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)

 

[Umbran]

I'll take your word for it since you have experienced a lot more of this stuff than I have. All I can say is that I was taught in school and told by every attorney that I've worked for to always check the local rules and for federal judges, their individual rules.

Well, yeah. But you see professionals skip steps for one reason or another all the time. Electricians are taught safety rules in classes and by mentors, but then they skip them and get shocked.

 

[Wincenworks]

It is amazingly common in all professions for the people who have succeeded in them for some period of time to start forgetting the basics, and things like safety, etc. I routinely get into fights with supervisors who are thrilled about people's metrics, and I am distinctly not thrilled about the amount of time I have to spend fixing their basic mistakes instead of boosting my metrics.

From my own experience dealing with them as a non-lawyer (still got a few more subjects to clear), its pretty common for lawyers who are in small firms or in firms that practice darwinism through under-mentoring to get caught up in weird tangents and overlook the basics - often because they're relying on resources that gloss over the basics. A judgment with lots of cool obiter and rhetoric rarely talks about the procedural aspects that got it there, and its also easy to get tripped up using either old rules or not realizing that there is an exception to the general rule and the approach - or a tradition which is not documented but is considered essential.

To build on @Snarf Zagyg 's example, family court (at least in New Zealand) is often a place where high end corporate lawyers stride in feeling twelve foot tall and bulletproof, and slink out with their tail between their legs. They go in there thinking that as they are experts on contract law, remedies and important authorities so they will steamroll these little family law firms - and get slapped down by the judges for failing to address the issues asymmetry between the parties of the separation agreement, policy arguments about the well being of children, obvious evidence in the children's demeanour and the different situations, and how the court is deliberately informal and flexible so that it can avoid the rigidity that is desired in contracts between corporations and business moguls.

None of those aspects of the court are written down and spelled out in the court rules - but they are understood to be sacrosanct by the Family Court and the superior courts that handle their appeals because it is a court with a unique and important purpose.

In this particular case, Justin's lawyer does seem to have approached the civil action very much like how he's seen a prosecutor approach a criminal one many, many times before. He started by laying out things in broad terms, saying what he felt the evidence was going to show and pontificating on the moral and social aspects of the issue - he then proceeds to barrage them with his demands and accusations. It's burned into his head from a thousand instances of being on the other side.

It didn't occur to him, and he certainly couldn't bill Justin, for doing some research on the very basic court rules, read up on what a recent, successful defamation suit - after all he bills himself as veteran attorney - and he may also just legit not have had time to do that research in the time between when he agreed to take the case and when he promised he'd have the filings, etc. It may be he did a quick look, and found one which succeeded despite being subpar.

None of this is to disagree with the notion that he is the architect of his own misfortune, but simply to point out the many factors that can drive someone who is supposed to be seasoned professional with amazing credentials into making very bad decisions.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

…material you may not see professionally for the rest of your career…

It’s amazing how many corner cases there are in law and legal-adjacent fields.

One of the first probate cases I ever handled, the testator hadn’t actually named an executor in the will, and the heirs couldn’t agree on who it should be. The probate judge had never seen that situation in his 10 years on the bench, so was initially puzzled at how to proceed.

Fortunately for all involved, the judge’s clerk was a true veteran, and recalled a similar case from 30-40 years prior, so we had the answer within an hour.

 

[Wincenworks]

The probate judge had never seen that situation in his 10 years on the bench, so was initially puzzled at how to proceed.

I had the opposite version in my Property Law class. There was an aspect of property law they'd been teaching for twenty years... just in case it ever came up - however I was apparently in the last class who had to learn it because they'd never, in the entire history of the relevant statute... had a case come up.

I still had to prepare to be tested on it though.

 

[DLIMedia]

So Dave Johnson's back on Twitter, using the character name from one of his trash novels and an AI girl as his avatar...

Maybe he's learned the error of his ways and turned over a new lea-

... Oh. Well OK then.

 

[Wincenworks]

He's privacy locked it again... but like... not before making it very obvious he was back on his reactionary naughty word and petty attacking ways.

I'm not convinced this is the best angle of attack for a guy who used to post literal Nazi memes.

 

[Umbran]

It’s amazing how many corner cases there are in law and legal-adjacent fields.

Well, schooling needs to give you a broad basis from which you can go out into the world and do work - without knowing for sure exactly what kind of work that's going to be. And that's not just a law thing.

Like, my wife still has textbooks on farm animals, though she has never treated a horse since vet school.

 

[thirdkingdom]

Well, yeah. But you see professionals skip steps for one reason or another all the time. Electricians are taught safety rules in classes and by mentors, but then they skip them and get shocked.

How else are you going to find live wires?

 

[DLIMedia]

He's privacy locked it again... but like... not before making it very obvious he was back on his reactionary naughty word and petty attacking ways.

View attachment 309213

I'm not convinced this is the best angle of attack for a guy who used to post literal Nazi memes.

And, like that, he's gone.

As much as it's very satisfying to deplatform racists, it's even more satisfying when they deplatform themselves because they can't take the heat.

 

[Sacrosanct]

How else are you going to find live wires?

Reminds me of my friend. He says he searches for traps with his hit points