Maxperson]

I had no idea just how far California had become a communist-socialist state full of atheists, but now this clinches it. Anti-business to an enormous degree! How am I supposed to run my business selling kitchenware out of house parties if I can't rob my employees of money, dignity, and their few friends?

This isn't a new thing for California. California passed PAGA(Private Attorney General Act) in 2004 to allow people to take companies to court over labor violations. I spent 5 years with a law firm that specialized in wage and hour class and PAGA actions. A lot of employers usually ignorantly, and sometimes knowingly, converted employee wages that were owed. Business was never slow.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I think it highly likely that WotC's lawyers could pursue the claim that Not-TSR was still promoting it. That by putting it on their website's shop, even in an unavailable form, Not-TSR is implying that Star Frontiers is a product that they had the rights to distribute.

I don't think you can be accused of selling a product if you don't actually take money for it.

However, they are promoting the product, an in the process promoting themselves, which is still not acceptable use of trademark, I think. IANAL