Jennell Jaquays, 67, fantasy game designer
Jennell Jaquays, who made luminous fantasy paintings, classic adventures for tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and distinctive levels in popular video games such as Quake II, died Jan. 10 in Dallas. She was 67.
Ms. Jaquays’ wife, Rebecca Heineman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Guillain-Barré syndrome.
During Ms. Jaquays’ lengthy career, gaming grew from a niche hobby into a cultural touchstone. But long before Dungeons & Dragons was adapted into hit video games such as Baldur’s Gate 3 and films such as “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” and before it served as a signifier of nerdiness on television shows including “Stranger Things,” “The Big Bang Theory,” and “The Simpsons,” devotees shared the adventures they created with other hobbyists.
Ms. Jaquays discovered Dungeons & Dragons, often abbreviated as D&D, shortly after it was released in the mid-1970s, when she was studying art in college.
In D&D, a group of players create characters who go on an adventure run by a dungeon master. The outcomes of attacks and other actions are often decided by rolling many-sided dice.
The rules and background lore can take up entire tomes. Art like Ms. Jaquays’s promises excitement belied by the dense text of a game guide, and makes it far easier for players to envision creatures such as Beholders (imagine a large, nasty, levitating meatball with a toothy maw, a colossal central eye, and many smaller eyes on swiveling stalks).
An artist can “show so much more in a 3-by-4-inch picture on a page than the designer can do in two pages of description,” Ms. Jaquays said in the documentary “Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons & Dragons” (2019).
Over nearly five decades, Ms. Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books, and magazines for D&D and other role-playing games.
Ms. Jaquays also crafted scenarios of her own. Two of her earliest D&D modules, “Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia,” are renowned for their pathbreaking designs.
Jennell Allyn Jaquays was born Oct. 14, 1956, in Michigan, and grew up in Spring Arbor, Michigan, and Indiana. Her father, William, sold mobile classrooms; her mother, Janet (Lake) Jaquays, worked for a credit union.
After graduating from high school in 1974, she studied art at Spring Arbor University. Her brother introduced her to D&D in 1975.
Ms. Jaquays eventually worked with gaming friends to produce The Dungeoneer, a fanzine of D&D content for which she secured permission from TSR, the company that published the game.
The Dungeoneer developed a following, and Ms. Jaquays, who earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1978 and needed a more secure profession, sold the magazine and worked as an artist and game designer.
Ms. Jaquays said in an interview posted on Medium in 2020 that she was in her mid-50s when she “finally accepted that I was transgender and that I could do something about it.”
She added, “It took two marriages and two divorces and my kids finally being established in their own lives for me to finally have the courage to confront my truth.”
Ms. Jaquays knew Heineman through gaming, and Heineman, a video game designer and advocate for transgender rights, helped Ms. Jaquays navigate her transition. Ms. Jaquays also became a transgender activist who served for a time as the creative director of the Transgender Human Rights Institute in Seattle.
Ms. Jaquays and Heineman married in 2013 and lived together in Heath, Texas. In addition to her wife, Ms. Jaquays leaves a son, Zach, a video 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 four grandchildren.