D&D publisher requests injunction against competitor, citing ‘blatantly racist and transphobic’ content

polygon.com:

Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has filed an injunction that could prevent the publication of content it calls “despicable” and “blatantly racist and transphobic.” The request, made before a federal judge in Seattle on Thursday, aims to immediately halt the production of Star Frontiers New Genesis, a reboot of the classic Star Frontierstabletop role-playing game first published in 1982. The target of the request for an injunction is TSR, an entity which Wizards bought in 1997.

The newly formulated TSR, Inc. is owned by budding game publisher Justin LaNasa. He claims residence in North Carolina, where he’s best known for a chain of tattoo parlors — and also for a failed political campaign that was torpedoed by, among other things, reports that he once asked several female employees to wrestle in a tub filled with warm grits. LaNasa had been promoting his reboot of the original Star Frontiers for more than a year without actually producing much content. Then, in July, what appears to have been an early playtest version of the game leaked out. It was so reprehensible, according to Wizards, that the company felt compelled to take action to protect its brand.

The 23-page request (embedded in full below) lays out its evidence against LaNasa, the vast majority of which he appears to have either written or edited himself. As part of its argument, Wizards includes excerpts of what it alleges to be an early draft of LaNasa’s manuscript for New Genesis. The document appears to include game features that position Black characters as mechanically inferior to other characters due to their perceived lower base intelligence scores and other “latent issues” with what the playtest refers to as a “Sub race” [sic]. The