“You never had control, that’s the illusion!”

Basic Roleplaying in Jurassic Park – Running the Game Day One

In the last post (It can’t see us if we don’t move), I discussed the preparations, homebrewing, and map building that was needed to get ready to run a couple of TTRPG sessions set in the setting of Jurassic Park, after the park’s collapse, but before the events preceding Masrani Global’s development of Jurassic World. Now it’s time to see how it all worked out.

“…he suffers from a deplorable excess of personality”

A couple of weeks before we were due to play our game, I asked my players to create the concepts for their characters. While I could have pre-generated characters for them, I believe that the best thing to get players invested in their characters is to let them make the choices themselves. I don’t think that I’m alone in thinking this, though it does come with a risk – players love to screw with your game play interesting characters.

In aid of allowing the players that freedom, I limited what I told them about the game…

• I told them the game system would be Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing and that it was going to be a Jurassic Park game.
• I let them chose what style of game it would be; if you recall from last time, they chose the Castaway’s scenario.
• and I told them the game would be set in the mid 1990s (thus avoiding a few things like everyone having a mobile/sat phone or everyone having computer skills.

Thankfully, like me they’d all played in a BRP derivative game before so while they didn’t all arrive with complete characters, they had all got their character concepts well in hand by the time we sat down before the session and went through the BRP Character Creation system. Of the four characters my players designed, we got the following archetypes:

• “Player Z” played Maya an out-of-work Magician’s assistant, slight of build and used to concealing themselves in tight spaces, but with some good mechanical/repair skills from a life in stagecraft, just don’t ask where the previous employer; Mysterious Howdie Dewiit went.
• “Player L” went for a grizzled, jaded Control Systems Engineer called Eugene, heavy set and cynical, but also our only character with computer skills. If I didn’t know better I’d say it’s a Dennis Nedry self-insert!
• “Player T” decided to play an “interesting” character; creating a character possibly best described as ‘The Cartel’s Accountant‘. Ramón was tall, thin and wearing an ill fitting designer suit, the character also started handcuffed to the final character.
• Finally, “Player C” chose to play Rosco; the chewing tobacco enjoying US Marshall escorting the cartel member back to the states from the Galapagos islands, where he had been arrested. The only armed character carrying a pistol, with a deep-south religious bent, I was interested to see how this character might rationalise seeing the dinosaurs for the first time.

“But, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists!”

Speaking of seeing the dinosaurs for the first time, one of BRP’s systems, developed for Call of Cthulhu, is Sanity. I borrowed elements of this system to deal with the shock of coming across these animals out-of-time. The plan was that when a character undeniably sees a clade of de-extincted animals for the first time (e.g.: Theropods, Stegosaurs, Marine Reptiles etc), they would have to roll a sanity check. Should they fail, they’d have to roll a creature dependent dice to determine how much sanity they lose, and if anyone lost more than a quarter of their sanity then something bad might happen. Not hugely differnet to a CoC application of sanity, but as I wrote in my previous post, I wanted the dinosaurs to be animals, not theme-park monsters, so I felt that after one sanity check per clade, or for seeing something particularly unnatural, that was probably enough. What I didn’t count on was the religious US Marshall rationalising the island as some form of biological refugia, or garden of eden, though in the context of the character it did make sense.

“…you do plan to have dinosaurs on your dinosaur tour, right?”

And so, with characters created, location of arrival on Isla Nublar chosen, it was time to introduce the players to their game. Here’s the spiel that the players received, I then asked them what they were going to do next…

“It’s late 1990, you and your fellow players were on a flight from the Galapagos Islands to Costa Rica when your flight sufferred a double engine failure and your pilot was forced to attempt a water landing. That was three days ago, and you are the only survivors that you’re aware of. It is now shortly after dawn on the fourth day and your life raft has washed ashore on the beach of an unknown island.”

To their credit, the players took their predicament surprisingly seriously, with nobody bolting straight into the island’s forests, and nobody suggesting they split up and go their separate ways. The first forty minutes of the game was spent in a series of arguments between the Ramón and Rosco, with the former not wanting to be shackled to the US Marshall, and while he succeeded in the end in decoubling the pair, he still ended up with bound hands, though I suppose he was now able to run away if needed without having to be dragged about by Rosco.

The players then walked north along the beach until they reached a headland, seeing a set of three toed tracks moving back the way they had come along the way, these were rationalised by Ramón (who first saw them) as being some kind of large bird like a Rhea or Emu. From this headland, the players saw a dock in the distance to the north (this was Isla Nublar’s North Dock) and beyond that another coastal facility across a river (the soft canon “Marine Reptiles Facility from Jurassic Park the Game). Both of these locations would require a fair bit of making stuff up on the fly as they were two of the locations I hadn’t developed maps for ahead of time, but just as the party had accepted the randomness of their landing site, so I must accept the attendant costs!

The party spent about an hour exploring the North Docks, and while they didn’t come across any dinosaurs, there was plenty of intra-party activity. Ramón managed to find a pair of bolt cutters and remove his shackles, Eugene managed to work out that the phones would probably work if they could power them locally; while Maya found a pair of topographic maps (These were the props I mentioned in my previous post It can’t see us if we don’t move) which allowed the party to start speculating about not only which island they were on, but where on the island they were, and looking at some of the labels on the maps, what the island might be as well. They initially placed themselves firmly at the East dock, based on the description of them having seen the dock from a headland, a notion I was more than happy not to disabuse them of until they had had the chance to disprove it themselves.

As to what they thought the island might be at this point; the consensus seemed to be some kind of game preserve for the ultra-wealthy or a theme park of sorts, as it was clearly absurd that there would actually be any of the creatures labelled on the map here.

I had decided that the Marine Reptiles Facility was still under construction, in part to explain why it wasn’t on their map. The group arrived at a building cantilevered over the water, with all-glass frontage. On going cautiously inside they found something akin to a half-built airport lounge, with ticket counters on one wall, lifts and a spiral stair on the other (notably the cantilevered end), and an all-glass rear viewing area looking out over the water.

While this was going on, Maya had become genuinely concerned at the revelations, and was determinedly watching out through the windows at the front of the building, justifiably not trusting the jungle outside. Rosco went down the spiral staircase, and found what is perhaps best described as an aquarium tunnel, the sort of thick perspex construction you view sharks from inside a big tourist aquarium. On eventually looking out through the glass, Rosco made his first sanity roll on coming face to face with a Mososaur out in the open water. Like Maya before him he succeded on the roll, so was able to rationalise it away (I believe the words were “Meh, there’s big stuff in the ocean”) though I like to think it was a little unnerving when he started to retrace his steps only to be followed on the other side of the glass.

The party now had a fair bit more information about where they were, and what their situation was, and playing the game straight as they were, thinking in “survivor” mindset, they chose to return to the docks and hole up in the Harbourmaster’s office for the night, deciding it was likely the most defensible building. Perhaps I should have expected it given that my players had picked the type of game (a castaway scenario) and had been forewarned that there would be little in the way of weapons on the island; but my players were so hesitant to go inland that we had arrived at the end of the first game session without leaving the coast.

I decided I’d have to bring the dinosaurs to them.

Ben D B
31 October 2026