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)

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

With people like him, there's always a grift.

Arnold Zwicky's favorite insult was 'spherical bastard', meaning the person thus honored was a bastard no matter what angle they were viewed from. Similarly, some people are fractal grifters - any piece of them, no matter how small, is almost exactly the same grifter as the entire person is.

 

[Steampunkette]

Still not quite accurate.

Ernie and Jeff get to split 48% of the proceeds and Justin splits the remaining 52% with his wife. And Justin is likely going to screw Ernie out of the money he invested in the museum home since Ernie didn't get anything in writing.

STILL not quite accurate!

Ernie and Jeff get to split 48% of the proceeds -minus- the seller's fees. And the Seller is Justin Lanasa. Who can and almost certainly will lie through his teeth about how much the fees cost.

 

[Wincenworks]

STILL not quite accurate!

Ernie and Jeff get to split 48% of the proceeds -minus- the seller's fees. And the Seller is Justin Lanasa. Who can and almost certainly will lie through his teeth about how much the fees cost.

The seller is Clay.74, who seems to be the general broker/ebay seller that TSR Inc and adjacent people seem to go to liquidate estate collection (they're currently also selling Jim Ward's collection). So Justin didn't even bother to actually list/sell it himself.

So Ernie and Jeff are getting 24% net each for the items Justin didn't decide to just keep for himself, or sell under the table, and the LaNasas are getting an extra 4% just because.

And yeah, I'm guessing that Justin is just going to demand Ernie and Jeff trust him on what the fees were, so they're getting rewarded with second hand crumbs. At a quick eyeball that means they're get, maybe three hundred bucks each.

Which, in itself, should be held up as a warning for anyone else who runs into a grifter like LaNasa who flashes cashes, promises to be very generous etc but always expects others to work for free for him and just give him things until such time as he decides to be generous.

 

[Deset Gled]

It will still be a while before we have real news on the appellate case, but here's some gossip to tide everyone over.

Over the last couple weeks, the "Dean Copermail" FB account (suspected, but not known, to be run by Lanasa or an associate) unexpectedly became active again. It made a number of (completely false and unfounded) posts making accusations against @Jedion357, and that Tim Kask had broken ties with @Wizard Tower Games. Then, just as unexpetedly as it started, the account has now disappeared. So it goes, so it goes.

And in real estate news, I reported back in January of 2023 that Lanasa had shut down one of his tattoo shop locations in a mall and moved it to a property he owned: TSR - The Full & Glorious History of NuTSR Very recently, Lanasa shut down this location and sold the property. This is the largest sale of real estate Lanasa has made since the NuTSR saga began. But he still has ownership of the DHSM property in WI, which is the real reason I've been keepting track of such things.

 

[DLIMedia]

In semi-related news, just to keep this thread rolling, our best friend Dave Johnson - original author of SF:NG - is looking to put his skils at designing quality sci-fi RPGs into yet another product*...

In line with his brand, he still can't decide on just ONE font. Every image I see of this has a different one. Also, I gotta say that designing a cover where the product's name is 50% obscured by the cover art is an interesting approach.

And, yes, it's using his infamous "d30 System", which was pulled from DTRPG because of... uh... DJ's "character flaws".

Having seen his Substack and painfully heard his podcasts, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this product - if it does get published - will probably be the single most AI-heavy product in the entire RPG industry (and that's with me knowing full well who, in my opinion, holds that title right now). Nothing about anything he's posted is real: the text, the podcast voices, the images, the logos, everything... is AI-generated in one way or another. The author, "Alex Sterling", isn't even a real person. The only way you'd know it's DJ is because of his occasional totally-not-RPG related posts or responses on Twitter, which although they aren't as extreme as some of his past work are definitely also on brand, and for one audio that he's posted somewhere that contains his unmistakeably nasal voice, which for someone who's also trying to run a voice actor's guild, (yes, really) is not exactly... how should we put it... pleasant.

And he's passionately optimistic... looking to charge a prime rate for the would-be "collector's item" and best RPG ever.

Going back to my "....yet another product..." he's got going, DJ historically has a lot of projects in the works and fails to deliver on most of them. By my count, he currently has in production:

• UAP Dark Horizons, which mentions an awful lot of content and is apparently at least two books ("this book complements the Audio Series and the role-playing game").
• Grognards & Bogeymen: Essence, his take on "old school" D&D, which is - to say the least - flawed.
• He's also back on Gor the Barbarian
• Lunar Colony: Alpha Site Tabletop Roleplaying Game, which I'm not sure if it's the same thing as UAP Dark Horizons or not, but there are separate posts with separate art so let's consider them different products.
• The King in Yellow, "a play in three acts", whatever that is
• Multiple podcasts... The Echoes of the Old Ones, The Haunting of Belavere, etc... These all kinda blend together, so I'm not sure how many actual products they are.

I gotta admit, I admire his tenacity... But damn it man, at least finishing publish something eventually, eh? I sit on one product for six months, but I guess I'm doing it wrong because I sit on only one product.

 

[Gradine]

Oh, to have the confidence of a deeply mediocre straight white cis man.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You got the lettering wrong. It's half ass mart when talking about the dungeon hobby shop.

Don’t shop as smart, shop Ass Mart!

 

[Wincenworks]

For those interested in how this has worked out for creator of the original flagship product, GiantLands

Seems he's pivoting in musicals...

The GiantLands X nee Twitter account has not updated anything since early September, though he talks about it fondly on his personal Facebook like its a past project. He had a post that he's since deleted where he was calling for people to try to help him sell the remainder of his stock (600 units, about 30% of the total made).



The follow up module which was supposed to be released mid-2022 is still not out, and no mention of it since the last target date (October 2024) sailed by, though he also claims the 25 people who preordered have been really supportive.

(Though this reply was to one of the 25 who was trying to explain to him that he needed to get it out to the public "soon")

So it looks like this project is dead, but the lead on it can't be bothered burying it - rather its just going lie rotting by the side of the road.

And you may ask yourself, has he learned anything? Did he ask himself, "how did I get here?" The answer is no.

He's still cheerfully calling the guy who branded him as a traitor and threw him under the bus as "a pal" and trying to whitewash the history of the whole project.

Also weirdly bragging that he's the one who did the arguable trademark/passing-off violation of include the 50 Dungeons & Dragons on the DHSM graphic.

 

[Umbran]

Oh, to have the confidence of a deeply mediocre straight white cis man.

Or, at least the outward confidence.

 

[DLIMedia]

Dinehart's had the domain for over a month (registered first week of November) and, even though all his posts and social media accounts (Facebook and Twitter) reference the product's domain...

...he can't be bothered to put up an actual website to support the promotion he's doing for it. Not even a one pager... Until just a few days ago, the domain went nowhere.