“It can’t see us if we don’t move”

Basic Roleplaying in Jurassic Park – Preparing the game

Introduction

I’m a longstanding fan of Jurassic Park (see my post from the release of Jurassic world; On Dreams Made Real), it’s one of a small number of TTRPG settings that I’d love to get the opportunity to be a player in at some point. Alas, as a not-entirely-willing “forever GM” with a group that only plays very rarely at the moment, when it came to organising a couple of days of gaming this year, I decided to run a game in the Jurassic Park setting. In truth it’s my second attempt at doing so, the first time around during COVID was a bit haphazard, being run online, with my players deciding to split the party; which didn’t end very well and after the first session we never returned to it.

This time around, we’d be running face-to-face, so I thought it was high time to put some effort into setting myself up for success and do some planning. This is the tale of what I did, what worked well, and what might need a bit more work.

Canonically speaking.

The first problem that one hits when planning a game in this setting is the question of canon. I’m a huge fan of Michael Crichton’s books, which puts the events of “The InGen Incident” as happening in August 1989, while the later films place the events some time in 1993 – in line with the release of the original Jurassic Park film but that’s only the start of the issues (as we’ll see).

One of my favourite things about the original two films / books is that they treat the dinosaurs as animals, not “Theme Park Monsters”. Sadly, from Jurassic Park 3 onwards though, the dinosaurs that act as the antagonists seem to almost entirely be some combination of genetically modified monsters and hybridised dinosaurs.

In an effort to avoid problems with canon as much as possible, I decided I’d run the game in the period between the events of “The InGen Incident” and the events of “Jurassic Park: The Lost World”.

What game to play?

Having constrained myself to the period between the first two films, I gave my players four choices of a game style to play that I thought would work in the time period I’d picked out;

Castaways on Isla Nublar – Set after the events of Jurassic Park, the island is abandoned to the Dinosaurs, Few weapons are available, but some of the infrastructure still works. The goal for the party is to escape the island.

Lost World Exploration – A mix between JP:TLW and Arhur Conan Doyle’s orginal Lost World, a well equipped group of naturalists or reporters exploring Isla Nublar or Isla Sorna. The goal for the party is exploration, perhaps cataloguing the dinosaurs.

Corporate Espionage – The players play as a group of BioSyn operatives trying to recover what they can from the collapsed Jurassic Park. This gives a more hack-and-slash option, with the goal for the party being recovery of the barbasol can, or finding and recovering other viable genetic materials/dinosaur eggs.

InGen Park Rescue – Set during the events of “The InGen Incident”, Hammond and the InGen corporation want the party to help recover the island’s systems and re-capture and contain the dinosaurs.

In the end, it was a slam-dunk 3-0 vote for the Castaways scenario, with one player happy to do whichever the other three picked. I’ll happily confess they picked the one I wanted, but I think with a bit of work any of these scenarios would make for a great one-shot, or even a campaign with enough forethought.

Now I had my game-style, and my setting, it was time to begin preparations.

“Man Creates Dinosaurs” – making (or re-making) dinosaurs in BRP.

My game system of choice for this game is Chaosium’s “Basic Roleplaying” or BRP. I picked it because I “grew up” in the hobby as a Call of Cthulhu/Runequest/Delta Green player primarily, so it is the system I’m most comfortable with and have run as a GM the most. As a Generic System BRP also uses the D100 dice system, that I’ve always found much more intuitive than the variety of D20, 2D20 or D6 systems, though I’m certain any system would work.

Dinosaurs, and their various stat blocks, ended up being quite an interesting problem. Basic Roleplaying’s Core Rulebook and Creature Manual only had stats for a “Brontosaurus” and a Tyrannosaurus, which left a slew of species to either find stat blocks for or design them myself.

Looking through the other BRP variants I own, I managed to find that in the first edition of RuneQuest, there was an Allosaur, a Velociraptor, a Stegosaur, a Hadrosaur and a Triceratops, alongside Hit Location Tables for them. The Design Mechanism’s “Monster Island” campaign guide for the Mythras system added a Pachycephalosaurus and a Heterodontosaurus to the mix. This gave me a great starting point, and so I began by using those as archetypes for the representative dinosaur groups (Therapoda, Sauropoda, Stegosauria, Ankylosauridae, Euornithopoda, Pachycephalosauria and Ceratopia) with a view to taking these starting statistics, and adjusting the skills and dice-rolls accordingly for different JP species.

It took quite a lot of fiddling, becasue different BRP games have different ethos’ for creatures and skills, but I got a full set of creatures eventually. In the end though, as we ended up playing more of a “hide and seek” campaign than one involving fighting the dinosaurs, a lot of it ended up not being necessary beyond having the dinosaurs’ tracking, sensing and special skills to hand for skill rolls. It was an exercise in home-brewing, and perhaps at some point I’ll have time to playtest the resulting mess of a spreadsheet (see below, yellow cells are drastic changes from the source versions!)…

“120 miles west of Costa Rica” – Would the canon Isla Nublar please stand up?

The next troublesome task was finding a good Map of Isla Nublar, and boy-oh boy was I not ready for how this was going to pan out.

It turns out that despite there being three films set on Isla Nublar (Jurassic Park, Jurassic world, and Fallen Kingdom) there is no generally accepted canon map of the island in 1989/1993, with completely divergent maps in the book compared to the different film maps. Below are just a few examples of maps of Isla Nublar that can be found around on the internet.

I think I spent the better part of a day surfing my way around the internet looking for something that approximated a complete Isla Nublar map representing everything that was on the island in 1989/1993. I didn’t find one that fit that bill (though SangheliosThel’s DeviantArt Map would have been perfect had I found it then!), but did find the wonderful Topographic map made by TomMakesMaps over on Etsy, so bit the bullet and purchased both his Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna maps (They are beautiful maps, printed on high quality paper, and made excellent handouts!).

I then started to put together a simplified map of major locations, including everything I could find referenced in the original book and the film. In order to have a few extra locations I also included locations from the soft canon “Jurassic Park: The Game” by Telltale Games, and a couple of other locations labelled on Tom’s Topographic map. This map would act as my GM’s map, rather than being full of the wonderful details on the topographic map the players had, this one helped me remember not only which locations where where and the tour and utility roads, but also which of the island’s inhabitants lived where on the island – assuming of course that they hadn’t escaped their enclosures. I also created a map to “randomise” where the party started, arriving at the helipad or airstrip wasn’t really an option for the “castaway” scenario, so instead my brother (unknowingly) took on the challenge of rolling the dice to decide their fate, and had I not already decided they would be arriving on a liferaft, would have landed them right in the middle of the Tyrannosaur Paddock!

“Confidential work product – Not for distribution” – on making Location Maps

While I was genuinely quite surprised that there was no canonised map of Isla Nublar, I wasn’t remotely shocked that there were no canon maps of the various locations themselves. As far as I know there was only ever a couple of production blueprints created by Lauren Polizzi when working on set of the original films, and a couple of others have surfaced in recent years and held by private individuals not willing to share, and so for many of the locations on Isla Nublar, I had some fairly free reign to make maps of the various locations to my own liking.

So I took myself over to one of the most under-rated graphics programs in existence (yes, Microsoft Powerpoint!) and started to build some maps of the various locations that might show up in our game, and ended up creating maps of eleven different locations:

Film Locations	Book Locations	“Original” Locations
Visitor’s Centre	Safari Lodge	Airstrip**
Maintenance Shed	Aviary / Pteratops Lodge	Geothermal Power Plant
Emergency Bunker	Lagoon Boathouse
Raptor Pen	A Generic Paddock Feeding Shed
Helipad**

I wanted to also create maps of the clifftop “Les Gigantes” restaurant from the book and the East and North Docks, but alas I ran out of time so they will have to wait. To make these maps feel a little bit more immersive, I took the decision to make them into in-universe blueprints, like the ones referenced in the Jurassic Park book chapter “Plans” and had them printed as A3 posters at DoxDirect so that I’d have yet more physical maps to give my players.

If you want to use these plans yourself, here’s a version that (I think) is copyright safe (i.e.: with the logos removed!).

Setting the scene

At this point, I had maps, I had dinosaurs, and I had a vague idea of where I wanted the party to go; arrive on the island on a liferaft as the only survivors following a plane crash three days prior, be forced to explore a bit to try and find a way to call for help and eventually escape the island.

I’d decided to let my players design their own characters, so the only thing left to prepare was some more immersion building tools. When I had last tried to run in a Jurassic Park setting, I’d built a simple soundboard using my streamdeck and sounds I’d downloaded from 101Soundboards.com containing the “important” dinosaur noises, primarily things like the roar of the T-Rex, the calls of the Raptors etc. mainly focused on the predators! this time though, I wanted to add a little more.

Since the last attempt I’d found the wonderful handbuilt soundscapes on the “Ecosystems of Jurassic Park” album put together by a youtuber called Fossil Box (Though I see at time of writing that the extended versions of his ambience tracks have all been delisted 😭– other YouTube Ambience tracks exist though if you go looking!) I decided to use these as a backing track to the game, and played these at a low volume throughout the course of the sessions I ran, in the hope that the soundscapes helped sell the immersion of being on the island. Whether or not it was a success will be something you’d have to ask my players, but the pseudo-random dinosaur calls, roars and other jungle noises in the ambiences definitely caused a few double takes and intakes of breath.

“Let’s get something straight John, This is not a weekend excursion…”

…Well as it turned out, a weekend was just about enough time to run the full game in two 5-6 hour sessions, but that’s a story for another day!

Ben D B
26 October 2026