In June 2021, a Twitter account @tsr_games (archive) was launched to promote TSR LLC, a company registered in Wisconsin in September 2020 for the express purpose of running a tribute to the original Dungeon Hobby Shop at the original address, and making games with the help of old school gaming personalities like Ernie Gygax. The company and associated group (NuTSR) were founded by Justin LaNasa.
By the end of July 2021 the twitter account would be renamed to @wfd_games and representing Wonderfilled Inc, a company registered in Wisconsin by Stephen E Dinehart IV – former CCO then separated from TSR LLC and owner/co-creator of GiantLands. By December 2021, TSR LLC would have lodged a federal lawsuit against Wizards of the Coast over a handful of old trademarks.
The events involved in that are complicated, and convoluted, but the short version of it is a series of bad business decisions, unethical practices and expression of reactionary politics by the personalities above created quagmires of public image, legal problems and unfavourable exposure. Most of the incriminating tweets, videos, etc have seen been deleted or removed from public access so screenshots will be used where archive links are not available. Most of this is being recreated from a Twitter thread that has become incredibly unwieldly over time.
Ignition Point
In June, Ernie Gygax did an interview (no longer available on YouTube) that was reported on EN World by the site owner Morrus. In it, Ernie, amongst other things:
- Announced that about he was dissed for being old-fashioned, particularly around ideas like gender identity.
- Claimed Lorraine Williams was a corporate raider and that mean she was like native american tribes who would “wipe out another tribe many times take the woman and children and murder off everything else.”
- Referred to the people at modern Wizards of the Coast and their supporters lemmings – then announced the problem is “my fighter returns antagonism for antagonism. So that’s where we start getting into some difficulties and I’m having to throw a protection from evil up.”
For obvious reasons, this raised a lot of concerns among the modern audiences and required TSR LLC to wade in on and seek support. This was, initially done primarily by Stephen Dinehart who attempted to simply to deny anything happened and then – through his GiantLands Twitter account (replying to a tweet to TSR’s Twitter) launched the tweet that escalated things to flashpoint.
The lit fuze
An apology by Ernie was issued, but at this point the situation became polarized – with the vast majority of the old school gaming (including Luke Gygax) being alarmed and opposed to all of this, sceptical of the validity of this claim of being the old company reborn and unimpressed with the responses; and reactionaries from groups like ComicsGate rushing in to defend TSR LLC, seeing it as a new battlefield where they could claim victory and dominance over shared nostalgia.
TSR’s Official channel leaned into this.
Stephen Dinehart then started proposing that the backlash was artificial and was a the result of people being paid by Wizards of the Coast to speak out against the company. He would continue to repeat variations on this idea at various points later.
(As a side note, based on his old tweets – Stephen did NOT vote for marriage equality)
This combined with a truly baffling apology by the Ernie Gygax account (allegedly operated by Dinehart at the time) – sharing a fantasy of becoming a school shooter and essentially blaming all his statements on misunderstanding and his own experience being bullied created a branding crisis.
This culminated in the baffling announcement on the @tsr_games account that there was a new Social Media manager named Michael, who would be handling things from then on. At the time this was viewed by many as a badly executed hoax, but we now know that it was in fact Michael K Hovermale, blinded by nostalgia and trying to help TSR LLC recover from the branding crisis so they could make the old school style games he dreamed of.
It seems this… announcement of “the individual that was handling this account is no longer with TSR” didn’t go over well with Dinehart as these posts were deleted shortly afterwards.
Explosion
Around 7 July 2022, it appears differences between Dinehart and LaNasa lead to an explosive schism in which Dinehart left with most of the Twitter accounts and urls. Initial confusion led to this being reported as a rebranding, etc – but ultimately it lead to a split into two groups whose only common member was Ernie Gygax.
TSR LLC re-established itself later with continuing it’s Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum (tsrmuseum.com) and TSR Hobbies branches and consisted largely of Justin LaNasa and a rotating inner circle of reactionaries with Jeff Leeson kept on for the museum and credibility. They had the promise of making Star Frontiers: New Genesis game, along with other “old school” games. Their story is the TSR Saga.
Wonderfilled continued to post in plural (“we are excited to announce”) despite being entirely Dinehart, with James M Ward remaining as a co-creator of GiantLands but operating in a purely contract capacity with royalties. That story is the GiantLands Saga, continued here.