Jennell Jaquays, who made luminous fantasy work, traditional adventures for tabletop role-playing video games like Dungeons & Dragons, and distinctive ranges in fashionable video video games like Quake II, died on Jan. 10 in Dallas. She was 67.
Ms. Jaquays’s spouse, Rebecca Heineman, stated she died in a hospital from issues of Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Throughout Ms. Jaquays’s prolonged profession, gaming grew from a distinct segment interest right into a cultural touchstone. However lengthy earlier than Dungeons & Dragons was tailored into hit video video games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and movies like “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves,” and earlier than it served as a signifier of nerdiness on tv reveals like “Stranger Issues,” “The Massive Bang Principle” and “The Simpsons,” devotees shared the adventures they created with different hobbyists.
Ms. Jaquays (pronounced “JAY-quays”) found Dungeons & Dragons, typically abbreviated as D&D, shortly after it was launched within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, when she was finding out artwork in faculty.
In D&D, a bunch of gamers create characters who go on an journey run by a dungeon grasp. The outcomes of assaults and different actions are sometimes determined by rolling many-sided cube.
The principles and background lore can take up whole tomes. Artwork like Ms. Jaquays’s guarantees pleasure belied by the dense textual content of a sport information, and makes it far simpler for gamers to ascertain creatures like Beholders (think about a big, nasty, levitating meatball with a toothy maw, a colossal central eye, and lots of smaller eyes on swiveling stalks).
An artist can “present a lot extra in a 3-by-4-inch image on a web page than the designer can do in two pages of description,” Ms. Jaquays stated within the documentary “Eye of the Beholder: The Artwork of Dungeons & Dragons” (2019).
Over almost 5 a long time, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D&D and different role-playing video games. In one among them, a purple dragon roars whereas perched in entrance of a snow-capped mountain; in one other, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a 3rd, two Ghostbusters put together to tangle with a discipline of animated jack-o’-lanterns.
Ms. Jaquays additionally crafted situations of her personal. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Darkish Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are famend for his or her pathbreaking designs.
Within the early days of D&D, many situations have been pretty linear — enter dungeon, defeat monsters and plunder, assuming your characters survive.
Ms. Jaquays’s adventures weren’t so easy. They typically contained a number of potential entrances and a number of avenues, a few of them secret, by which gamers might accomplish their objectives.
“The result’s a fantastically complicated and dynamic surroundings: You possibly can actually run dozens of teams via this module and each one among them could have a recent and distinctive expertise,” the sport designer Justin Alexander wrote about dungeons like Ms. Jaquays’s on his web site in 2010.
“Darkish Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia” are nonetheless out there, and nonetheless being performed, generations after Ms. Jaquays made them. Her identify has additionally change into a verb — “Jaquaysing the dungeon” means making a situation with myriad paths.
Within the early Eighties Ms. Jaquays went to work for Coleco, and he or she ultimately oversaw the groups that designed video games for the Coleco Imaginative and prescient, an early house online game console; one notable challenge was WarGames, an adaptation of the 1983 movie.
Lengthy after leaving Coleco, when video video games have been vastly extra refined, Ms. Jaquays designed ranges for the first-person shooters Quake II and III and the army technique sport Halo Wars. She additionally made The Warfare Chiefs, an enlargement pack that allow customers play as Native American cultures vying for energy in opposition to European civilizations in Age of Empires III.
Jennell Allyn Jaquays was born on Oct. 14, 1956, in Michigan, and grew up in Spring Arbor, Mich., and Indiana. Her father, William, offered cell school rooms; her mom, Janet (Lake) Jaquays, labored for a credit score union.
After graduating from highschool in 1974, she studied artwork at Spring Arbor College. Her brother launched her to D&D in 1975.
Ms. Jaquays ultimately labored with gaming pals to supply The Dungeoneer, a fanzine of D&D content material for which she secured permission from TSR, the corporate that printed the sport.
The Dungeoneer developed a following, and Ms. Jaquays, who earned a bachelor’s diploma in high quality arts in 1978 and wanted a safer occupation, offered the journal and labored as an artist and sport designer. She married Ruta Vaclavik within the late Nineteen Seventies.
Ms. Jaquays bought a job at Coleco a number of years later, however she was laid off within the mid-Eighties after a downturn within the online game trade. She spent years doing freelance artwork and design work for RPG publishers earlier than she started working for TSR full time within the Nineteen Nineties.
In 1997 Ms. Jaquays joined id Software program, the corporate that made groundbreaking first-person shooters like Doom and Quake.
However constructing video games with a small staff in what Ms. Jaquays described as a typically poisonous surroundings burned her out. She left id in 2002, the identical yr she divorced her first spouse. A later marriage additionally resulted in divorce.
Ms. Jaquays stated in an interview posted on Medium in 2020 that she was in her mid-50s when she “lastly accepted that I used to be transgender and that I might do one thing about it.”
She added, “It took two marriages and two divorces and my youngsters lastly being established in their very own lives for me to lastly have the braveness to confront my fact.”
Ms. Jaquays knew Ms. Heineman via gaming, and Ms. Heineman, a online game designer and advocate for transgender rights, helped Ms. Jaquays navigate her transition. Ms. Jaquays additionally grew to become a transgender activist who served for a time because the inventive director of the Transgender Human Rights Institute in Seattle.
Ms. Jaquays and Ms. Heineman married in 2013 and lived collectively in Heath, Texas. Along with her spouse, Ms. Jaquays is survived by a son, Zach, a online game designer with Bungie, and a daughter, Amanda Jaquays, from her first marriage; a brother, Bruce; a sister, Jolene Jaquays; three stepchildren, Maria, William and Cynthia Heineman; and 4 grandchildren.
After leaving id Ms. Jaquays labored full time for the online game studios CCP Video games and Ensemble Studios. She additionally helped create a grasp’s diploma program for online game design known as Guildhall at Southern Methodist College in Dallas.
In recent times Ms. Jaquays targeted on one large challenge: “Central Casting,” a set of elaborate back-story tables that allowed gamers to create character backgrounds by rolling cube.
She printed the primary of three “Central Casting” volumes in 1988, however it’s out of print. She was nearly achieved with “Central Casting” when she died, and Ms. Heineman stated she was decided to get it into gamers’ arms.
“I’m going to make sure that want is fulfilled,” she stated.
