Part 1 of a new series by @Nickoten on the history and impact of Jennell Jacquays for modern dungeon design.
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This was a great read, looking forward to part 2!
Someone pointed out that Jennell Jaquays’ name doesn’t have a c in it and for the first time in my life I understood the Berestain/Bernstein bears phenomenon.
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Tagging @Nickoten just in case they don’t know and want to amend the title.
Sigh. I misspelled her name in a different way a bunch of times in the Bsky thread too. Just fixed it, thanks for bringing it to my attention!
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It would be interesting to see some attention paid to Jennell’s earlier dungeons. Night of the Walking Wet is one of my favorite dungeons that she wrote or at least had a hand in writing but it’s not one that gets much discussion.
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One could also look at Jaquays’ video game work, particularly her map design in Quake games. Jaquays did the Palace levels in Quake 2 and there’s some great ideas that apply to TTRPGs in there. I like how when you approach the palace gate you’re elevated, you can see the spires in the distance behind this massive fortified door with big fascist-looking banners, it’s well-lit and obviously the way forward but you can’t go through it yet. There’s all these elevation features in the area in front of it to climb and explore and all the paths from that area, other than that big main gate, are either secret switch doors or completely shadowed tunnels. Jaquays draws your attention to the tunnels by having the enemies emerge from them as you enter the area from a higher elevation. All those tunnels and the secret door loop back into that canyon, which is really easy to reorient yourself from because of the ginormous main entrance feature, so the element of exploration is there but if you’re paying reasonable amounts of attention you won’t re-tread ground unintentionally. That ability to reorient yourself is really key in old FPS games when a lot of texture has to be reused to save framerate, but it really applies to the sort of low-res nature of using theatre of the mind or a vinyl battlemat for TTRPGs.
I wish I could find the map layouts for her levels to point stuff out easier but my Google-fu is failing me.
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Part 2 is out:
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It’s sad that we can’t get the original version as a PDF due to the situation with Judge’s Guild. And even if you’re okay ethically with getting the new Goodman Games edition, it’s a deluxe £50 hardback.