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)

 

[LordEntrails]

I really don't think we are supposed to be attributing reasoning and causes to other people's actions on this forum.
I know we've been given a lot of leeway in this thread due to the horrible actions of the folks we are talking about. Let's please stick to their actions. I don't think we really should be going so far as to try and attribute causes, reasons, justification for those actions. (Unless they actually state those themselves, then quote and source them!)

 

[Meech17]

How on earth does "orcs aren't fundamentally evil" mean "no more races"? And there were never witches, except as NPC classes from early Dragon mags, and D&D never went with the idea that people viewed magic as inherently evil. I don't think the latter was ever really a thing until warlocks came around, since they always got their powers from entities of usually dubious morality.

I think this is carry over for Magic: The Gathering. Last year there was rumor that WoTC was going to drop Witches and Druids as a creature type. (Around the same time that they opted to stop using the term 'Tribal' to refer to synergistic creature types.). A lot of folks were up in arms about that saying it was more wokeness.

I believe Mark Rosewater denied that rumor on his blog as well. I could see them potentially re-categorizing creatures as they aren't the most supported type. Roll them into other types with more support. But that's just my personal speculation.

But yeah, this is another common thing these types of folks get angered about

 

[Wincenworks]

I really don't think we are supposed to be attributing reasoning and causes to other people's actions on this forum.
I know we've been given a lot of leeway in this thread due to the horrible actions of the folks we are talking about. Let's please stick to their actions. I don't think we really should be going so far as to try and attribute causes, reasons, justification for those actions. (Unless they actually state those themselves, then quote and source them!)

Well that can be a rather inoperable burden on a forum, particularly since demonstration of such can require grabbing samples from dozens of different sources and platforming terrible people, etc. Also I feel like at this point we could footnote everything with "seen all screenshots posted generally". But to give you an example of what I mean, here's a screenshot of a video I have linked in a blog post, because it's a proudly reactionary YouTuber who received a copy of GiantLands that he did not want after he found out you could have non-binary characters in it.

Yes, it's eight hours and at the point I'm at the host is ranting about his explanation of why he doesn't respect non-binary identities, and one of his co-hosts is giving a different stance that he's agreeing with - creating a dichotomy in isolation. Is it reasonable to ask someone to watch ten minutes of this to confirm that these guys have x opinion because y? What about an hour? The whole eight hours... do I have to watch every one of the videos on his channel? What about comparing what he says in this stream vs what he says in his intro video?

Can I just direct you to the Twitter thread that I started in June 2021 which is so long that it breaks threading constantly? Do I have to point to individual tweets every time? How many? How long do I need to make a post to justify that x believes y? What about the absence of evidence? Does the inability to show Jeff didn't edit a book prove he did if the book says he did?

I don't think that any of these analysis are particularly radical, or particularly personal or in-depth - they're just observations and pattern matching. Obviously there are areas people seem to want to go into that are wildly inappropriate (eg people speculating on childhood trauma as a cause of x behaviour, etc) but that's not really what's going on here.

Encouraging the whole "you need to show us" can easily turn into sea lioning and arguments over judgement etc that essentially amount to demanding passive observation rather than enabling people to deal with it etc or be able to explain to their friends why they might not want to share an image they saw someone like on social media.

Innuendo Studios has talked at length about how memes and other associated strategies were used in GamerGate by incorporating communication etc that relies on layerings of shared knowledge specifically so that it can be used to communicate to the in group without incriminating themselves to the out group (and/or used to attack people who are trying to explain/expose the in-group).

In the above scenario, would it really be helpful to say - present a four page essay with links to every questionable statement that appears on DHSM in posts or comment, to analyse the entire image used and the comments relating with cross-referenced quotes/posts, etc. Or is it more helpful to explain the underlying basis behind it? Because just explaining the wheelchair and how its come to significance to reactionaries etc could be a multi-page thread.

At the end of the day, there is no perfect analysis tool for dealing with your fellow humans - but there are a lot of pitfalls you can run into looking for one.

 

[Faolyn]

The icing on the cake when it comes to them whining about orc alignments is that orcs have never been fundamentally evil in D&D anyway. That's not a even a thing. But, you know, since when have D&D players ever actually read the rules very much?

To be fair, their alignment has always been evil and back in AD&D, there wasn't any easy way to distinguish between fundamentally evil, like a demon, and evil-by-culture, like an orc (both would ping to a detect evil spell). It's one of those things that's been talked about forever, along with whether or not mindless undead are evil and is it evil to make them.

But let's face it--it would take time and effort to look at an orc, realize they're only culturally evil, and make a culture of good or neutral orcs. And people who think being "woke" is a bad thing are not the time of people to spend that sort of time and effort.

 

[Rystefn]

To be fair, their alignment has always been evil and back in AD&D, there wasn't any easy way to distinguish between fundamentally evil, like a demon, and evil-by-culture, like an orc (both would ping to a detect evil spell). It's one of those things that's been talked about forever, along with whether or not mindless undead are evil and is it evil to make them.

But let's face it--it would take time and effort to look at an orc, realize they're only culturally evil, and make a culture of good or neutral orcs. And people who think being "woke" is a bad thing are not the time of people to spend that sort of time and effort.

I mean, your last point is correct, but the rules have actually been clear about this since the beginning. AD&D1 specifically called out the alignment listings as a "bent" that was modified by specific intent. And AD&D2 said that it was only describing the average individual and that you could always encounter exceptions. And that fully applies to demons as well in both cases. I have less experience with pre-A versions of D&D, but iirc, it also put it in similar terms.

So the end result is that people making a stink about non-evil versions of these monsters, up to and including full-on demons, are not only naughty words, but also objectively wrong. Which is the usual state of affairs for that type, but I think it's still worth taking the time to call it out now and then.

 

[Umbran]

I was aware of the latter through the scifi and e-gaming communities (and weirdly, some supposed anime fans) but hadn't realized it had penetrated the reactionary tabletop gamer crowd so badly. Sigh.

Well, what else are they reactionary about? Fluffernutters?

 

[Ondath]

To be fair, their alignment has always been evil and back in AD&D, there wasn't any easy way to distinguish between fundamentally evil, like a demon, and evil-by-culture, like an orc (both would ping to a detect evil spell). It's one of those things that's been talked about forever, along with whether or not mindless undead are evil and is it evil to make them.

But let's face it--it would take time and effort to look at an orc, realize they're only culturally evil, and make a culture of good or neutral orcs. And people who think being "woke" is a bad thing are not the time of people to spend that sort of time and effort.

To add on to this, we have quotes from EGG himself in these very forums (and Dragonsfoot) where his solution to the baby orc problem is "Raise them as good and then immediately kill them so they get sent to the Good Afterlife". We have to admit that race essentialism is not that foreign to D&D's roots.

 

[Wincenworks]

I think a big thing that is overlooked in the discussions is that D&D was not created as a singular, complete system that was never meant to change - Gary changed the game as he went, he wrote new lore, approved new settings, etc. Dragon magazine was constantly filled with "here's my idea on how to..." etc.

The idea that anything as murky and frankly weird as general alignments is sacrosanct to the gaming experience is... kinda ridiculous.

 

[Longspeak]

Matter of perception, same as "woke" is an insult to some people and not others. The same image is posted in the D&D Meme thread here and got nothing more than some (arguably deserved) snark about the phone. Over in DSHM Land you can bet they're also sneering at the idea of adventuring in a wheelchair, the "exotic" non-TSR-era PC species (well, races for them) being showcased, the lack of humans, and I'm sure some other things, including the not-Old-School art style in general. No matter what the creator of that piece intended, it's being used as an opportunity for that audience to point and laugh, much the same way we're pointing and laughing at LaNasa over here for his output.

If you can't see it, be happy. You aren't missing anything.

So... "diverse folk getting along = bad?" That's their message?

Could everyone look away from the screen a moment? I need to use some bad words.

[redacted][redacted][redacted][redacted][REDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREDACTEDREEEEEEEEDAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCTEEEEEEDD]

Thanks. I'm fine now.

 

[Umbran]

So... "diverse folk getting along = bad?" That's their message?

Well, yeah. The message that folks can get along suggests that, if you (generic, not Longspeak) don't get along, there's some actions you ought to take to also get along. It suggests a lack of effort, or a flaw - showing folks getting along is a criticism of those who just want to be superior.