Jeff Dee


Jeff Dee is an American artist and game designer. He was the youngest artist in the history of pioneering role-playing game 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 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 in 1979. Dee and Herman convinced 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, and several other designers were talking about genres for which game systems had not yet been designed; although they agreed that such a game would be impossible to design, a few years later Costikyan designed Toon 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 and computer games. Dee created a new superhero roleplaying game called Living Legends in 2005, although the project was originally titled Advanced Villains and Vigilantes. 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 and transhumanist. He has been the host of a bi-weekly Internet podcast called The Non-Prophets and a former host of a live, weekly, public-access television program, The Atheist Experience.