Lorraine Williams

Life

Lorraine Dille Williams was born into the Buck Rogers business. Her grandfather, John F. Dille, was president of the National Newspaper Service syndicate in the 1920s and arranged for Philip Francis Nowlan's spaceman to become a syndicated comic strip. After his death in 1957, the rights and a large collection of memorabilia went to the Dille Family Trust, of which Williams was a beneficiary. Her brother is the screenwriter, novelist and game designer Flint Dille. Her birth date is not on the public record.

She earned a BA in history at the University of California, Berkeley, worked at the family syndicate, and then built a career in health-care administration. She was an assistant administrator at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago and later an administrator at the National Easter Seal Society. None of this involved games, and the gap became part of her reputation.

Work

By the mid-1980s TSR, Inc. was in serious trouble. Sales of core rulebooks had peaked in 1983, the company had expanded as if they would keep growing, and its debts had reached more than $1.5 million. Gary Gygax, back from Hollywood, had forced out the Blume brothers who ran the company, but he needed money. His Hollywood collaborator Flint Dille suggested his sister. Williams declined to invest but joined TSR as general manager, and began working with creditors to bring cash back in.

She and Gygax soon clashed. The Blumes, out of power and wanting to sell, offered their shares to Gygax. He refused, and they sold them to Williams, who bought a few more and became majority shareholder. On October 22, 1985, she used that stake to remove Gygax as president and CEO. He sued to overturn the sale, lost, sold his remaining shares and left the company he had co-founded. The bitterness lasted. When Gygax's new game Dangerous Journeys appeared, TSR sued; the settlement had TSR buying the system and shelving it.

Williams ran TSR for more than a decade, and those years were among its most prolific. The Forgotten Realms launched in 1987, AD&D second edition in 1989, and then a run of campaign settings: Spelljammer, Ravenloft (1990), Dark Sun (1991), Al-Qadim, Planescape (1994) and Birthright. The book division became a profit engine: R. A. Salvatore's Drizzt novels, beginning with The Crystal Shard (1988), reached bestseller lists, and his hardcover The Legacy (1992) reached number 9 on the New York Times list. She also pushed the family's property. TSR published a Buck Rogers XXVC roleplaying game based on AD&D rules, board games, comics and novels, and paid royalties to her family's trust. These products did not succeed commercially.

The collapse had many causes. Too many settings split the audience; Wizards staff who later examined TSR's books concluded that many setting products could never have been profitable. Relations with star authors soured: Weis and Hickman had left in the 1980s, and Salvatore fought TSR over terms in 1994–95. When Magic: The Gathering took the hobby by storm, TSR answered with the collectible card game Spellfire (1994) and the collectible Dragon Dice (1995). In 1996 it published twelve hardcover novels, up from its usual one or two. Then Random House returned huge quantities of unsold novels and Dragon Dice and charged fees in the millions. TSR could not pay the logistics company that handled its printing and held the plates for the core D&D books. With no plan for survival, Williams sold the company in 1997 to Wizards of the Coast, led by Peter Adkison, in a deal brokered by Five Rings Publishing Group.

Legacy

Williams has often been cast as the villain of the TSR story: the non-gamer who ousted the founder and ran the company into the ground. Gygax claimed she looked down on gamers, and her readiness to threaten lawsuits made enemies of potential allies in the hobby. Later accounts are more balanced. TSR editor John D. Rateliff said that everyone he knew who worked under both Gygax and the Blumes and then under Williams preferred working under her. Jeff Grubb said she "pretty much saved the company," which he described as weeks from collapse when she took over. Historians such as Ben Riggs have reexamined her record using TSR's own documents.

Both views fit the facts. Under Williams, TSR published much of the work that later generations treat as D&D's canon, and under Williams it failed. After the sale she returned to the family's Buck Rogers interests, auctioning the Dille collection in 2010 and funding the trust's later trademark fight over the character.