(27/41: 1979) JEFF DEE
The Argument
Two teenagers in Illinois, roughly thirty minutes south of Lake Geneva, got into an argument about whether Spider-Man or the Human Torch would win in a fight. The year was sometime around 1978. Jeff Dee and Jack Herman were comic book fans and RPG players, and their only available rulebook was Empire of the Petal Throne — Dee’s brother had taken everything else to college.
So they modified EPT for superhero combat. Dee would later describe the process: the 1–100 scale for normal human attribute scores wasn’t going to work for superheroes, so they started replacing all the parts.
They replaced all the parts. They sent the result to Fantasy Games Unlimited rather than TSR, because FGU had published Bunnies and Burrows — proof of willingness to take creative risks. In 1979, Villains & Vigilantes became the first complete, commercially successful superhero RPG. Dee was eighteen years old.
Role-playing games were five years old. The market was D&D-derived fantasy and Traveller-style sci-fi. Nobody was making games about capes. Dee and Herman proved it was possible, and within two years Champions arrived to prove it was profitable. V&V, Champions, and Superworld would form the “Big Three” of early superhero RPGs before the licensed games — Marvel Super Heroes, DC Heroes — arrived with corporate budgets and trademark muscle.
The argument about Spider-Man and the Human Torch created an entire genre.
The Youngest Artist
In that same period — roughly 1979 to the early 1980s — Dee was also the youngest artist in TSR history, hired at age eighteen. He illustrated Deities & Demigods, the Fiend Folio, the A-series slave modules, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, the Rogues Gallery, and dozens of other products. His Wikipedia page opens with art listed before game design. The ordering has shaped his legacy ever since.
Multiple interviewers have described discovering his design work only after knowing his illustration. The recognition gap persists: the TSR art is arguably more culturally embedded than any single game he designed.
This matters for scoring because it creates a perception problem, not a design problem. Dee’s game design career ran entirely through independent channels — FGU, Gamescience, UNIgames, Monkey House Games. At TSR, he was exclusively an illustrator. Every TSR credit is for art, never for mechanics. The two careers ran parallel, touching the same hobby from opposite sides of the page.
Forty-Six Years of Systems
Dee’s design catalog spans from 1979 to the present, across at least fourteen original designs. The range is extreme.
V&V 1st and 2nd editions (1979/1982, with Jack Herman) introduced random power generation, the “play yourself” mechanic — where the GM assessed each player’s real-life stats and layered random superpowers on top — and a combat matrix that cross-referenced attack types against defense types. The 2nd edition fit a complete superhero RPG into 47 pages. RPGnet gave it Style 4/5, Substance 4/5. Structural weaknesses were real: the Agility exploit let min-maxers stack extra actions per round, hit points were partly based on body weight, and the borrowed level-and-HP framework sat awkwardly in a superhero context. Groups ran it anyway for decades.
TWERPS (1987, with Talzhemir Mrr) gave characters one stat. The entire game fit in a zip-lock bag. Partly a joke, partly a genuine inquiry into how small an RPG can be. It sold well, spawned supplements, and seeded the minimalist movement.
Pocket Universe (~2000, with Talzhemir Mrr) answered the opposite question: how small can a complete RPG be? A compact 2d10 roll-under system that became the modular engine for Quicksilver, Teenage Demon Slayers, and eventually Béthorm. This is where Dee’s mathematical architecture matured — the bell curve replacing the flat d20, making skilled characters reliably skilled.
Living Legends (2005), originally titled “Advanced Villains and Vigilantes,” marked Dee’s first major move toward structured point-buy design — absorbing lessons from Champions while V&V’s rights remained legally entangled with FGU.
Cavemaster (2012, with Talzhemir Mrr) was the most radical departure. Players divide small stones between their fists in secret; the opponent picks one; whoever reveals more stones succeeds. No dice. No manufactured components. The Habilis stone-throwing system won the 2013 Three Castles RPG Design Award, beating Dungeon Crawl Classics and other strong competitors. DriveThruRPG reviews called it “nearly flawless.”
Béthorm: The Plane of Tékumel (2014) was a 262-page sourcebook built on the Pocket Universe engine — one of only a few game systems officially endorsed for M.A.R. Barker’s Tékumel setting. The system drew the assessment “unremarkable” from the Esoteric Order of Gamers. The setting coverage was the draw, not the mechanics.
Mighty Protectors / V&V 3.0 (2017, with Jack Herman) was the synthesis. Fixed the Agility exploit. Integrated random and point-based character creation. Added Power Levels. The Bamfsies awarded it 2nd place and a Judge’s Spotlight. The Kickstarter raised over $45,000. Purists found it lost the original’s rougher charm. Others called it the system V&V always should have been.
And throughout all of this, a parallel career in video games — artist on Ultima VI, art director on Ultima VII, work on Master of Orion and Master of Magic at Simtex, and lead game designer on The Sims: Castaway Stories (2008) at EA/Maxis. Game design was never Dee’s sole profession. It was always one superpower among several.
The Signature
Across every system Jeff Dee designed, armor absorbs damage. It never deflects. It never makes you harder to hit. This principle runs through V&V, Pocket Universe, Cavemaster, Béthorm, and Mighty Protectors. It is the clearest single thread in a 46-year design career, and it reveals the governing philosophy: rationalism over realism.
Dee doesn’t want mechanics that simulate physics. He wants mechanics that make logical sense within their genre. When one character swings a battleship at another, the armor the defender is wearing shouldn’t make it hard to be hit by a battleship. It should absorb the impact. The distinction sounds semantic. In practice, it produces systems that feel different from everything built on D&D’s armor class model.
The other consistent principles: roll-under mechanics (d20 in V&V, 2d10 in Pocket Universe), random character generation as a creative constraint rather than a failure of point-buy design, and an explicit hostility toward expensive entry barriers. Cavemaster was a deliberate reaction against big publishers pushing expensive boxed sets, special dice, and card packs.
The consistency is remarkable given the range. A designer who moves from a single-stat joke to a 262-page Tékumel sourcebook while maintaining the same philosophical commitments in both has a design voice. It’s not always the loudest voice in the room, but it’s recognizably his.
The Partnerships
Dee’s career is defined by two enduring creative partnerships that make attribution both straightforward and complicated.
Jack Herman has been his co-designer on every edition of V&V from 1979 to 2017. They met as teenagers in Illinois. Both have consistently presented themselves as equal co-creators — “the Two Amigos” — across interviews, legal filings, and marketing materials. Observable patterns suggest Dee handles art and significant system architecture while Herman contributes writing, adventure design, and content, but neither has claimed primacy. The FGU lawsuit (2010–2016) reinforced their unity: they filed jointly, won jointly, and settled jointly.
Talzhemir Mrr is Dee’s partner and co-founder of UNIgames. She co-designed TWERPS, Pocket Universe, Quicksilver, and contributed to Cavemaster and Béthorm. The specific division of labor is not publicly documented, though in Cavemaster, Dee authored the Habilis system while Talzhemir led the setting and anthropological research.
Dee’s clearly solo-authored or primarily-authored designs include Living Legends, the Pocket Universe system core, and Béthorm. These are the unfiltered expressions of his design philosophy. When the collaborative work and the solo work share the same principles — armor absorbs, rationalism over realism, roll-under, accessibility — the design voice is demonstrably his.
The Honest Assessment
Jeff Dee is a living person born May 15, 1961, in Illinois. All assessments here are drawn from published reviews, BoardGameGeek data, Kickstarter records, court documents, publisher websites, and interviews.
The FGU lawsuit (2010–2016) is a matter of public record. In January 2013, a magistrate judge ruled that Dee and Herman own all copyrights to V&V and that FGU’s trademark rights had been abandoned through non-use from 1999–2004. A January 2016 settlement gave Monkey House Games exclusive publishing rights while Scott Bizar retained the V&V trademark, licensed to MHG. The case established important precedent regarding creator rights in the RPG industry.
Commercial performance data is limited. V&V was described as “wildly successful” for its era, generating approximately 30 products over its FGU run. V&V 2.1 hit #1 on RPGNow’s Top 100 on its first day of release. Kickstarter campaigns across all projects raised approximately $112,000. No single title has approached $10M in lifetime retail revenue.
Dee’s video game career included work at Origin Systems, Simtex, and EA/Maxis, where he was lead game designer on The Sims: Castaway Stories (2008). Game design — tabletop or digital — has never been his sole profession. He has maintained parallel careers in illustration, video game development, and atheism advocacy.
The Scoring Case
Invention (7):
“People noticed.” Dee and Herman co-created the superhero RPG genre with V&V in 1979. The “play yourself” mechanic was the first commercial RPG to codify using your real identity as a character base. Random superpower generation predated and influenced TSR’s FASERIP system (1984). The Habilis stone system in Cavemaster was a genuinely radical resolution mechanic that won a design award. The attack-type vs. defense-type combat matrix foreshadowed interaction-based power modeling. TWERPS explored single-stat minimalism. Each innovation is meaningful. But the components that made V&V work had identifiable precedents — Empire of the Petal Throne’s framework, the broader dice-table RPG tradition — and adoption, while documented, was partial rather than wholesale. Meaningful innovation that opened new design space and shifted the conversation. That’s a 7.
Architecture (7):
“Built to last, built for itself.” The dual test. On quality: V&V 2nd edition’s 47-page economy is impressive. Mighty Protectors demonstrates real structural maturity — fixed known exploits, integrated multiple character creation paths, scaled beyond the original scope. Cavemaster is elegant within its scope. The Pocket Universe engine supported multiple settings. But structural weaknesses persist — the Agility exploit in V&V 2E, weight-based HP, the “unremarkable” assessment of Béthorm’s system. On propagation: the V&V ecosystem was robust — ~30 FGU products, Dragon Magazine content, Eclipse Comics, Bill Willingham’s adventures spawning the Elementals franchise. But nobody built their game on Dee’s mechanical foundations the way designers built on BRP or d20. The ecosystem was content, not architecture. Excellent within scope, didn’t become a template for other designers. That’s a 7.
Mastery (7):
“Skilled professional at top of game.” A 46-year career with ~14 designs showing clear craft evolution: from the enthusiastic chaos of V&V 1E through one-stat TWERPS and modular Pocket Universe to the radical Habilis system and the mature synthesis of Mighty Protectors. Identifiable design voice across every title. Three Castles Award. Recognizable approach refined over decades. But most major titles are co-designs with Herman or Talzhemir Mrr. Game design was never his sole profession. Output of ~14 designs doesn’t match the volume of a grandmaster. Quality varies from “nearly flawless” (Cavemaster) to “unremarkable” (Béthorm system). Real depth, recognizable craft, refined over time, tempered by collaboration and professional breadth. That’s a 7.
Adjustments (+6):
- ■ Longevity 20+: Yes. First publication 1979, still active 2025. +2.
- ■ Cross-genre: Yes. Superhero RPG (V&V), minimalist universal RPG (TWERPS), stone-age diceless RPG (Cavemaster), Tékumel setting RPG (Béthorm), board game (WarChest). +1.
- ■ Awards: Yes. Three Castles RPG Design Award 2013 (Cavemaster). Bamfsies 2nd place and Judge’s Spotlight 2017 (Mighty Protectors). +1.
- ■ Design propagation: Yes. FASERIP adopted random power generation. Icons acknowledged V&V as influence. Champions was designed as a response to V&V’s design space. Steve Perrin used V&V scenarios while playtesting Superworld. +2.
- ■ Full-time career: No. Parallel careers in illustration, video games, and advocacy.
- ■ Branded name: No. V&V is known within RPG circles but fails the grandmother test.
- ■ Commercial success: No. No single title approaching $10M in lifetime revenue.
The Hidden Pattern
Dee keeps coming back to the same question. Not Spider-Man vs. the Human Torch — he settled that in 1979. The question underneath all his designs: what is the minimum viable system that still produces the maximum genre fidelity?
TWERPS asks: one stat. Can you still play? Pocket Universe asks: compact 2d10 engine. Can you still run a full campaign? Cavemaster asks: stones in fists. Can you still make tactical decisions? Mighty Protectors asks: all the lessons of 38 years. Can you finally have balance and character?
Every game is a different answer to the same question. The question is about efficiency — specifically, the ratio of rules weight to genre experience. Dee doesn’t want you reading rules. He wants you playing a superhero hitting a villain, and the rules should make that feel exactly right while taking up exactly as little space as possible.
The art career isn’t separate from this. An illustrator knows that a single line can define a figure. Dee designs games the same way — looking for the single mechanic that defines the experience. Armor absorbs. Stones in fists. One stat. The line, the rule, and the drawing serve the same function: minimum ink, maximum recognition.
What Remains
An argument about Spider-Man and the Human Torch that became a genre. Fourteen designs across 46 years. Two creative partnerships that have survived longer than most marriages. A six-year lawsuit that established creator rights. The youngest artist in TSR history, drawing gods he didn’t design, while designing superheroes nobody drew better.
Dee co-founded two companies — UNIgames and Monkey House Games — and kept publishing through legal battles, career changes, and the industry’s long march from game shop shelves to PDF downloads and Kickstarter campaigns. Cavemaster won an award for proving that RPGs don’t need anything you can’t pick up off the ground. Mighty Protectors proved that a system can grow up without losing its identity.
The score is solid. Twenty-seven points for a designer whose best-known game co-created a genre, whose most original game won a design award, and whose consistent philosophy — rationalism over realism, minimum rules for maximum genre — threads through every system he’s touched.
Total: 27 points. Year: 1979.
Total: 27 points. Year: 1979.