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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 9425224" data-attributes="member: 6680772">So, I've listened to all the episodes, including the latest (and last) one, and nothing, nothing in the whole series has been more of a gut-punch than to hear Lorraine Williams' first offer to buy-out Gygax, in an effort to stave off his lawsuit:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">She would buy all his shares at $3,000 a share. Gygax had roughly a little over 1,600 shares, so this would be about $4.8 million in total ($14 million in 2024 dollars).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">$500,000 in royalties for the next five years.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Gygax would get the trademark to D&D, AD&D, Greyhawk, and Gencon.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Right to produce a D&D movie, if it is made.</li> </ul>I mean, I get it. If Gygax had won his lawsuit, he'd have all that and control of TSR. But, in the end, he loses the lawsuit, and decides to settle rather than appeal. In the settlement he only gets $1,000 a share, a renegotiated royalty deal, and his loans to the company are repaid.But if he had taken the deal...it seems he surely would have had enough money to start a new company, and possibly even put out a new edition of (A)D&D. I don't know what exactly Williams planned to do after giving up the trademarks. License them from Gygax? Continue to publish a revised version of D&D under a new name? Make TSR the Buck Rogers Game Company?Gygax being ousted from his company was rough. But hearing, for the first time, that he might have even gotten away from it with the rights to D&D? And he turned the deal down? Oof. That might have been even rougher.</blockquote>

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