from the do-not-meddle-in-the-affairs-of-wizards dept.
Renton, Wash.-based gaming company Wizards of the Coast filed a preliminary injunction in Seattle last week that seeks to prevent the release of a Wisconsin company's upcoming tabletop game, citing conflicts over both intellectual property rights and allegedly "racist and transphobic content."
Wizards of the Coast, owned by conglomerate Hasbro, is the current publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, the audience for which has been growing steadily over the course of the last several years.
The company's injunction, filed on Sept. 8 in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington, aims to stop the publication of Star Frontiers: New Genesis, a tabletop space opera role-playing game that's currently under development at TSR LLC, headquartered in Lake Geneva, Wisc.
TSR LLC (a.k.a. "TSR3.5" or "NuTSR") is the latest company to lay claim to the name and legacy of the defunct TSR Inc., which is best known for publishing the original version of Dungeons & Dragons in 1973 and was acquired by Wizards in 1997.
TSR LLC was founded in June 2021 by Ernie Gygax, son of late D&D creator Gary Gygax; Stephen Dinehart; and Justin LaNasa, the owner and operator of the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum in Lake Geneva. The Museum is located on the site of the first office that Gary Gygax opened for TSR Inc. in 1976.
New Genesis, by TSR LLC, is an attempt to revive the original Star Frontiers, which TSR Inc. published from 1980 to 1986. While Star Frontiers never found the success that D&D did, it's maintained a cult fanbase up to the present day. Several features of its universe were later recycled into the D&D spacefaring setting Spelljammer.
In July, a preview copy of New Genesis leaked online and was met with immediate controversy due to allegedly containing explicitly racist and transphobic content. "A 'negro' race is described as a 'Subrace' in the game and as having 'average' intelligence with a maximum intelligence rating of 9, while the 'norse' race has a minimum intelligence rating of 13," the preliminary injunction notes, citing an example from the New Genesis playtest.
[...] In the injunction, Wizards' counsel writes that it "would be irreparably harmed by the publication and distribution of the game using its trademarks because consumers may mistakenly associate Wizards with the reprehensible content of the game, damaging its reputation and goodwill and undermining its efforts to foster a culture that embraces diversity."
[...] The Sept. 8 injunction marks the latest step in an ongoing legal fight between TSR LLC and Wizards. They had previously filed suit against one another in December over the rights to the TSR name and to Star Frontiers.
I didn't know TSR had been revived!
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by HammeredGlass on Sunday September 18 2022, @10:06PM
ruined by petit tyrants who were empowered by weak people.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday September 18 2022, @10:09PM (5 children)
This has been going on for a while. I guess Gygax son just took it a step to far and had some opinions about old material that wasn't inline with the new and enlightened material from Wizards of the Coast.
That said I think I just stopped caring when Wizard of the Coast started to apologize for previous editions and source material. Even going as far as starting to edit them to remove all the old "racism" and stereotypical representations of White heroes. There just wasn't enough diversity around so they had to inject some by force. I guess it was just to many white humans and not enough black orcs that are totally not evil or anything like that. The weirdest part I guess was when the Drow elfs was just misunderstood, cause sacrificing humans to your demonic spider queen isn't evil at all. It's just another interesting cultural experience ...
https://dnd.wizards.com/news/diversity-and-dnd [wizards.com]
At least I still have my 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition books in print so they can't edit their bullshit into them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday September 19 2022, @02:08AM (4 children)
A reminder for our readers - there is a difference between the "Troll" and "Disagree" mods.
I do have an issue with publishers going back and revising older texts - whether they're books, movies or roleplaying games. It's important that creative works are allowed to remain as they were when first published, as it provides insight into our cultural history. Just as the censors of the 1500's damaged ancient artworks by painting fig leaves over the bodies [artsy.net] to reflect the morals of the time, we are erasing parts of our history when we pretend that we never played games in which Orcs and Goblins were always evil (or that 1st Edition AD&D had a rule that female characters' maximum strength was lower than male character's maximum strength). Those delving back into older material simply need to understand the context and place in which these works were created. Perhaps even have a conversation about it!
WotC could quite easily (and have) published revised "2.0" versions of classic adventures - the Tomb of Annihilation is basically an updated Tomb of Horrors, which was also updated in between the two with Return to the Tomb of Horrors. There's no reason to go back and retcon the 1970's 1st Edition rules to reflect contemporary values 50 years later. Just keep the original one as-is, mmmkay?
(Score: 2, Informative) by helel on Monday September 19 2022, @03:47AM (3 children)
What is under scrutiny here is not the old material from the 80's, its new material written by Dave Johnson today. As I understand it the controversial elements aren't even rehashes of what existed before but entirely new material so there's no "it's a product of it's time" defense - It's just racist and transphobic drivel being pumped out today.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday September 19 2022, @02:04PM (1 child)
Well, I guess since it's drivel, people will not buy it and whoever writes it will go out of business, correct?
(Score: 2) by helel on Monday September 19 2022, @02:34PM
Probably yes. Thus far it's been sold via pre-release crowd funding so they've collected money without anyone seeing the product. It's not as if they're releasing numbers but I suspect that revenue stream has dried up after the leak of the working document.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday September 19 2022, @09:40PM
My comment about people misusing the Troll mod was in response to people's modding of looorg's post - not TFA itself.
I agree that the current issue described in TFA is not historic at all, but is entirely current. That was not my issue with looorg being modded Troll.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mykl on Sunday September 18 2022, @10:10PM (4 children)
This article is actually about multiple things.
First, there's the issue of who owns the trademark to Star Frontiers. It seems that WotC's claim to it relies upon them licensing a third party to reprint their back catalogue, including the original Star Frontiers. IANAL, so I can't speak to the strength of that. I find it curious that the project has progressed as far as it has without this particular item being covered off though. After all, you're naming the company after the original TSR, naming the product after something produced by them and sold to WotC - you are obviously making a great effort to cash in on the IP of the original. If that's the plan, you'd better be sure that you are on solid ground!
Interesting that the company has included Ernie Gygax too - makes me wonder if Gary eventually regretted the sale and privately complained about the injustice of it all, leading the son to this course of action? Pure speculation.
The second issue is the alleged racist / anti-trans content. I followed the link and, if the reporting is accurate, can see the problems. This can always be cleared up by the Game Master's use of Rule zero (if you don't like what's in the book, change it!), but the inclusion in the book is indicative of the general theme that the designers are going for.
It would be one thing to come up with a bunch of invented races and assign different attributes to them (e.g. Ogres are big and dumb, Gnomes are bright and inquisitive, Orcs are warlike etc). But the writers here have explicitly used real-world races and have made stat-based rules that put some of these races above others. To explicitly describe in the game rules that a negro can never be as intelligent as a norse person is pretty incendiary, and clearly indicative of someone with an agenda.
I'm not so worried about the 'subrace' reference, as it can be argued that all races described are subraces of 'human' (which would include the aforementioned norse). Also, subrace has been common usage in D&D and Pathfinder for ages - if you are an Elf, you can belong to the subraces of Wood Elf, Gray Elf, Dark Elf etc.
I think there are two separate things going on here too. The more obvious one is that the writer is a racist who wants to put their message forward through this product. For that reason alone, I think the product will be a commercial failure. The roleplaying community in general is very progressive politically, as RP groups have forever been a haven for the 'misfits' in high school.
The less obvious element of this race bit, in my opinion, is a push back against changes that are happening across D&D and Pathfinder today - that is to remove all stat-based advantages/disadvantages from races entirely, and to remove the idea of inherently evil races. The game is moving away from being able to use Orcs, Goblins etc as conveniently 'always evil' creatures, and is giving them the same complexity as humans. There are pros and cons to this - it can make the world more interesting and fleshed out while also avoiding parallels to real-world races creeping in, but it also makes it harder for the players (who sometimes just want to roll dice and hit stuff) to know what's OK to attack and what's not. I doubt that Star Frontiers will make much of a difference in this discussion though, as it's put forward its opinion in such a divisive and extreme fashion.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday September 18 2022, @10:55PM (1 child)
Who owns TSR and the rights is probably the main issue. It also seems that they (Wizards and HASBRO) didn't mind this whole thing until they did. Lapsed trademarks being reclaimed by various people and passed around like some kind of nostalgia token then Wizards coming back into the game and trying to regain control.
Did Gygax regret selling TSR? Considering the company was doing very poorly, even tho it was pulling in the millions, probably not. He probably regretted his company and his products being lost or being in the hands of others. But not the other aspect. The company after all manged to hobble along for another decade or so until Wizards came along and bought them out and saving it, more or less, from bankruptcy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tekk on Monday September 19 2022, @02:19AM
It wasn't lapsed though, that's the main thing Wizards is pointing out (god, do I hate admitting Wizards is in the *right* with a court case, but here we are.) Wizards has been selling pre-Wizards source books with the TSR branding on them for years online (for example, look here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/44/Wizards-of-the-Coast?filters=44827_0_0_0_0) [drivethrurpg.com] and apparently licensed the trademarks out to another company which released physical editions.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by helel on Monday September 19 2022, @03:59AM
This just isn't an issue. If your group is just in it for some tactical combat it doesn't matter what alignment the book says a character has, you can just fight them. If your GM wants to run a morally grey story where the orcs are real people with their own hopes and dreams... well plenty did that before, "always evil" be damned! The only thing this change does is (somewhat) move the authorial assumption away from "some racial groups are just born evil."
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday September 19 2022, @05:06PM
Thanks for the thoughtful post.