https://www.kotaku.com.au/2024/01/jennel-jaquays-has-passed-away/
"Tabletop RPG illustrator and game designer Jennell Jaquays passed away at the
age of 67, her wife Rebecca Heineman has confirmed. Jaquays is best known for
her game design and illustration work on the
Dungeons & Dragons Dark Tower
and Caverns of Thracia modules, as well as her cover art for TSR’s 1993
Dragon
Mountain adventure.
Jaquays was born October 14, 1956 in Michigan, and had a prolific career across
TTRPGs and video games which began with the creation of the D&D fanzine
The
Dungeoneer while in university, one of the earliest RPG periodicals to be
published. She would go on to work for Judges Guild in the late 1970s as an
illustrator and adventure designer, where she worked on the standalone D&D
modules
Dark Tower and
Caverns of Thracia.
Dark Tower was the only
non-TSR published adventure listed in
Dungeon magazine’s 2004 list of the
thirty greatest D&D adventures of all time. Jaquays continued to work in a
freelance capacity for other tabletop publishers including
Call of Cthulhu
publisher Chaosium and Game Designers’ Workshop.
Jaquays moved into video game development in the 80s, working at Coleco where
she developed and designed home arcade conversions of well-known titles such as
Donkey Kong and
Pac-Man. She continued to be closely involved with the game
industry for the next few decades, working on concept and design work for
companies including Electronic Arts. Jaquays became a level designer in 1997 at
id Software during the development of the original
Quake game, before moving
to Ensemble Studios (
Age of Empires III, the
War Chiefs expansion, and
Halo Wars).
In 2012, Jacquays co-founded game developer and publisher Olde Sküül with
Heineman (her wife), Susan Manley, and Maurine Starkey, while also working on
her own RPG adventures and illustration work through Dragongirl Studios. She
was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame in
2017, and her adventures would go on to receive multiple nominations for the
H.G. Wells award."
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
