Lorraine Williams

Lorraine Dille Williams is an American businesswoman. She was hired as manager of TSR, Inc. by company co-founder Gary Gygax in 1984, and was in charge of the table game company from 1986 to 1997. Williams gained control of TSR in October 1985 when the Blume brothers sold her their controlling shares of the company. In 1996, an unexpectedly high cost of returned (unsold) fiction books and an expensive, unsuccessful foray into the collectible card game market caused a cash flow squeeze, and Williams sold TSR to Wizards of the Coast in 1997.

Williams inherited the rights to Buck Rogers and a large collection of Buck Rogers memorabilia. She sold the memorabilia at auction in 2010.

Early life Lorraine Williams is the granddaughter of John F. Dille who, while president of the National Newspaper Service syndicate in the 1920s, arranged for Buck Rogers to be turned into a syndicated comic strip. After Dille's death in 1957, ownership of Buck Rogers and other works passed into the Dille Family Trust through the Dille family trust, making Williams one of the beneficiaries of the Buck Rogers franchise. The Dille family retained the licensing of Buck Rogers, as well as a collection of Buck Rogers memorabilia that John F. Dille had accumulated over thirty years. Game designer, screenwriter, and novelist Flint Dille is her brother.

Williams attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a B.A. in history. After graduating, she worked at the National Newspaper Syndicate. She then became an assistant administrator at the Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center. Later, she joined the National Easter Seal Society, where she worked as an administrator.

TSR

Brought into TSR by Gary Gygax Gary Gygax, co-inventor of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and partner in the company TSR, had been sent to Hollywood in 1982 to work on licensing the Dungeons & Dragons brand, leaving fellow board members of TSR, Kevin and Brian Blume to run the day-to-day operations of the company. While in Hollywood, he was involved in the making of the Dungeons & Dragons animated television show and exploring the possibility of a Dungeons & Dragons film adaptation. During the course of his work, Gygax met Flint Dille, and they worked together on a series of gamebook-type novels and a script for an unmade Dungeons & Dragons film. In 1984, Gygax was alerted to the fact that TSR was in debt for $1.5 million and the Blumes were looking for a buyer. In an attempt to bring new investment money into the company, Gygax asked Flint Dille to arrange a meeting with his sister, Lorraine Williams.

Although Williams turned down Gygax's invitation to invest money in TSR, Gygax did hire her, on the basis of her management experience, to manage TSR. Williams successfully worked with creditors of TSR to get money coming back into the company again. both brothers then sold their stock to Williams, making her the majority shareholder. Former TSR employee Mike Breault has stated that he does not recall a rumored ban by Williams on playing games in the company during his time in TSR, but does go on to say that the vast majority of the products were not playtested.

Upon leaving TSR, Gygax had founded New Infinities Productions, Inc., and subsequently developed a new fantasy role-playing game, spanning multiple genres, called Dangerous Journeys. When the product was released by Game Designers' Workshop, Williams immediately sued, claiming that the game infringed upon intellectual property that TSR owned. With no product to sell, Gygax's new company was driven out of business.

Under Williams's direction, TSR initially maintained its leadership position in role-playing games, and expanded further into additional fields, including magazines, as well as paperback fiction, and even comic books. Williams held the rights personally to Buck Rogers through her family, and she encouraged TSR to publish games and novels based on the Buck Rogers license. In 1988 she edited Buck Rogers: The First 60 Years in the 25th Century. However, in the early 1990s, TSR fell behind both Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast in terms of sales volume. Seeing the profits being generated by Wizards of the Coast with their collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, TSR attempted to enter this market in 1994 in with Spellfire: Master the Magic (followed by Dragon Dice). In addition, despite a history of publishing only one or two hardcover novels each year, TSR also decided to publish twelve novels in 1996. In February 2019 the Dille Family Trust (DFT) entered into a Settlement Agreement with the Nowlan Family Trust selling the Trust's assets and assigning all their intellectual property rights to Buck Rogers to the Nowlan Family Trust; US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Civil Action NO 15-6231 case dismissed with prejudice on March 4, 2019.