US Law – A gentleman with opinions

nuTSR v WotC (inevitable outcome)

By now it’s a fact of history that eventually, Justin LaNasa(LaNasa) came to a confidential settlement with Wizards of the Coast(WotC) over the lawsuit he started over trade marks he poached for culture war nonsense and profit.¹ This effectively ended his crusade to try to usurp the history to the table top role-playing game(TTRPG) hobby as well as Dungeons & Dragons(D&D).

I think its worth examining the final outcome in order to understand how absurd it was, how many lies it required to keep the campaign going, and how much waste it resulted in for a wet fart of an ending.

The settlement means there’s not really any fascinating statements on trade marks, since we never got to an actual trial and hence a decision by the courts.

Before we commence, I want to clarify that I will not be naming LaNasa’s counsel during these proceedings as – based off what I can see – she was simply doing her job. While I find some of the decisions questionable, based on the rest of the nuTSR ordeal I think she was just doing the best she could.

We’ve seen what she was working with, and a fundamental pillar of law in a free society is even terrible people deserve competent representation. There’s also good odds that she helped him realize he needed to settle.

1
TSR LLC v. Wizards of the Coast LLC, 2:21-cv-01705, (W.D. Wash.), [nuTSR v. WotC] Document #66, 29 May 2024

nuTSR declares BANKRUPTCY!

So, at this point in the saga, the situation was:

Justin LaNasa (LaNasa) had taken out multiple lapsed trademarks, and was claiming his new company TSR LLC was the divine heir to them, and was now having to throw money into a bottomless pit due to having taken Wizards of the Coast to court over it.¹

This was, not sustainable given that is its products were generally bad and it’s convention failed to generate any buzz for obvious reasons. 16 months in, Justin had clearly noticed it wasn’t going great – hence the numerous meltdowns.²

So naturally, in May of 2023, he decided TSR LLC should just go bankrupt, and it was very funny. Yes, normally bankruptcies are tragic and heart breaking but this one was very funny. Bankruptcy was filed for on 8 June 2023.³

The first area of hilarity was Stephen Erin Dinehart IV, (Dinehart) of GiantLands infamy, immediately jumped into try to blame Wizards of the Coast for nuTSR putting themselves into bankruptcy.⁴

It should be noted that the courts never had to decide who owned TSR, but the answer is Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary (not a Doing Business As) of Hasbro.

LaNasa himself chose to amplify this message, but decided to make no effort in doing so – leaving it open to speculation if he’d agreed with Dinehart – a man who he’d previous branded a traitor and put on his haters list – should basically resume his old job as nuTSR’s public relations.

A screenshot of Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum re-sharing the post by Wonderfilled.

TSR original Tim Kask had a much less sympathetic response to it.⁵

A text on image post by Tim Kask, 16 June 2023, "NuTSR bankrupt? Oh my, waht is the world coming to? Ah, it's senses. Big surprise when you are headed by a slimeball."

Rest in peace Tim, you were rough around the edges but you were an entertaining man of integrity right until the very end.

1
TSR LLC v. Wizards of the Coast LLC, 2:21-cv-01705, (W.D. Wash.)
2
Kim Wincen “Dungeon Crawl, TSR Cons & Meltdowns” (9 January 2026) A gentleman with opinions <blog.wincenworks.com>
3
TSR, LLC, 23-01577, (Bankr. E.D.N.C.)
4
Stephen Erin Dinehart IV (8 June 2023) Wonderfilled Facebook <now deleted>
5
Tim Kask (Kaskoid) (16 June 2023) Facebook <www.facebook.com/tim.kask.9>

ORC 2-ish years later

It’s been 2-ish years since Paizo “finished”¹ their Open RPG Creative License (ORC)² (more on that in a bit) so it seems like a good enough time to see how the new license is coming along, what sort of momentum has it built, what was the overall outcome. Did it revolutionize tabletop role-playing games (“TTRPGS”)? And what was the overall significance and involvement of Azora Law?³

Tell me you want to be the premier law firm for TTRPGs without telling me you want to be the premier law firm for TTRPGs.

Azora Law is, according to a publication in the Washington State Bar News – June 2021, it is “one of Seattle’s oldest virtual law firms”.⁴ This seems to be the singular instance of it claiming to be a virtual law firm, which is an odd claim since if they’re all in Seattle and they have a registered office address… that means they just let staff work from home if they want? Pretty sure that was the standard in mid 2021.

Unless they also had a presence in the Metaverse at some stage.

Anyway, I thought ORC sucked… but I’ve been known to be wrong.⁵

My name is Kim. I am not a lawyer, certainly not a US lawyer specializing in copyright and most importantly I am not your lawyer. I am a law graduate in New Zealand who has a passion for role-playing games, and you should not consider anything I post to be legal advice (or take legal advice from blogs or social media posts in general). Also please, understand – absolutely nothing you say to me falls under lawyer-client privilege – especially if you do it in the comments.

Okay, now that’s done, let’s look at this.

1
“ORC License: The Final Version is Here!” (29 June 2023) Paizo <paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6sico>
2
“Open RPG Creative License” Paizo <paizo.com/orclicense>
3
Azora Law <azoralaw.com/>
4
Brian Lewis “Three Big Developments in Soft IP Law” Washington State Bar News (Washington US, June 2021) at 30
5
Kim Wincen “The ORC has landed. It kinda sucks” (2 June 2023) A gentleman with opinions <blog.wincenworks.com/2023/07/02/the-orc-has-landed-it-kinda-sucks/>

X nee Twitter’s Terms of Service

First a disclaimer, my name is Kim, I’m not a lawyer – more importantly I’m not your lawyer and I am not a lawyer in the United States of America. Nothing following it to be taken as personal legal advice, it certainly does not form a lawyer-client relationship and please do not take legal advice off random bloggers.

So, a lot of people have been posting screenshots of the new Terms of Service (“XTos”) on X nee Twitter (“Xitter”), but I haven’t seen many people doing much of an analysis into what they actually mean. So I decided to look into it before 15 November 2024, when all these changes take effect.

While some of the changes have been, on the surface, a little alarming most of it is fairly banal when taken in isolation. When looked at a whole, it paints a rather grim picture for the platform, those who continue to make use of it, and the those who are not on there but are directly impacted by the activities there.

It’s bad, but to truly understand how bad, we need to have a good look at everything and see the overall picture that it paints.

LaNasa v. Tenkar – Dismissed with Prejudice

Throughout out the TSR Saga, there have been many reporting on it – doing varying avenues and degree of investigating. One of those was the proprietor of the Tenkar’s Tavern web presence… who we’ll refer to as Tenkar (who is an old D&D character of his, of course).

Background

Tenkar is a long time player of D&D who has a general interest in role-playing games, which he primarily expresses through his website, Tenkar’s Tavern and the connected YouTube Channel. He is also a former Internal Affairs officer with the New York Police Department and a big advocate for OSR. He also (like everyone) injects his politics and his personal opinions in there, but for the most part here’s what you need to know:

Tenkar did a lot of videos covering the various mistruths and questionable claims of the nuTSR crowd, sometimes with accompanying blog posts writing things up and linking to relevant information.
Tenkar has a lot of opinions on old school games styles, often making videos to discuss the idea of playing now vs then, talking about the principles of OSRIC, etc.
Tenkar also made a consistent effort over the years to expose people trying to grift or otherwise exploit the nostalgia for old school gaming. Ken Whitman, for example, has featured frequently and generally in an unflattering manner since at least as far back as October 2014.¹
Tenkar is wary of the pitfalls of commentary, and takes steps to prepare his receipts and evidence in advance – and to always show the material he’s using to substantiate his opinions.
Tenkar’s long involvement with the hobby, conventions and the history of the hobby have made him quite well networked within the niche hobby.

Naturally this did not bode well for Justin LaNasa, the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum or the nuTSR crowd in general.

1
Tenkar A WTF are They Thinking!?! Kickstarter – Castles & Crusades: Blacktooth Ridge (T.V. Pilot) (3 October 2014) <www.tenkarstavern.com>

Gina Carano’s LOLsuit

In the interests of personal responsibility, I feel I need to open with a clarification that when a billionaire (Elon Musk) funds a washed up celebrity (Gina Carano) to sue a multi-billion dollar mega-corporation (Disney) with a baseless case – it’s a LOLsuit and should be viewed as a spectacle.

When rich assholes sue regular people with baseless defamation suits, it’s class terrorism and needs to be stomped out.

Also I’m not a lawyer, more importantly I’m not your lawyer so this is not personalized legal advice to anyone (especially not Gina Carano) and I strongly urge you to never take legal advice off a blog, or ever believe you have a lawyer-client relationship with a blogger. Also I’m doing this without Westlaw or Lexis so someone who is practicing can probably find some info I can’t.