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)

 

[JackMann]

Probably doesn't matter to him. The more I see of this, the more I realize LaNasa's motivations really aren't profit-driven. He has plenty of money from his passive real estate income. What he really wants is acclaim and respect. He wants to be the big guy who beat the wokes who ruined his beloved childhood games and saved D&D for the real men. Tossing out a few thousand bucks to have people fawning over his hobby company probably seems cheap to him. Oh, if it had made money, that would have been even better... but mostly because it would have meant even more people attending, validating his need to feel powerful and influential.

Having money is one of the few things he actually has going for him (which probably is what prompted him on the "net worth" poll a while back). He uses the money he makes off of real estate to finance the rest of his operations.

We'll see how well that does once the lawsuits all settle out, though.

 

[Deset Gled]

Admittedly we don't have any eye-witness reports... pics from TSR Con II so far are as could be expected; better turn out than I expected, actually. And apparently someone did take home at least some of the awards already, even though there was still one more day to go.

Given the cost of the hall over the three days (prices on the HH website range between $3K and$5K for the three days, depending on whether food is involved), and with a profit of $10 a ticket plus the vendor booths, he'd need over four hundred attendees... so I'm guessing he didn't make his money back.

The photos posted online so far from various sources show about a dozen attendees, including vendors. I suspect that at least a few more people were there, but nowhere near enough to justify renting the hall. Also, no hot food shown anywhere; I'm guessing they ended up with no catering.

I think my favorite photo so far is this one of Larry Elmore with a completely empty sign up board behind him:

And before anyone asks, the board was not empty because it was the start of the Con. It was confirmed on Facebook that Elmore didn't arrive until later in the day. From the photos posted, there were only a small handful of games played during the Con.

 

[HomegrownHydra]

Probably doesn't matter to him. The more I see of this, the more I realize LaNasa's motivations really aren't profit-driven. He has plenty of money from his passive real estate income. What he really wants is acclaim and respect. He wants to be the big guy who beat the wokes who ruined his beloved childhood games and saved D&D for the real men. Tossing out a few thousand bucks to have people fawning over his hobby company probably seems cheap to him. Oh, if it had made money, that would have been even better... but mostly because it would have meant even more people attending, validating his need to feel powerful and influential.

Having money is one of the few things he actually has going for him (which probably is what prompted him on the "net worth" poll a while back). He uses the money he makes off of real estate to finance the rest of his operations.

We'll see how well that does once the lawsuits all settle out, though.

I think it is apparent that money is a major motivator for LaNasa when it comes to his RPG endeavors. We see this in his attempt to charge people to use his dopey game ratings meter and the ridiculous prices for the compilation books he sells at the museum. I think that he very much wants to make lots of money off of RPGs, it's just that he is too lazy to do any real work which is why he tried to takeover the TSR brand. He thought doing so would allow him to rake in money without any real effort; all he'd have to do is slap the TSR logo on products and people would buy them up.

 

[Deset Gled]

Probably doesn't matter to him. The more I see of this, the more I realize LaNasa's motivations really aren't profit-driven. He has plenty of money from his passive real estate income. What he really wants is acclaim and respect. He wants to be the big guy who beat the wokes who ruined his beloved childhood games and saved D&D for the real men. Tossing out a few thousand bucks to have people fawning over his hobby company probably seems cheap to him. Oh, if it had made money, that would have been even better... but mostly because it would have meant even more people attending, validating his need to feel powerful and influential.

I think this is partially true. Lanasa definitely wants people to think he's important. And he really wants people to think he's wealthy.

That being said, he absolutely does not "toss" money around. Multiple people who have worked with him, including @GraphPaper Architect and @Wizard Tower Games can confirm that he loves to talk about spending money, but has a terrible track record of paying when the bill is due. The Hovermales (Michael and his son) were never paid a dime for the work they did. The only reason the DHSM stays open is because Jeff Leason is given free housing upstairs; no one is paid money to run it. The only material actually published by NuTSR are the Cult of Abaddon module that Vince Florio gave them for free, and Those Pesky Goblinz which Lanasa cobbled together from OSR material (and a reprint of Cult of Abaddon).

Dungeon Crawl is another great example. All of the issues with delivering the game late could have easily been solved if he was willing to cough up even a little money to get things going. Instead, he's doing everything the absolutely cheapest way possible, which means product is delivered slowly (if ever). And quality seem to be taking a hit as well. The photos from the new batch make it look like the card stock is now pretty cheap and full of warping:

Why would someone who wanted to buy their way into acclaim and respect in the gaming industry cut corners like this on the board game? Why does he never pay for professional editing on NuTSR's other gaming products? Why did he cheap out on food at the convention? Is it that he thinks his customers are too stupid to realize he's being cheap? Because he doesn't actually have the skill/knowledge to do any better? Or that he doesn't have quite as much money as he wants everyone to think? My guess: all three.

 

[DLIMedia]

As far as I can tell, the last set of pictures from TSRCon2 were posted Sunday at 10am local time, and they were labeled "Day Two" which means they're from Saturday... Not a single photo after that.

So it seems it went as well as could be expected.

 

[DLIMedia]

In a minor NuTSR/WotC update, the original trademark lawsuit which started everything and has been suspended for a year gets a minor poke to ensure it still remains suspended and will re-open once the federal case concludes.

And, according to NuTSR's lawyer, no depositions have been taken yet.

 

[DLIMedia]

(sorry about the triple post)

Meanwhile, Stephen Dinehart of Giantlands fame clarifies things for the WotC attorneys, almost ensuring that he and Ernie go down with the ship.

 

[Deset Gled]

As far as I can tell, the last set of pictures from TSRCon2 were posted Sunday at 10am local time, and they were labeled "Day Two" which means they're from Saturday... Not a single photo after that.

So it seems it went as well as could be expected.

I had noticed this as well. I was waiting to see if anything from Day 3 popped up, but so far nothing has. No posts, no pictures. None of the "friends" of NuTSR who posted about days 1 and 2 shared anything. Nothing from the vendors. Even the awards were given away on Day 2. I think they may have cancelled Day 3 due to low turnout (i.e. no one showed up). Oh well.

On a related note, I saw posts from Mick McArt, who definitely spent some time at the Con. And you could see Tone Deaf Bards sitting bored in the background of a couple photos. But I never saw anything about the third vendor, Sand and Saber. They're a mini company based in NC. I'm wondering if their "booth" was really just Lanasa using their minis and maybe selling a few. Or maybe they bailed completely.

 

[DLIMedia]

And no mention of what happened to AstroManatee.

 

[adamantyr]

(sorry about the triple post)

Meanwhile, Stephen Dinehart of Giantlands fame clarifies things for the WotC attorneys, almost ensuring that he and Ernie go down with the ship.

View attachment 279952

I was wondering if Dinehart was going to show up at Gary Con at all... seems like if he wanted to promote Giantlands he'd have been there. Jim Ward certainly was.