"[Back then], TSR hated the Internet," Harrington speculates. "It made them nervous. Why were these people talking about TSR products and sending files back and forth on this network?" Like bolts of Eldritch lightning, cease-and-desist e-mails streaked out of TSR's citadel in Geneva, Wis., striking individual gamers and server administrators alike. One such e-mail claimed as TSR's intellectual property "elements of the gaming system, such as ARMOR CLASS, HIT DICE, and so forth" -- features already common to other RPG's.

Gygax, who in the mid-'80s left TSR, the company he founded, on the heels of internal conflicts that read like a treacherous palace coup, confirmed the gist of Harrington's charges: "The former management of TSR was, in my considered opinion, quite incompetent," he says in an e-mail. "Indeed they had a most aggressive enforcement policy in regards to their copyrights, and their fan base eroded considerably, in part because of alienation due to their strict enforcement."

By now, the melee between Internet culture and old corporate media is well known, and ongoing, be it studios and networks battling fan Web sites that use their material, or the unresolved strife the recording industry has over MP3 and Napster. Often, the fans prevail. But then, TSR's policies were among the first blows in that conflict, and some gamers took critical hits.

"I know some -- myself at the least -- threw in the towel at this point," concludes Harrington, "forswearing further purchase of TSR material." It's hard to escape the sense that TSR was, during that time, the Microsoft of RPGs. The artifacts of this era are still evident, in Internet postings that refer to the company as "T$R," or the witticism that the acronym for Tactical Studies Rules actually stands for They Sue Regularly.

Dancey himself identifies the company's litigious behavior as a cause for TSR's demise. After Wizards purchased the near-bankrupt company, Dancey writes me, he led a kind of siance over its hollowed corpse, to divine the cause of its death: "[We] began an extensive analysis of the old records of TSR ... to see if we could determine what had led the company to its eventual collapse ... [W]e eventually concluded that TSR had seriously damaged its relationship with its customers by breaking down the value of the player network -- we believe that the players didn't abandon the game, they abandoned the company."

Given TSR's history, then, it's not surprising that hardcore gamers are skeptical about Dancey's plans. Kevin Andrew Murphy, a writer of role-playing-game modules, worries: "[B]y the terms of the D20 contract, if I have the right to Web-publish my own adventure ... TSR has a right to clone that page, sand off my name, say it was written by 'Elminster,' and publish it on their own Web site."

Meanwhile, other gamers assert that Dancey's rhetoric is just a shameless PR move to associate D&D with open-source media hype. Rogers Cadenhead, onetime contributor to TSR's Dragon Magazine, groused on Usenet: "[Wizards] should just be honest ... and stop pretending it's 'open source' to capitalize on a hot buzzword." Another Usenet gamer with the handle 'Dracos' seethes, "This open sourcing of 3rd edition D&D just screams 'devious marketing scheme.'"

Open-ended, open-source RPGs like Steve Jackson's GURPS already exist, available to all. But Dancey traces his interest in the open-source movement to his pre-Wizards tenure at ISOMEDIA, where he created a mail-order business for game hobbyists. "ISOMEDIA had created an ISP in 1996," he says, "and the ISP was becoming heavily reliant on free software, notably Linux." This eventually led him to the open-source evangelism of Eric Raymond, whose essays, said Dancey, were "... a very good introduction to the theory of why the open-source movement was having success in a market heavily tilted in favor of large, closed, software development projects."

Co-creator of the popular card game Legends of the Five Rings and co-founder of the Five Rings Publishing Group, Dancey helped broker both Wizards' purchase of TSR and Five Rings. After post-merger management reshuffling led to Dancey's promotion to a Wizards' VP, he was in the ideal place to advocate the open-source ideas he had first learned at ISOMEDIA and apply them to the RPG market.

Not simply by way of public-relations hype, he insists, but by urgent necessity, to reseed a land left cursed by TSR's previous management: "As we geared up for the release of the third edition of D&D, scheduled for midsummer in 2000, we had to confront the fact that our active player base was severely disenfranchised ... Our fans have always been individuals who create content to share with each other, either through the exchange of ideas, or through play of the game."

And Gygax now enjoys a working relationship with his game's new owners. He's under contract to review and critique Wizards' development of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, and seems excited by the possibilities of D20: "The open-source idea is a great one for Wizards ... If the concept is embraced, it will certainly promote the D&D game system through support of the fantasy genre and expansion into other genres."

Recent Stories