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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...

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.

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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • 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).
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  • 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.
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(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)
 
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Morrus

Morrus is the owner of EN World and EN Publishing, creator of the ENnies, creator of the What's OLD is NEW (WOIN), Simply6, and Awfully Cheerful Engine game systems, publisher of Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, and co-host of the weekly Morrus' Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk podcast. He has been a game publisher and RPG community administrator for over 20 years, and has been reporting on TTRPG and D&D news for over two decades. He is also on the socials.

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DLIMedia

DLIMedia

David Flor, Darklight Interactive
Steampunkette said:
So leaking the info about the "N&N" races would represent a breach of NDA.
Click to expand...
The premise of most NDAs is the notion that, if you violate the NDA, whoever you tell may use that information to their own advantage and take revenue away from the company with the NDA.

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You can argue loss of sales counts the same thing, but it depends on the wording of the NDA.

Because of that, it's very hard to enforce. For example, me telling my wife would technically violate an NDA, but there's no financial risk in that act alone as she is not a competitor; they can't sue me for that. Now, if she goes and tells a competitor who in turn uses that information to further their competitive business... well... that's a whole other matter.

NuTSR doesn't really have competition right now. There's no one rushing to take their business, mainly because they don't have a business to speak of. The only thing happening as a result of this leak is potential loss of sales, which is not something brought on by a competitor.
 

Dannyalcatraz

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator
Staff member
Supporter
DLIMedia said:
The premise of most NDAs is the notion that, if you violate the NDA, whoever you tell may use that information to their own advantage and take revenue away from the company with the NDA.

View attachment 255025

You can argue loss of sales counts the same thing, but it depends on the wording of the NDA.

Because of that, it's very hard to enforce. For example, me telling my wife would technically violate an NDA, but there's no financial risk in that act alone as she is not a competitor; they can't sue me for that. Now, if she goes and tells a competitor who in turn uses that information to further their competitive business... well... that's a whole other matter.

NuTSR doesn't really have competition right now. There's no one rushing to take their business, mainly because they don't have a business to speak of. The only thing happening as a result of this leak is potential loss of sales, which is not something brought on by a competitor.
Click to expand...
And the only real competitor in this equation is the actual owner of the Star Frontiers IP in question. NuTSR almost can’t suffer loss of sales by definition because their infringement of WotC’s IP would probably either cause forfeiture of their revenue (or judgements in amounts that would be functionally the same or greater) from their infringing products or prevent sales from happening in the first place.
 

Ancalagon

Ancalagon

Dusty Dragon
Faolyn said:
Sorry, I should have written "bad sociology" instead of biology.

If the entomoids were a monster race--even one that had a high degree of innate intelligence--then their design would be OK. But Johnson wrote that they don't live together, cooperate with each other, or care about one another at all, so it makes no sense that he also wrote that they had been able to create the same level of technology as the other spacefaring races and work together as the crew of a starship. He wrote that they'll work together to create machines, but creating a machine--at least a high-tech one--involves a lot of people living and working together to come up with the ideas in the first place, teaching and developing the science and technology needed to fulfill those ideas and how to find, create, and refine the materials needed to build the make them.

In the webcoming Freefall, the alien race called the Sqid apparently also have their males and females die after mating/producing young, but in their case only a fraction of adults are fertile in the first place, and non-fertile adults raise and teach the offspring. But the Sqid's technology is at a Victorian-level, whereas the humans are spacefarers.

The entomoids could have been an interesting pirate-like monster race. Say they were intelligent, fully sapient, but didn't have any sort of real culture. Humans colonize their planet. The entomoids kill them and take their stuff and figure out how to use the weapons and get off-world with the colony ships--mostly by trial and error, since they aren't going to teach each other. Then they spend the rest of their time flying around space alone and killing other people and taking their stuff so they could replace their aging and malfunctioning equipment, or hiring/enslaving others to fix it for them, because they don't have the knowledge needed to do it themselves. That could be pretty cool.
Click to expand...

Oh! Well yes, then I am in agreement.

Interestingly, there was a race mentioned in passing in the Hyperion Cantos where the adult form was a dangerous, solitary predator... but the "immature" form was much more social. They took drugs to prevent the onset of adulthood so they could stay social and do things instead of you know, going were-alien murder machine.
 


Steampunkette

Steampunkette

Rules Tinkerer and Freelance Writer
Supporter
New update from the DHSM Facebook:

They deleted their "Proof" image from the post, but left the post. So now it's a claim to proof that isn't there. And instead there's a reply to a comment of a screenshot of Logan Hovermale introducing himself in a Discord Thread.

And that is their current "Proof". A crazed declaration of providing proof with nothing provided, and a response to a comment referring to nonexistent evidence which shows Logan Hovermale introduced himself at one point to a group of people as the lead writer for SFNG.

Magnificent.
 

Morrus

Morrus

Well, that was fun
Staff member
Steampunkette said:
  • TSR, and Lanasa specifically, have been continually putting out intentionally offensive material on their social media.
  • Tenkar, 2 months after receiving a leaked Beta Test that was written back in February for TSRCon, revealed the contents including such gems as the phrase "Like in real life races are good at some things and not as good at others, and some are superior to others." "No Trans characters of these races." Described the attractiveness attribute through a pure male gaze fantasy ideal complete with 'nonmagical charm effect' and the idea that racial features like big noses and lips could lower your effective charisma, and of course the "Negro Race" which has dark skin and high strength, but a maximum intelligence of 9, compared to the "Nordic Race" which has a minimum of 13 in all attributes. Also all Fat People have Asthma automatically, and there are no Gay people who are Socially Awkward 'cause it only applies around the "Opposite Sex".
  • Lanasa immediately threatened to sue Tenkar for revealing this. Then deleted his threats. https://blogger.googleusercontent.c...zK6jAtCmhAWnUMBo8crQv_V8bA/s2436/IMG_3360.jpg
  • Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum and TSR Hobbies claimed it was photoshopped (video photoshop, obviously!) Then claimed it was entirely fake.
  • Any dissent or pointing out Dave Johnson wrote the same sort of material in his Alarms and Journeys 13 was deleted and the writer muted.
  • Truth Sucks releases a video showing the Google Docs folder and proof of the offensive material in multiple locations: (Spoiled for anti-trans slur written by Lanasa)
  • Then they said that it was a leak rather than fake, but also faked, and as "Proof" they showed a Discord Message from Logan Hovermale in December organizing the google docs files into different folders.
  • As part of that proof they unintentionally revealed their google doc of 5e D&D based SFNG work, which was mostly written by Logan Hovermale and actually pretty good. (I could give you the link to the google doc, but it contains the next item which is against forum rules)
  • Also in their google drive is every Star Frontiers book that TSR put out... all Pirated. All uploaded by Justin Lanasa.
  • There's also a SFNG Card Game in there, which is literally just Magic the Gathering with some name changes. Seriously. They reference Serra Angel in the document.
  • None of the files in that folder, or any containing folder have been edited after January 3rd. The documents in the released video were edited the day the video was recorded, by Justin Lanasa.
  • Which means there are two folders. The original 5e design folder likely created and curated by Logan Hovermale, and then the Dave Johnson folder probably created and curated by Lanasa, based on the "Hater File".
  • There is a "Hater File!" Which is an Excel Spreadsheet of all the people who "Hate On" TSR or whom Lanasa has a personal grudge against. Including Jeff Leason, the person who -lives- in the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum and relies on them because he is disabled... The Hater File records a plan to fire him which will result in him being homeless.
  • Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum keeps waffling on whether there was a data breach or the files are completely fabricated, realized they opened their 5e google drive to everyone, and covered the address on Twitter but not on Facebook.
  • Michael Yach, in a bid to give the finger to Tenkar unintentionally confirms that it was a data breach, not a fake document. https://scontent-msp1-1.xx.fbcdn.ne...MDGyoN59-l-C5RkxpruyGA3ZPmZ_Dpgbw&oe=62E0BF67
  • Threats of legal action, pissing and moaning about victimhood, and more of the same BS as every other day this farce rolls on!
Might take me a bit to get to sources but... yeah.

Both the Dungeon Hobby Shop posts are still online, but cannot be directly linked. They can both be found here, though:

Facebook

www.facebook.com www.facebook.com
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Thanks! I've updated the timeline!
 

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