Lorraine Williams - in Control of TSR

In Control of TSR

Williams was a financial planner who saw the potential for transforming the debt-plagued company into a highly profitable one. However, she supposedly disdained gaming, viewing herself as superior to gamers. Williams is rumored to have implemented an internal policy under which playing games was forbidden at the company. However former TSR employee Mike Breault has stated that there was no such policy.

She also continued to try to thwart Gary Gygax's attempts to stay in the gaming industry. 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, believing that it infringed TSR's intellectual property. The suit was eventually settled out of court, with TSR buying the complete rights to the Dangerous Journeys system from New Infinities and then permanently shelving the entire project. With no product to sell, Gygax's new company was driven out of business.

Under Williams' direction, TSR initially maintained its leadership position in role-playing games, and solidified its expansion into other fields, such as magazines, paperback fiction, and comic books. Through her family, Williams personally held the rights to the Buck Rogers license and encouraged TSR to produce Buck Rogers games and novels. In 1988 she edited Buck Rogers: The First 60 Years in the 25th Century. TSR would also publish a Buck Rogers board game, a Buck Rogers XXVC role-playing game based on the AD&D 2nd Edition rules, several dozen expansion modules for the role-playing game, a line of novels and graphic novels, and a computer version of the role-playing game produced by SSI using their Gold Box game engine.