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)

 

[darjr]

@DLIMedia go ahead and take a break. They’ll have bigger meltdowns and my bet is the case won’t end silently. They they were smart they’d try and end the whole thing either silently or in a way to earn good will. I think it’ll be loud and smelly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Harn is still published by Columbia Games. Twilight 2000 has been republished by a partnership pf GDW and Fria Ligan.

I stand corrected. I thought the new T2000 was being done by Columbia.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I'm conflicted at this point. I keep posting the dumb s%$# these morons constantly post, but for what? What's their endgame here? Why are they doing this? Why does anyone care?

I deeply suspect they are simply getting the dopamine hit of continued attention. As long as they are continuing to be reprehensible and asinine, people will mock them, and (amazingly) that feels better than being ignored -- plus they get a group (however small) of fellow malcontents telling them that they are the real victims and really sticking it to those of opposing mindsets (if they weren't being successful, why would people keep mocking them?). They are drawing a response from people, and thus must be having an effect, and therefore they are meaningful.

Every kid I knew growing up that was, for lack of a better term, the pre-online troll did so because they liked attention, didn't know how to get positive attention, and didn't overly mind that attention was negative. It certainly is easier than figuring out how to make people actually like you.

If they took anywhere near as much time doing idiotic stuff like this, and instead spent it on... you know... making an actual product, they'd have a halfway decent one at that?

Maybe. I mean, getting good at things takes lots of hard work and effort. Perhaps more important to this situation, it takes long stretches of practice and intermittent failure and low-level success that don't have the same sense of reward and immediate gratification as trolling someone.

Beyond that, there's every possibility that, were they to go to the effort to increase their game development skill, they would end up either 1) end up being proficient, but unremarkable, gamemakers; or 2) maybe even end up as good gamemakers, but no one notice and no one buy (there certainly have been plenty of very well made games that never took off). If your goal is attention, sometimes it is better to be famously bad. Think Tommy Wiseau or Rob Liefeld of Marvel comics -- if they buckled down and became the best actor in the local community theater Shakespeare production or the third most realistic line artist on the Fantastic Four line or something like that, would they get nearly as much attention as they do being bad?

I'm tired of this s%$#... I really am... Maybe that's their goal? If it's a war of attrition we're facing, they might actually be winning. But, even so, we know it won't last; WotC is going to sue them back to the stone age and it'll all be over.

Except I don't think us all losing interest is what they want. They want to be agitators -- to have us notice and comment (and theoretically that we care, but I think they impute that onto the situation whether we do or not).
As for the lawsuit, the most WotC can do is bankrupt them, which honestly might not be all that far down to fall at this point (any of them pulling in any money at this point? How much savings will they have at the end of this regardless of the court judgement?). That really won't end it. There are too many free mediums of communication these days and starting a company which never makes anything is too cheap. One day after WotC annihilates them they can pay the $50 bucks and register 'nuTSR: Electric Bugaboo' and start posturing all over again.

What I'm saying is that you are under no obligation to see this to the end: there isn't one.

 

[Nikosandros]

I deeply suspect they are simply getting the dopamine hit of continued attention. As long as they are continuing to be reprehensible and asinine, people will mock them, and (amazingly) that feels better than being ignored -- plus they get a group (however small) of fellow malcontents telling them that they are the real victims and really sticking it to those of opposing mindsets (if they weren't being successful, why would people keep mocking them?). They are drawing a response from people, and thus must be having an effect, and therefore they are meaningful.

Yes, I agree. IMHO, we've talked enough about them. They should now simply be ignored, even whe they post something dumb or hateful.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I agree, they're seeking attention more than anything else with these deliberately provoking posts. After a bunch of them, it's easy to see the pattern that whenever they get pushback, inevitably out come the insults. They don't have any real deep understanding or ability to debate these subjects. Nor do they have an interest in doing so. If they can get people riled up, then rile them up with a personal insult, that's good enough for them.

I deeply suspect they are simply getting the dopamine hit of continued attention. As long as they are continuing to be reprehensible and asinine, people will mock them, and (amazingly) that feels better than being ignored -- plus they get a group (however small) of fellow malcontents telling them that they are the real victims and really sticking it to those of opposing mindsets (if they weren't being successful, why would people keep mocking them?). They are drawing a response from people, and thus must be having an effect, and therefore they are meaningful.

Every kid I knew growing up that was, for lack of a better term, the pre-online troll did so because they liked attention, didn't know how to get positive attention, and didn't overly mind that attention was negative. It certainly is easier than figuring out how to make people actually like you.

Maybe. I mean, getting good at things takes lots of hard work and effort. Perhaps more important to this situation, it takes long stretches of practice and intermittent failure and low-level success that don't have the same sense of reward and immediate gratification as trolling someone.

Beyond that, there's every possibility that, were they to go to the effort to increase their game development skill, they would end up either 1) end up being proficient, but unremarkable, gamemakers; or 2) maybe even end up as good gamemakers, but no one notice and no one buy (there certainly have been plenty of very well made games that never took off). If your goal is attention, sometimes it is better to be famously bad. Think Tommy Wiseau or Rob Liefeld of Marvel comics -- if they buckled down and became the best actor in the local community theater Shakespeare production or the third most realistic line artist on the Fantastic Four line or something like that, would they get nearly as much attention as they do being bad?

Except I don't think us all losing interest is what they want. They want to be agitators -- to have us notice and comment (and theoretically that we care, but I think they impute that onto the situation whether we do or not).

While I agree that they will undoubtedly continue their grifts and antics in another form, I think stripping them of all the things that infringe on Wizards' IP will severely limit them. Without the TSR name and imagery, there's little that stands out about them in the OSR field.

As for the lawsuit, the most WotC can do is bankrupt them, which honestly might not be all that far down to fall at this point (any of them pulling in any money at this point? How much savings will they have at the end of this regardless of the court judgement?). That really won't end it. There are too many free mediums of communication these days and starting a company which never makes anything is too cheap. One day after WotC annihilates them they can pay the $50 bucks and register 'nuTSR: Electric Bugaboo' and start posturing all over again.

What I'm saying is that you are under no obligation to see this to the end: there isn't one.

 

[Ancalagon]

Except I don't think us all losing interest is what they want. They want to be agitators -- to have us notice and comment (and theoretically that we care, but I think they impute that onto the situation whether we do or not).

They can't "fight oppression/for freedom of speech" if there aren't "woke moralists" to fight against, after all...

 

[Willie the Duck]

While I agree that they will undoubtedly continue their grifts and antics in another form, I think stripping them of all the things that infringe on Wizards' IP will severely limit them. Without the TSR name and imagery, there's little that stands out about them in the OSR field.

Oh, that's true. I just mean I think they can still be there showing up and making noise.
The barriers for entry into the fields of 'business owner' and 'online RPG personality' are sufficiently low that if they are able to survive month-to-month, they will on a lucky month come up with enough to get a new corporate entity and be able to start the process all over again.
We've seen any number of TTRP agitators or scammers (or both) seem to last effectively indefinitely on very little obvious game making/selling success. Pundey keeps squeaking by on marginal Youtube dollars and whatever newbie who buys the line that he's a big deal purchasing one of each of his books or the like. Ken Whitman lasted a lot longer than anyone had a right to believe possible (certainly more than his kickstarter funds would have paid rent). Isn't there another guy who keeps making bogus storefront websites or the like?

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Ken Whitman is a perfect example of a grifter that kept his grifts going longer than one would've thought. And he (as far as I'm aware) didn't even lean into the culture war aspects like Not-TSR has.

Oh, that's true. I just mean I think they can still be there showing up and making noise.
The barriers for entry into the fields of 'business owner' and 'online RPG personality' are sufficiently low that if they are able to survive month-to-month, they will on a lucky month come up with enough to get a new corporate entity and be able to start the process all over again.
We've seen any number of TTRP agitators or scammers (or both) seem to last effectively indefinitely on very little obvious game making/selling success. Pundey keeps squeaking by on marginal Youtube dollars and whatever newbie who buys the line that he's a big deal purchasing one of each of his books or the like. Ken Whitman lasted a lot longer than anyone had a right to believe possible (certainly more than his kickstarter funds would have paid rent). Isn't there another guy who keeps making bogus storefront websites or the like?

 

[Maggan]

I'm tired of this s%$#... I really am... Maybe that's their goal? If it's a war of attrition we're facing, they might actually be winning. But, even so, we know it won't last; WotC is going to sue them back to the stone age and it'll all be over.

Until then, I honestly don't know what to say or do about it any more.

They're only winning in their own minds.

I think you should take a break, drop nuTSR and their antics from your mind, for your own well-being. At this point I believe ignoring them is the best way forward.

 

[Mannahnin]

Yeah, I think the thread should still be updated* when there's more material updates; like movement in the lawsuits, or big stuff like the news that they are now working with a neo-nazi.

But their everyday social media trash and drama probably don't merit close attention anymore.

*(I wind up linking to it periodically in other venues when someone asks "Hey, what's the deal with nuTSR?", so the thread, especially the OP, is definitely still of ongoing value)