The Fanzine in the Dorm Room

In June 1976, the entire published RPG industry was approximately two years old. Dungeons & Dragons had appeared in 1974. The concept of a “published adventure module” barely existed. There were no established conventions for how adventures should be structured, what a module should look like, or how a dungeon should be mapped.

Jennell Jaquays, then a college student at Spring Arbor College in Michigan, co-founded the Fantastic Dungeoning Society and began publishing The Dungeoneer—a fanzine she created, edited, wrote, and illustrated largely by herself. The first issue contained “F’Chelrak’s Tomb,” among the earliest published pre-made RPG scenarios anywhere. She was nineteen years old.

Within three years, she had produced Dark Tower and The Caverns of Thracia for Judges Guild—works that would be recognized as masterpieces decades later and analyzed as foundational texts by an entire school of design thought.

She entered the medium before it knew what it was. She helped it discover what it could be.

The Corridors That Loop

By the late 1970s, published adventure modules were trending toward linear design. Room leads to corridor leads to room. Encounter follows encounter in sequence. The dungeon is a gauntlet—the players start at one end and finish at the other. Early home-brew dungeon play had been more freeform, but commercial publication was standardizing the railroad.

Jaquays went the opposite direction.

Dark Tower (1979) features multiple entrances, looping paths, elevation changes, and secret connections between areas that let players approach challenges from multiple angles. Two opposing religious factions—followers of Mitra and followers of Set—inhabit the same space with their own agendas, territories, and relationships. The environment isn’t a sequence of rooms. It’s a living place with internal politics.

The Caverns of Thracia (1979) layers history into physical architecture. Lizardfolk built the original structures. Thanatos cultists occupied them next. Minotaurs moved in after that. Current inhabitants live among the ruins of three prior civilizations, and the dungeon’s physical layout—its collapsed passages, sealed doors, and hidden sub-levels—tells that story without a word of exposition.

Don Turnbull noted that Jaquays’ work came “closest in quality to the TSR standard” among Judges Guild products. John Rateliff described Dark Tower as a work that “raised the bar on dungeons.” Dungeon Magazine’s “30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time” (2004) ranked Dark Tower #21—the only non-TSR/Wizards of the Coast adventure on the list.

Judges Guild did not edit her work. “The author’s words went straight to typesetting.” This meant occasional production quality issues—typographical errors, map complexity that tested readability. But the design quality underneath was exceptional. The production problems were the publisher’s. The architecture was hers.

The Enchanted Wood

In 1981, Jaquays designed The Enchanted Wood for SPI’s DragonQuest system. She considered it possibly her best adventure design work—a judgment that tells you something about a designer who was secure enough to prefer an obscure module for a lesser-known system over the famous Judges Guild masterpieces.

The Enchanted Wood features six different starting points and twenty-one maps. The non-linear approach from Thracia and Dark Tower is refined here into something more deliberate—multiple intersecting threads that resolve into deeper mysteries, with encounters generated by what she called “strange combos”: unexpected element juxtapositions creating memorable moments. An iron axeman echoing the Tin Woodman. A realm of magic inspired by Piers Anthony’s Xanth.

She described her own method: combining elements that shouldn’t work together until they did. The result was encounters that felt surprising yet internally logical—the signature of a designer who trusted the creative process over formulaic construction.

The Mountain and the Frontier

Jaquays’ design range extended well beyond dungeons.

Griffin Mountain (1981), co-designed with Rudy Kraft and Greg Stafford for Chaosium’s RuneQuest, is one of the earliest published products explicitly designed as a wilderness sandbox supporting extended campaign play. It originated as Jaquays’ Adventures Beyond the Pass for Judges Guild, adapted for Chaosium when she moved to RuneQuest. Players on the Dragonsfoot forums report learning RuneQuest specifically to run it—a testament to the campaign architecture’s pull.

FR5: The Savage Frontier (1988) defined the North of Faerûn for the Forgotten Realms. Jaquays wrote, designed, and cartographed the entire sourcebook. Characters, mythology, and geography from her work became canonical Forgotten Realms history. Her sourcebook is specifically cited in the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide (2015) and Storm King’s Thunder (2016). The Savage Frontier has supported continuous Forgotten Realms play for over thirty-five years.

The Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide (1990), co-authored with William W. Connors, represents a different kind of design work entirely. Jaquays wrote Chapters 1–9—campaign creation, DMing techniques, the meta-design of how to run games. This material was originally drafted for the 2nd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide but cut for space. It’s Jaquays designing not an adventure but the framework for how to think about adventure design.

The Background Generator

Central Casting: Heroes of Legend (1988), Heroes for Tomorrow (1989), and Heroes Now! (1991) represent yet another facet of Jaquays’ design thinking. These were system-neutral character background generation tools—interconnected networks of random tables producing detailed life histories with narrative coherence, genre-differentiated across fantasy, science fiction, and modern settings.

Traveller (1977) had lifepath character generation eleven years earlier, but Central Casting was significantly more elaborate and narrative-focused. Where Traveller’s lifepath was mechanical—your character might die during creation—Jaquays’ approach was storytelling. The tables generated not just statistics but biography: family, upbringing, pivotal events, relationships, moral formation.

The series remained in demand for decades after going out of print, with used copies commanding premium prices. Jaquays was working on an updated edition at the time of her death. Her wife Rebecca Heineman has indicated intent to publish the revision.

The Name That Became a Verb

In July 2010, Justin Alexander published an essay on his blog The Alexandrian titled “Jaquaying the Dungeon.” It became one of the most influential RPG design essays of the OSR era—a formal codification of the non-linear design principles Jaquays had demonstrated three decades earlier.

The term entered common RPG design vocabulary. Alexander later renamed it “Xandering” at Jaquays’ request—she wanted her name spelled correctly with the “s,” and legal considerations led to a full rename for Alexander’s book So You Want to Be a Game Master (2023). The book devotes substantial space to her design principles.

Gabor Lux developed “Melan Diagrams”—a technique for visually mapping path connectivity in dungeon designs—explicitly using Jaquays’ work as the benchmark. Blog posts, YouTube videos, and design essays analyzing her dungeon layouts number in the hundreds. The OSR movement treats her maps as gold-standard exemplars, diagrammed and studied in forensic detail.

Goodman Games dedicated three volumes to her work in the Original Adventures Reincarnated series—Dark Tower (2024), Caverns of Thracia (2025), and the Judges Guild Deluxe Collector’s Edition Vol. 2: The Works of Jennell Jaquays. Necromancer Games published a Thracia 3.5 conversion in 2004. These are not nostalgia reprints. They are treatments of her work as foundational texts worthy of preservation and expansion.

This is an unusual form of influence. Most designers propagate through systems—other designers adopt their dice mechanics or character creation methods. Jaquays propagated through philosophy—other designers adopted her way of thinking about space.

The Dual Career

Jaquays spent roughly half her professional life in video games. She directed game design at Coleco (1981–1985), designed levels for Quake II and Quake III at id Software, contributed to Age of Empires III at Ensemble Studios, and worked at CCP Games. She co-founded The Guildhall at SMU, teaching game design at the university level.

This is not irrelevant to her tabletop legacy. The spatial design thinking that made Dark Tower extraordinary is the same thinking that made her Quake levels work. The skills transfer in both directions—and when she returned to tabletop via Olde Sküül and Dragongirl Studios in 2012, the decades of digital level design had refined her understanding of how players navigate three-dimensional space.

The split matters for assessment. She was always designing—but the medium alternated. The tabletop-specific output, while exceptional in quality, spans roughly twenty-three years of active work across a forty-seven-year career. The video game years sharpened the same spatial instincts that powered her tabletop masterpieces.

The Return and the Loss

In her final decade, Jaquays returned to tabletop. She co-founded Olde Sküül, Inc. (2012) with Rebecca Heineman. She contributed to Petty Gods (2013). She worked with Goodman Games on the Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia reprints—massive multi-volume productions that treated her 1979 adventures as texts worthy of archaeological-grade preservation.

She was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame in 2017—the industry’s highest honor. She was Guest of Honor at Origins that year. The Trans 100 recognized her in 2015. LGBTQ Nation named her among the Top 50 Transgender Americans in 2017.

Jennell Jaquays died on January 10, 2024, in Dallas, Texas, from complications of Guillain-Barré syndrome. She was sixty-seven. The New York Times published an obituary—unusual for a game designer. Tim Kask, founding Dragon Magazine editor, wrote: “This past week, we lost one of the brightest stars in the firmament.” The SFWA awarded her the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award posthumously. The community created Return to Perinthos, a memorial mega-dungeon evoking her design principles.

The Honest Assessment

Jaquays never designed a standalone RPG system. No dice mechanic bears her name. No resolution framework originates from her. This is the central tension of her profile: she is arguably the greatest adventure architect in RPG history, and the methodology evaluates system design.

The honest answer is that adventure architecture IS design. The non-linear dungeon philosophy, the faction-based ecology, the multi-entrance spatial structures—these are systematic design innovations even though they don’t produce a rulebook. They produce a way of building the spaces where rulebooks come alive.

Invention holds at 7. She refined non-linear design into a published, replicable philosophy at the exact moment the industry was standardizing linearity. She didn’t invent non-linear dungeons—Arneson’s Blackmoor had them, and she said so herself. She codified and demonstrated them in commercially published form that became the reference point for an entire school of design. Central Casting advanced lifepath character generation across three genre-differentiated volumes. These are refinements that became paradigms—not new mechanical systems, but new ways of thinking about game spaces and character creation.

Architecture holds at 7. Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia are exceptional—internally consistent, faction-driven, multi-layered, designed for long-term play. Multiple reprints and conversions across forty-five years demonstrate enduring quality. Goodman Games dedicated three volumes to her work. But she built within inherited frameworks—D&D, RuneQuest, DragonQuest. Her architecture is adventure architecture within other people’s engines. The quality is outstanding. The propagation is extensive. The scope is content, not systems.

Mastery holds at 8. Forty-seven years active. Clear craft evolution from intuitive fanzine design to deliberate multi-system work to meta-design thinking to video game level design and back to tabletop. Simultaneously artist and designer throughout—a combination that gave her unique control over spatial communication. Distinctive, recognizable design voice maintained across five decades. The video game career demonstrates the same spatial design thinking applied across platforms, and refined her understanding of how players navigate designed space.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Jennell Jaquays designed spaces that remember their own history.

Every stratum of Thracia tells you who lived there before. Every faction in Dark Tower has reasons for being where they are. The stuttering collapse of a ceiling isn’t random—it’s the scar of the civilization that built the level above. A sealed door isn’t a barrier—it’s a story about who sealed it and why.

Most designers tell stories through dialogue, plot hooks, and read-aloud text. Jaquays told stories through corridors. Through elevation changes. Through the political tensions of creatures who share walls but not allegiances. The map IS the narrative. The architecture IS the storytelling.

She never built an engine. She built the spaces those engines moved through. And those spaces outlasted every engine that ever powered them—rebuilt for RuneQuest, for D&D 3.5, for DCC, for 5E, the architecture surviving each translation because the design lives at the level of structure, not mechanics.

What Remains

A dungeon where every corridor connects to something unexpected. A desert frontier that became canonical geography for the world’s most popular RPG. Three volumes of character backgrounds that turn creation into storytelling. A design philosophy so distinctive that the community named it after her. A fanzine started in a college dorm room that led to the Academy Hall of Fame. An artist who drew her own maps and understood that the visual design of a space IS its game design.

She entered the hobby before it had rules for how to build adventures. She built the adventures that became the rules.

The maps outlast the systems. The philosophy outlasts the maps. The spaces she designed still teach designers how to make imaginary places feel real.

Total: 30 points. Year: 1976.

Total: 30 points. Year: 1976.

The maps outlast the systems. The philosophy outlasts the maps. The spaces she designed still teach designers how to make imaginary places feel real.