Jeff Dee

Jeff Dee (born May 15, 1961) is an American artist and game designer. Based in Austin, Texas, he is a recognized figure in the role-playing game community and game industry. His illustrative work shows comic book art form and influence.

In the late 1970s, while Dee was still a teenager, he and Jack Herman co-created Villains and Vigilantes, the first complete superhero role-playing game. The game was published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1979.:73 Dee and Herman convinced Scott Bizar to produce a second edition, which was published in 1982.:75 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.:104

Jeff Dee was the youngest artist in TSR history when he began his work 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.:77 In 2009, he co-founded Nemesis Games, developers of an MMO named Gargantua.

In addition to his artistic and game-related work, Dee is an outspoken atheist and transhumanist. He is 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.