In my recent post about the passing of Jennell Jaquays, I mentioned how “Jaquaying the dungeon” had become fairly common parlance to refer to Jennell’s innovative dungeon design from the early 1980s. While researching/fact-checking that, I had found that Justin Alexander (who coined the term) had recently changed the term to “Xandering”. That new term sounded a bit weird and self-aggrandizing to me but the accompanying note seemed OK, if a bit vague about what Jennell actually wanted.

Now a pretty detailed essay called “Xandering is Slandering” has been making the rounds. It gathers a lot of evidence that doesn’t give Justin Alexander a good look (his response so far has been underwhelming). I’m not going to go into that whole thing, but I want to note that in the future I’ll be at least careful to keep the “S” in “Jaquaysing the dungeon”.

It was sad to wake up this morning with an update from Rebecca Heineman, Jennell Jaquays’ spouse and organizer of the GoFundMe campaign to finance her latest medical treatments, announcing that Jennell had passed away.

Jennell is of course a legendary roleplaying games designer and artist, whom various people will associate with various famous adventure modules such as Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia. Not being much of a D&D player, I mostly associate her with RuneQuest’s Griffin Mountain and Legendary Duck Tower & Other Tales. I was also looking forward to her current work revamping her old Central Casting books.

A few years ago I was also made aware of the term “Jaquaying the Dungeon“, which referred to emulating the non-linear aspects of the dungeons Jennell became famous for at the turn of the 1980s. I realized today that Justin Alexander went back and changed the term to “Xandering the Dungeon” a couple months ago, at Jennell’s request. The article that introduced this term has now been edited and renamed, and you can find the details and reasons of this renaming here… so, well, something to keep in mind.

ENWorld and DiceBreaker have some good eulogies, and we are already seeing a few new things pop up around the web, such as this interview with VintageRPG’s Stu Horvath (whose latest bit was included in Stu’s excellent RPG history encyclopedia book), or this transcript of a 2014 interview (“You may have been the first people to get Gregged” made me chuckle) on The Penultimate HârnPage blog.

Farewell Jennell.

Edit: a few more good eulogies have surfaced from Chaosium, of course, Steve Jackson Games, Gnome Stew, and Shannon Appelcline. Also note this important update, and check out the Jennell Jaquays Memorial Game Jam.