Jeff Dee is an American artist and

game designer Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, in ...

. He was the youngest artist in the history of pioneering

role-playing game A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of player character, characters in a fictional Setting (narrative), setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within ...

company TSR when he began his work at the age of eighteen. He also designed the '' Villains and Vigilantes'' superhero game. He was a co-host on ''

The Atheist Experience "The Atheist Experience" is an American live, weekly televised webcast based in Austin, Texas. Listeners are encouraged to call in to discuss the existence of God and related topics. Calls from theists are usually given priority, as the aim o ...

'' and Non-Prophets atheism advocacy podcasts.

Biography

In the late 1970s, while Dee was still a teenager, he and Jack Herman created '' Villains and Vigilantes'', the first complete superhero role-playing game. The game was published by

Fantasy Games Unlimited Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU) is a publishing house for tabletop and role-playing games. The company has no in-house design teams and relies on submitted material from outside talent. History Founded in the summer of 1975 in Jericho, New York b ...

in 1979. Dee and Herman persuaded Scott Bizar to produce a second edition, which was published in 1982. Dee came up with the idea of creating a role-playing game based on cartoons when he,

Greg Costikyan Greg Costikyan (born July 22, 1959, in New York City), sometimes known under the pseudonym "Designer X", is an American game designer and science fiction writer. Costikyan's career spans nearly all extant genres of gaming, including: hex-based ...

, and other designers were discussing which genres had no role-playing game systems yet; although they agreed that it would be impossible for such a game to be designed, a few years later Costikyan designed ''

Toon Toon may refer to: Places * Tōon, Ehime, a Japanese city in Ehime Prefecture * Toon, the former name of Ferdows, a city in South Khorasan Province, Iran * Toon, Somaliland, a town in the Garoodi region People * Toon (name), a list of peop ...

'' as a full game with the assistance of Warren Spector. Dee was the youngest artist in TSR history when he began working for them at the age of eighteen. In 1997, with his partner 'Manda, Dee founded UNIgames, a publisher of role-playing,

board Board or Boards may refer to: Flat surface * Lumber, or other rigid material, milled or sawn flat ** Plank (wood) ** Cutting board ** Sounding board, of a musical instrument * Cardboard (paper product) * Paperboard * Fiberboard ** Hardboa ...

and

computer game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This feedbac ...

s. Dee designed a new superhero role-playing game originally titled ''Advanced Villains and Vigilantes'', which was ultimately published as ''Living Legends'' in 2005. In 2009, he co-founded Nemesis Games, developers of an MMO named ''Gargantua''.

Advocacy of atheism

In addition to his artistic and game-related work, Dee is an outspoken

atheist Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no ...

and transhumanist. He has been the host of a bi-weekly

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

podcast called ''The Non-Prophets'' and a former host of a live, weekly,

public-access television Public-access television is traditionally a form of non-commercial mass media where the general public can create content television programming which is narrowcast through cable television specialty channels. Public-access television was cre ...

program, ''

''.

References

External links

* *
A Jeff Dee art gallery
including most of his AD&D work
''What Worries Jeff Dee?''
Dee's blog {{DEFAULTSORT:Dee, Jeff American atheism activists American speculative fiction artists American transhumanists Atheist Community of Austin people Fantasy artists Game artists Living people Role-playing game artists Role-playing game designers Year of birth missing (living people)