February 23, 2025: Introducing Jay Dragon As Lead Game Designer

Hi! My name's Jay, and as you probably know from the recent news, I've been brought on as lead game designer at Steve Jackson Games. It's a big fancy title (and a tremendous honor), but I imagine it's also a big surprise for some of you. Who does this girl think she is? Where did she come from? What's she going to do to my GURPS? So I wanted to talk a bit about my history of game design, what I'm bringing to Steve Jackson Games, and what I hope to accomplish in the future.

 

I got my start designing games when I was 14 at the Wayfinder Experience, a summer camp in the Hudson Valley famous for its LARPs and its star-studded alumni (including Brennan Lee Mulligan, Molly Ostertag, and others). I was a voracious LARP-writer, and it would be 5 years before I ever even touched a tabletop RPG. My focus during that time was on high-immersion games, horror, and using the game as a ritualized vessel for self-transfiguration. I got into tabletop RPGs completely sideways, through Ten Candles, Monsterhearts, and Dungeons & Dragons 4E (and this was after 5th edition came out!). In college I ended up running a lot of D&D 5E, but I often used it as a container for my own interests (as I think many people do). In college I also played a tremendous amount of online RP, specifically with a bespoke system my roommate and I made to model political intrigue. It was sprawling and complex, but it was my first foray into non-LARP game design.

 

In 2019, I dropped out of college and was couch-surfing around the Hudson Valley when I decided to take the jump into tabletop RPG design, as part of the Itch.io "explosion" of 2019-2020. I published Sleepaway, a queer horror RPG that made use of a deck of playing cards to model the monster (who you must never under any circumstances roleplay as). It was a modest success by my modest indie standards, and it pushed me to help with more Kickstarters and help get more games out into the world. It was also the first time I worked in a professional context with Ruby Lavin (aka. "Grubby"), who would go on to be my business partner and one of my dearest friends. 

 

Grubby is a genius with art and layout, and her mastery combined with my madness pushed us to crowdfund Wanderhome in 2020. An experiment in minimalism (and a cozy departure from my history of horror), the game tapped into the zeitgeist of the early pandemic and it seized hold of the imagination of a lot of people. Way more than we expected. It taught me a ton about Systems of Relation and the function of art in games. That work pushed me to co-create, with M Veselak, Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast, a sprawling maximalist pile of many smaller games that build together into the elaborate story of a Bed & Breakfast over the course of many years. When people picture my work, they often picture games like these – fluffy rules, comfy-cozy settings, and loose narratives. But It's not what brought me to Steve Jackson Games.

 

As work on Yazeba's wrapped up, I found myself longing for something . . . new. I was thinking a lot about the way the rules of a game outline a certain worldview, and they box and constrain the players into that worldview. Rules are a cage, but I freaking love that. So what happens if I go all in and make a game where the rules are all-encompassing and all-dominating but the fun part is trying to break out of the rules? This led me to write Seven-Part Pact, my extremely ambitious wizardgame TTRPG where each wizard plays their own board game and uses magic to try to bend the rules in their favor. It was Seven-Part Pact that caught Steve's eye, and through discussions and sessions of it, it's part of how I've found myself here. 

 

My background means I think about game mechanics differently than most TTRPG designers. To me, first and foremost, players are picking up a book and engaging with it like a toy. That means the mechanics themselves need to function as toy-objects that players manipulate, the same way you may handle a sword in a LARP. When rules construct (through simulation) the entire world, they teach us how the game-narrator sees the world, their biases, and their perspectives. We, as players, can lean into these biases or push against them, and in a well-designed game, any mode of engagement is worthwhile.

 

I can't speak to how I plan to help out with GURPS or other TTRPG systems (although you may hear more from me on that soon), but I can tell you my philosophy at its core: I seek rules that convey emotional meaning and poetry without sacrificing mechanical utility, that are complemented by beautiful artwork, and that give players the tools to express themselves and feel present in the worlds of the game. Time will tell how well I succeed, but I'm excited to get designin'!

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