Jennell Jaquays

Life

Jennell Jaquays was born on October 14, 1956, in Michigan. She graduated from Jackson County Western High School in 1974 and earned a bachelor's degree in fine art from Spring Arbor College in 1978. She was both an artist and a writer from the start, and she would work as both in two industries for nearly fifty years. Much of her early work was credited under a former name; later reprints and references credit her as Jennell Jaquays.

In December 2011 she publicly announced that she was a trans woman and a lesbian. She became an advocate for transgender rights, serving as creative director of the Transgender Human Rights Institute in Seattle, which supported a petition for "Leelah's Law" to ban conversion therapy for LGBT young people. She was married to the game developer Rebecca Heineman. Jaquays died on January 10, 2024, aged 67, from complications of Guillain–Barré syndrome.

Work

In 1976, while at college, Jaquays and friends founded The Dungeoneer, a fanzine of adventures and articles for the new hobby; her first published adventure, "F'Chelrak's Tomb," appeared in June 1976. The magazine led to work with Judges Guild, the Illinois company that was the first licensed publisher of D&D support material, and there in 1979 she produced two of the most admired adventures of the era. Dark Tower built its adventure around a sinister tower and the dungeons beneath it; Caverns of Thracia sprawled across a vast, multilevel cave complex beneath a ruined city. What distinguished them was their structure. Rather than a line of rooms, her dungeons were webs, with multiple entrances, loops, secret connections between levels and factions whose rivalries players could exploit. Players could get lost, circle back, choose their own route: the first sense, for many, of a dungeon as a real place.

She left Judges Guild in October 1979 and freelanced widely. For Chaosium she co-wrote, with Rudy Kraft and Greg Stafford, Griffin Mountain (1981), a huge wilderness sourcebook for RuneQuest set in a wilderness region of Glorantha and widely admired as one of the finest campaign books of its time. With Frank Mentzer she later revised his Aquaria tournament modules into the Egg of the Phoenix super-module for TSR. From 1988 to 1991 she worked on Central Casting, a celebrated series of books for generating character backgrounds, published by Task Force Games.

Her second career began in 1981, when she joined Coleco. There she developed and designed conversions of arcade games for the company's home systems, assembled one of the first art and design studios devoted to video game development, and rose to director of game design. In the 1990s she returned to tabletop work as an illustrator at TSR, Inc. from 1993 to 1997, briefly serving as its director of graphics. In March 1997 she joined id Software as a level designer, working on Quake II and Quake III Arena, where her instinct for looping, interconnected spaces translated directly into multiplayer arena design. From 2002 until the studio's closure in January 2009 she worked at Ensemble Studios in Dallas as an artist and designer on games including Age of Empires III and Halo Wars.

Legacy

Few designers have given their name to a technique. In 2010 the game-design writer Justin Alexander analyzed the maps of Caverns of Thracia and Dark Tower and coined "Jaquaying the dungeon" for the practice of building levels with multiple paths, loops and interconnections, so that players make real navigational choices. The term spread quickly through the Old-School Renaissance (OSR), where her 1970s adventures were rediscovered as models, and into video game level design, where her own later work had long exemplified the idea.

She was honored accordingly. The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2017, and in 2024 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association gave her its Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award posthumously. Her career, spanning fanzines, Judges Guild, Chaosium, TSR, Coleco and id, maps almost the whole history of fantasy gaming, and her openness about her own life made her a visible figure for the transgender community in games.