Jennell Jaquays

Early life and education Jaquays was born on October 14, 1956, in Michigan and grew up in Michigan and Indiana. Jaquays graduated from Michigan's Jackson County Western High School in 1974 and Spring Arbor College in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art.

Career

The Dungeoneer and fantasy roleplaying While still at college, Jaquays became interested in science-fiction and fantasy gaming and the nascent role-playing game industry through the pages of The Space Gamer which her brother had shared with her. Jaquays began playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1975 and created the Fantastic Dungeoning Society (FDS) with several college friends including Mark Hendricks. One of their projects was to publish a fanzine that would include adventures that other gamemasters could use. Tim Kask from TSR granted Jaquays a casual license to publish this amateur fanzine, and The Dungeoneer became one of the earliest periodicals for role-playing games.

In addition to these "honest efforts at quality contents to interest readers," Jaquays began submitting artwork to TSR in 1976. Jaquays's work appeared in the premiere issue of The Dragon, and later contributions included the cover of issue #21.

Judges Guild, later independent role-playing projects, and TSR Jaquays was preparing for graduation by late 1977 which meant spending more time working in the art studio, so FDS sold The Dungeoneer to Chuck Anshell of Anshell Miniatures. it became one of Judges Guild's two gaming periodicals. Jaquays also began working at Judges Guild in October 1978, spending a year there as an illustrator and designer for adventures, Jaquays worked on two stand-alone D&D modules for Dungeons & Dragons, Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia, which were completed before she left the company in October 1979. She provided a variety of content on a freelance basis thereafter, particularly to The Dungeoneer. Jaquays and Rudy Kraft authored Adventures Beyond the Pass for Judges Guild, who never published it; instead Greg Stafford published it through Chaosium as the adventure Griffin Mountain (1981). A number of these became the basis for starship models from Ad Astra Games and the deckplans found in Mongoose Traveller Supplement 3 - Fighting Ships.

From 1986 to 1993, she did freelance work while running a design studio. Jaquays worked on a series of supplements focusing on character creation called Central Casting (1988–1991) to be published by Flying Buffalo, although they were instead published by Task Force Games. which was then collected and reprinted by Goodman Games in 2022.

Freelance artwork In addition to many gaming artwork contributions (including artwork spread over two decades for TSR's first-line periodicals, Dragon and Dungeon), she worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for the Jackson Citizen Patriot in 1980. During the late 1980s, Jaquays was a regular interior artist for Amazing Stories, and contributed one cover for that publication.

Video game industry Michael A. Stackpole worked for Coleco from 1980 to 1981, and was able to help his friend and fellow role-playing game designer Jaquays get hired at Coleco as well. During a freelance design studio period in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she continued to be involved in the video game industry, with concept and design work for Epyx, Interplay Entertainment, and Electronic Arts. In 2003 Jaquays co-founded The Guildhall at SMU, a video game education program, located at the Plano campus of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. Jaquays worked as an advisor to The Guildhall program.

Activism As creative director for the Transgender Human Rights Institute in Seattle, Jennell Jaquays was involved in the petition to create "Leelah's Law," outlawing conversion therapy of LGBT youth. In response to the petition, President Barack Obama called for the banning of conversion therapy for minors in April 2015.

Legacy The New York Times noted that "two of her earliest D&D modules, Dark Tower and The Caverns of Thracia, are renowned for their pathbreaking designs". Many contemporary modules had linear designed dungeons while Jaquays's adventure modules "often contained several possible entrances and multiple avenues, some of them secret, by which players could accomplish their goals". Roast wrote:Analysis of her writing and design of megadungeon-like spaces has been particularly prominent in online discussion of the experience of dungeoneering, as her dungeons are thought to have pioneered principles which produce a particularly satisfying and engaging space to navigate. [...] These spaces are thus frustrating and difficult to navigate, but also present the PCs with a wide range of resources which can be combined and exploited in novel ways, including those which may not have been anticipated or imagined by the designer themselves. [...] Jaquays dungeons are also characterised by incorporating extra-dimensional or nested spaces within 'normal' dungeons. Such designs make the spatial practice of dungeoneering more dynamic and interesting than a series of simple choices by creating a more complex and variable landscape within the overall infrastructure of play provided by the megadungeon. her name has "become a verb – 'Jaquaysing (Originally coined by Justin Alexander in 2010 as "Jaquaying".) Jaquays announced in December 2011 that she was a lesbian and trans woman. She resided in Seattle, Washington, with her wife Rebecca Heineman.

Jaquays died from complications of Guillain–Barré syndrome at a hospital in Dallas on January 10, 2024, at the age of 67. A memorial project titled Return to Perinthos , organized by the Jennell Jaquays Memorial Game Jam, launched that month to raise funds for Jaquays's family and the Trans Lifeline. Return to Perinthos is a mega-dungeon that a gamemaster can "slot into most fantasy or adjacent tabletop RPG campaigns" and evokes "the layout and style of classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure Caverns of Thracia, which Jaquays authored".

Awards and honors Dark Tower Jaquays's Dark Tower was nominated for the 1979 H.G. Wells award for Best Roleplaying Adventure. In November 2004, as part of the 30th anniversary celebration for Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeon magazine produced a list of the "thirty greatest D&D Adventures of All Time." Dark Tower was the only entry on the list not published by TSR.

Griffin Mountain Jaquays was co-author and illustrator for Chaosium's Griffin Mountain RuneQuest scenario. Set in Glorantha, this highly praised scenario was nominated for the 1981 H.G. Wells award. The reworked version, Griffin Island, was nominated for the same award in 1986.

Activism In 2015, Jaquays was a "Trans 100 2015" Honoree. In 2017, Jaquays was honored as one of the "Top 50 Transgender Americans You Should Know" by LGBTQ Nation.

Other recognition Jaquays's contributions to the early video game industry are recognized in the collectible trading card series "Walter Day's Superstars of 2015", where Jaquays is featured on Card #2036, which notes that she was one of the women interviewed for the documentary film "No Princess in the Castle." In 2017, the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design inducted Jaquays into their Hall of Fame, and she was an Origins Game Fair Guest of Honor. Jaquays was posthumously awarded the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award at the 2024 Nebula Awards.

Works

Partial bibliography of works in print

The Dungeoneer (D&D fanzine) (editor 1976–77; contributor 1976–79) Dark Tower (AD&D Scenario – Judges Guild:88) (1980; revised 2001, 2007) The Caverns of Thracia (D&D Scenario – Judges Guild:102) (1979; revised 2004) Legendary Duck Tower and Other Tales (Runequest Scenario – Judges Guild:220) (1980) (with Rudy Kraft) The Unknown Gods (D&D Sourcebook – Judges Guild:420) (1980) (co-author) Griffin Mountain (Runequest Campaign Setting) (1981; revised and expanded 1986 as Griffin Island) (with Rudy Kraft and Greg Stafford) Cults of Terror (Runequest Sourcebook) (1981) (co-author) The Enchanted Wood (DragonQuest Module) (1981) Talons of Night (D&D Module:M5) (1987) The Shattered Statue (AD&D/DragonQuest Module:DQ1) (1987) Egg of the Phoenix (AD&D Module:I12) (1987) (with Frank Mentzer) Terror in Skytumble Tor (part of AD&D Module: I13) (1987) Castle Greyhawk (AD&D Module:WG7) (1988) (credited as one of the co-authors; wrote Level 4) The Savage Frontier (AD&D Module:FR5) (1988) Central Casting: Heroes of Legend (Generic Sourcebook) (1988) Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide (AD&D 2nd edition sourcebook:DMGR1) (1990) Citybook VI – Uptown (1992) (co-author) Shadows on the Borderland (Runequest Adventure) (1993) (co-author) Country Sites (1995) (cover artist)

Partial list of video game credits Title Released System name Role Donkey Kong July 1982 ColecoVision Project leader, design, and graphics conversion Omega Race 1983 ColecoVision Project leader, design, and graphics conversion WarGames 1984 ColecoVision Project leader, gameplay co-designer 4x4 Off-Road Racing 1988 Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga, DOS, Commodore 64, MSX, ZX Spectrum Game design The Bard's Tale IV 1991–1992 (unpublished) Rewrite and integration Quake II December 9, 1997 Amiga (68k), AmigaOS 4 (PowerPC), Nintendo 64, Macintosh, BeOS, Linux, Windows, PlayStation, Zeebo Designer and level designer Quake III Arena December 2, 1999 Linux, Microsoft Windows, IRIX, Mac OS, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox Live Arcade Designer and level designer Quake III: Team Arena December 2000 Designer and level designer Age of Empires III October 18, 2005 Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Windows Mobile, N-Gage Artist Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs March 7, 2006 Windows, Mac OS X Artist Halo Wars February 26, 2009 Xbox 360 Artist and level designer