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)

 

[pukunui]

Is that a personal setting? I thought it was strange when all the thread pages suddenly got way shorter

Yes. You can change it in your own settings. I think there may have been a glitch or reset recently, as I noticed mine had gone back to 10 posts per page as well. (I much prefer it at 20.)

 

[Gradine]

Yes. You can change it in your own settings. I think there may have been a glitch or reset recently, as I noticed mine had gone back to 10 posts per page as well. (I much prefer it at 20.)

I'd had it at 20 for so long that I just assumed that was the default, and then when it inexplicably switched to 10-per-page I figure it was that for everybody. That this is something I can fix is absolutely the best news in this thread.

Low bar, I know, but still.

 

[Longspeak]

Wow. I was just making a funny...

 

[Willie the Duck]

Yes. You can change it in your own settings. I think there may have been a glitch or reset recently, as I noticed mine had gone back to 10 posts per page as well. (I much prefer it at 20.)

Anyone know why it caps at 20 here? Other boards I am on have limits that go up to 50 or 100 (the later of which, honestly, is overboard, but 50 would be nice).

 

[LordEntrails]

Anyone know why it caps at 20 here? Other boards I am on have limits that go up to 50 or 100 (the later of which, honestly, is overboard, but 50 would be nice).

These questions belong in the Meta sub-forum, not here. Please.

 

[Wincenworks]

Justin's lawyer has refiled his motion in the LaNasa vs Tenkar case and... well...

Firstly the illustrative strike outs are very sloppily applied, (taking out the "and" which was definitely in the final version) but more importantly not really addressing the error he made when he served Tenkar's mother. He may very well have thought he was serving Tenkar's wife, and meant to serve his wife... but he didn't. Rachel is a different party, so he would need to apply for special leave to provide her a late service... which he doesn't do.

For the uninitiated, a common maxim in Civil Procedure classes is "service is jurisdiction, and jurisdiction is service" - if you haven't served the proper party then the court will refuse to do anything due to lack of jurisdiction, no matter how compelling your evidence.

Serving someone in the same house, or a spouse, etc is not good enough - you need to serve the person involved. Courts do not like people trying to sneak another party in midway through proceedings as it denies that party their right to due process.

This is particularly not a great idea since the judge specified he was to stay as close to the original complaint as possible... and trying to add a new party is a pretty big jump.

Also the redline version doesn't show the additions he did, just the parts he removed which makes it... very confusing to read - thus defeating the stated point of him supplying it. So... in terms of pleasing the court... dubious.

In terms of substantial changes, Justin's lawyer has made practically none - the vast majority are to change the references to Tenkar's mother to Tenkar's wife (who again, they haven't served) with the sole major change being the removal of the claim that it was defamatory to refer to Justin as having a criminal history.

And it's... very funny when you see the paragraph that puts into context how absurd that is:

As a general reminder....

• The Nazi and white supremacist is Dave Johnson... who posted about how eugenics saves species in his Star Frontiers teaser in Alarms & Journeys #13 - and there is a web site documenting his sins in this regard; and
• the anti-homosexual conduct evidence is Tenkar reading out some Chad Revenge tweets... with the tweets on screen so you can see exactly where they're from - and Justin has previously said he's anti-marriage equality in his campaigns; and
• the failure to pay debts is not demonstrated in the submission... but there is a court judgement that Justin's oxygen bar failed to pay its taxes available to the public; and
• the "other statements" are mostly whinging about things that are not defamation (saying rude things, expressing a dislike of a person, threatening to invoke Castle Doctrine if attacked, and/or not censoring out Justin's child from his wife's avatar when talking about her comments)

I'm not convinced the judge is going to believe Justin's lawyer did his due diligence this time around.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Justin's lawyer has refiled his motion in the LaNasa vs Tenkar case and... well...

Firstly the illustrative strike outs are very sloppily applied, (taking out the "and" which was definitely in the final version) but more importantly not really addressing the error he made when he served Tenkar's mother. He may very well have thought he was serving Tenkar's wife, and meant to serve his wife... but he didn't. Rachel is a different party, so he would need to apply for special leave to provide her a late service... which he doesn't do.

Wait, he re-filed a complaint, with leave of the court to file a red-line to remove certain allegations ... and he just ....

Changed a party completely? A party that had not previously been in the action and has not been served?

I'd provide additional commentary, but I lack the capacity to do anything but facepalm right now.

 

[Steampunkette]

Oh, look what I found!

It's a picture of Lanasa's 5D chess game against literally everyone.

As you can see, he's cleverly using Checkers pieces in the hopes of getting multiple pieces kinged.

 

[Staffan]

As you can see, he's cleverly using Checkers pieces in the hopes of getting multiple pieces kinged.

Well, no matter. Because he's STILL holding all the cards, and guess what: they're all Full Houses!

 

[Wincenworks]

Changed a party completely? A party that had not previously been in the action and has not been served?

Yup... best I can tell he interpreted the permission to remove Tenkar's mother from the proceedings to... just swap in Tenkar's wife and pretend that it'd always been like that.

They served Tenkar in September 2022, and his mother in February 2023... his wife has never been served.

And the permission from the court was...

Leave is granted solely for the purposes of allowing Plaintiffs to remove the allegations discussed in their 55 November 26, 2023, letter and any other allegations (if any) that Plaintiffs may no longer believe they can make consistently with their obligations under Rule 11(b). Additionally, Plaintiffs shall attach as an exhibit to their second amended complaint a redline clearly indicating the differences between the first amended complaint and second amended complaint.Because Defendants' 32 motion to dismiss is directed at the first amended complaint, the Court denies Defendants' motion as moot. Because the Court's grant of leave to amend is so narrow and only allows Plaintiffs to remove allegations, the Court will set a compressed briefing schedule with the expectation that the parties will borrow heavily from their prior motion papers.Defendants shall serve, but not file, motion to dismiss papers on or before January 23, 2024.

So yeah, he really did just try to swap in a part that was never served, effectively adding a new defendant who would have full liability, nearly a year after the initial service - after the discovery period... without any leave of the court to do so... just as a "we assumed the judge would let us fix this as a minor whoopsie..."