"Jaquays Your Dungeon" - Another OSR Maxim

Be Cautious of Maxims

As I've written before, the "OSR" loved its maxims, short phrases that try to describe shared principles and act as a way of mutual recognition among OSR folks. At the same time ... these are maxims, and they don't really capture what they might, they aren't sufficient alone. Often, without deeper understanding and outside of their original context OSR maxims become dogma, undermining the goals and principles they are trying to capture.

An OSR maxim that I think needs a bit of explanation these days is:

“Jaquays your dungeon”
The phrase “Jaquaysing” comes from a 2010 post on the Alexandrian post (since renamed for perhaps ill-considered reasons), but that post itself is the result of a series of discussions on various old school forums. The idea itself is a reference of course to Jennell Jaquays, the highly influential adventure, dungeon (and 3D video game level) designer and fantasy artist.  Jaquays is likely most famous for “Caverns of Thracia”, a revolutionary 1979 dungeon adventure that asks the then novel question of “What would a dungeon look like if it was a real, archaeological ruin?”  The full implications of Jaquays’ design work are huge, and undoubtedly influences the way we perceive fantasy spaces today and games as a whole, but it is likely most consistently evident in digital games - especially shooters and “soulslikes”*.

One of Jaquays' Paintings
Used for Spell Jammer

In the context of OSR maxims “Jaquaysing” is usually reduced to a map design principle (or set of map design principles), which might actually be traceable back to the 1974 edition of D&D - though Jaquays’ work fully explored them in a way that even Gygax, whose excellent adventure designs seems to have largely been concerned with setting up infiltration/commando raid type scenarios rather than exploration, did not.  The Alexandrian’s post, and its source material were concerned with dungeon map layout and design - and focused on these elements of Jaquays’ work. This means that more than some other OSR maxims “Jaquaysing” or “Jaquays your dungeon” has been reduced even more than its full meaning could imply.  Rather than an exhortation to read and take lessons from the work of Jenell Jaquays, maxim today largely means:
“Dungeon maps shouldn’t be linear, you need to design them so the rooms are looping”

“Looping” here is the idea that a map should consist of “loops”, likely several … each a series of keyed areas with a lot of paths that connect them to each other, and usually circular paths, allowing the party to find themselves back where they started exploring.  This is contrasted with “linear” map design, where keyed locations lead down a single (or even branching path) from an entrance to a final climactic conflict, usually with a “dungeon boss”. The contention is that through looping paths and locations that don’t have a linear path through them, exploration of the dungeon will be required.