Lorraine Williams

A bitch who thought she was better than us. Responsible for destroying TSR Games.

Fucking whore.

When she dies, all of /tg/ shall verily spit and piss on her grave; in fact, even her family will join in on the desecration of her remains, because she is a huge bitch (bluh bluh!)

How'd she get so much power anyways?

Kinda Gary Gygax's fault, mostly the Blume Brothers' fault. TSR was truckin' along in the early 80's, things were looking up enough that Gary hopped out to California to oversee licensing on the Dungeons & Dragons brand for the saturday morning cartoon, and drum up some support for producing a movie, and get away from running a company so he could write more books. There he met Flint Dille. Dille and Gygax wrote some choose-your-own-adventure books together.

Meanwhile, Gary left TSR in the hands of Kevin and Brian Blume, who mismanaged the place to the tune of $1.5 million in debt. When Gygax found out that the Blumes were looking for someone to buy out TSR so they could pay off the debts, Gary was "fuck that shit" and hopped the next plane to Lake Geneva.

After a look at the books, and how Blume & gang were running the place into the ground, he asked his writing buddy Flint Dille to help out. Well, Flint was more of a writer, but his sister was really business savvy and might want to invest. She said no, but she had plenty of experience in running a company, and could help her brother's buddy to get the business back on its feet.

Flint's sister was Lorraine Dille-Williams... who, it turns out, thought gamers were pathetic losers and D&D was anti-Christian.

Gary told the Blumes and their herp-derp buddies to take a hike. Blume & co. sold all their shares to Lorraine to make HER the majority shareholder instead of Gygax. Gary was all "wait, what?" and tried to void the sale, but it was too late. Lorraine was bwa-ha-ha-ing about how Gygax was a gamer, Gary was "fuck this shit, I don't have to work alongside this bitch," sold the rest of his stock and left TSR in 1985.

What was the damage?

• Lorraine went on to sue Gygax and publishers who tried to print Gygax's new role-playing stuff, making sure that Gary's career would be stopped at every turn.
• She removed any references to "Christian-hostile" ideas in sourcebooks (renaming devils to Baatezu among other things).
• D&D, the flagship product, had to be remade, thus was born 2nd Edition ... the most forgettable version of Dungeons & Dragons that could still be called D&D.
• She forbade TSR employees from playing games on company time. What the fucking fuck.
• She railroaded Buck Rogers stuff through TSR because her fortune was based on inheriting the license from her grandpaw.
• She saw the money that Wizard's was making for Magic: The Gathering and said TSR had to get a piece of that pie, so she pushed out a forgettable collectible card game and the Dragon Dice products... and made far more than the distributors could sell, causing millions of dollars in returns from distributors.
• Under her watch, TSR increased their novel publishing tenfold... which also undersold in record numbers and cost money to be sent back.
• In 1996, eleven years after she took over, she sold TSR to Wizards of the Coast.

Jesus wept.