Very sad to hear the passing of Jennell Jaquays – after a period of severe illness. She was a great contributor to the early D&D era and (as Paul Jaquays) did many new and original things at the early time in D&D’s history. I have hugely fond memories of playing through Caverns of Thracia while at high school! Aside from the Judges Guild publications Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia and The Book of Treasure Maps (in the late 1970’s) she created or worked on numerous other official TSR D&D publications including Egg of the Phoenix and Forgotten Realms: Wild Frontier in the 1980s; and returned again through the mid-1990’s as an illustrator I believe, to do her last work there before WOTC took over TSR…
Back in the very early days of 1976-1979 she also amateur published what is possibly the very first ever D&D adventures and almost certainly the very first fan’zine, dedicated to D&D… Not to be forgotten was her early work in the video game industry with being in the team that did Donkey Kong as one of her credits, and her other RPG work with Chaosium/Runequest, Task Force Games and similar. It’s fitting that in the D&D community there is a saying about a style of adventure design called ‘Jaquaying your Dungeon‘! RIP.
Here’s an abridged list of some of Jennell Jaquays’ work, these are the primarily written publications where she was the sole or majority author (or one of multiple equal contributors) but also includes reference to a small amount of her numerous illustration works as well (there is a lot more, especially for TSR and similar); it excludes her video game industry work:
- The Dungeoneer (D&D fanzine 1976–79)
- The Book of Treasure Maps (D&D Judges Guild 1979)
- The Caverns of Thracia (AD&D Judges Guild 1979)
- Dark Tower (AD&D Judges Guild 1980)
- The Unknown Gods (D&D Sourcebook Judges Guild 1980 co-author)
- Chaosium & Runequest works, incl. Griffin Mountain (1981)
- Various Flying Buffalo (Tunnels & Trolls) & GDW (Traveller) publications
- Talons of Night (D&D Module M5 1987)
- The Shattered Statue (AD&D/DragonQuest Module DQ1 1987)
- Egg of the Phoenix (AD&D Module I12 1987 with Frank Mentzer)
- Terror in Skytumble Tor (part of AD&D Module I13 1987)
- Castle Greyhawk (co-author, wrote Level 4, AD&D Module WG7 1988)
- The Savage Frontier (AD&D Forgotten Realms Module FR5 1988)
- Central Casting series for Task Force Games/Flying Buffalo (1988-1991)
- Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide (AD&D 2e sourcebook DMGR1 1990)
- Plus several others including some rules-generic role-playing publications
Addendum: It was subsequently pointed out to me in recent times Jennell herself had disliked the term ‘jaquaying your dungeon‘, and you can find a discussion of that at The Alexandrian (A Historical Note on Xandering) blog (see also the follow up A Second Historical Note on Xandering the Dungeon).