Jaquays unlocked fantasy dungeons for gamers
Jennell Jaquays, who made luminous fantasy paintings, classic adventures for tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and distinctive levels in popular video games including Quake II, died Jan. 10 in Dallas. She was 67.
Jaquays’ wife, Rebecca Heineman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Guillain- Barré syndrome.
During 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.
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 often are decided by rolling many- sided dice.
The rules and background lore can take up entire tomes. Art such as Jaquays’ 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- by4- inch picture on a page than the designer can do in two pages of description,” Jaquays said in the
documentary “Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons & Dragons” ( 2019).
Over nearly five decades, Jaquays illustrated the covers and interiors of settings, modules, books and magazines for D& D and other role- playing games. In one of them, a red dragon roars while perched in front of a snow- capped mountain; in another, a nautiluslike spaceship floats above an alien world; in a third, two Ghostbusters prepare to tangle with a field of animated jack- o’- lanterns.
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.
In the early days of D& D, many scenarios were fairly linear — enter dungeon, defeat monsters and then plunder, assuming your characters survive. Jaquays’ adventures were not so straightforward. They often contained several possible entrances and multiple avenues, some of them secret, by which players could accomplish their goals.
“The result is a fantastically complex and dynamic
environment: You can literally run dozens of groups through this module and every one of them will have a fresh and unique experience,” game designer Justin Alexander wrote about dungeons such as Jaquays’ on his website in 2010.
“Dark Tower” and “The Caverns of Thracia” are still available, and still being played, generations after Jaquays made them. Her name has also become a verb — “Jaquaysing the dungeon” means creating a scenario with myriad paths.
In the early 1980s Jaquays went to work for Coleco, and she eventually oversaw the teams that designed games for the Coleco Vision, an early home video game console; one notable project was Wargames, an adaptation of the 1983 film.
Long after leaving Coleco, when video games were vastly more sophisticated, Jaquays designed levels for Quake II and III and the military strategy game Halo Wars. She also made The War Chiefs, an expansion pack that let users play as Native American cultures vying for power against European civilizations in Age of Empires III.