Community megadungeon honouring late D&D designer Jennell Jaquays seeks an expanded physical book
Proceeds from Return to Perinthos will first benefit Jaquays family to offset medical bills and funeral costs.
When storied tabletop designer and trans activist Jennell Jaquays passed away earlier this year, a group of independent RPG creators banded together to create a memorial megadungeon called Return to Perinthos, both to honour her contributions to the industry but also to help her family cover medical and funerary expenses.
The resulting project, which contains nearly 90 interconnected dungeon levels of all sizes and systems, will be printed as a physical book and sold in a limited batch to help Jaquays’ family eliminate the last chunk of the unfortunate expenses that the US medical system and funeral industry foists on individuals.
Return to Perinthos is designed to mirror another classic megadungeon from Jaquays’ own portfolio, Caverns of Thracia, and will be printed in a 200-page, wire-bound book with a fresh setting designed by Troika! and Mothership adventure designer Luke Gearing. A previously unpublished Q&A with Jaquays was donated by Tavis Allison and will be included in the book with the permission of Goodman Games.
Project coordinators have launched a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdfundr for the book, which will be licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. All of the dungeon rooms are intentionally disparate designs linked together by the whimsy or wit of whatever group decides to put it in their tabletop session. Contributors could use any RPG system they desired, resulting in an heirloom quilt-esque hodge podge of Old School Essentials, Cloud Empress, Cairn, World of Dungeons, into the Odd and several different Dungeons & Dragons editions.
Each room’s contents is just as eclectic and often directly reference Jaquays’ own tabletop RPG design for TSR, Chaosium and several other 3rd-party publishers. Fantasy theme parks might be connected to a Gamma World-style post-apocalypse, which leads into a room full of Pac-Mac ghosts, a crashed spaceship or the vault of a billionaire art collector. The artists could use any style the desired, which led to one of the rooms being an excellent and high-detailed cross-stitch dungeon map.
Return to Perinthos’ Crowdfundr campaign will run through February 26th and expects shipping to backers to begin around May of this year. A small print run will be sold through retailers afterwards, and all proceeds from that initiative will be donated to Trans Lifeline in honour of Jaquays’ work as an activist and legislative architect in the US’ trans community.