Basic Roleplaying in Jurassic Park – Running the Game Day Two
In the last post (You never had control…), I discussed the first of my TTRPG sessions set in the setting of Jurassic Park, after the park’s collapse. I talked about using the sanity mechanic, and told the tale of the party’s arrival on the island and initial explorations along the coasts near Isla Nublar’s North Dock. Where we left off, the players were fortifying themselves in the North Dock Harbourmaster’s office, and I had decided I needed to bring the Dinosaurs to my players.
The Stalking Shadow.
When everyone reconvened the next day, I glossed over the fortification of the Harbourmaster’s office, as we’d already spent a few hours in-game but still hadn’t moved near the park’s perimeter fence, let alone the interior of the island. The long and the short of it was that they put some breeze-blocks around the wrap around windows and pushed a cabinet over the door for the night. Importantly the group left a small opening in one window so they could safely have a small fire. There was a short discussion about whether or not the party would hold watches through the night, and eventually it was decided they would. Nothing much happened during the first three watches of the night (that’s dice-rolls for you) but in the third, I got the opportunity to make things interesting.
In Michael Crichton’s follow up novel “The Lost World” one of the creatures that plays quite a heavy role is the Carnotaurus, because it has inherited a chromatophore based camouflage system, whether from its own DNA or from some genetic infill Dr Henry Wu had to use is not made clear. Unfortunately these animals aren’t in the first novel, but as I wanted to include this as a story beat, I’d decided to port that ability over to the Metriacanthosaurs, given they don’t appear in the first film or novel as anything but a name on a map, I don’t think this too big a departure from canon; but your mileage may vary.
So, in the last two hours of the night, Rosco was on watch, and I asked him to roll a listen roll, which he did succeed. So while he is sitting on watch and everyone else is sleeping, he hears a soft, rythmic thumping outside the building in the direction of the warehouses which suddenly stops. He prevaricated long enough to wake up Ramón who had last been on watch before looking out of the small opening they’d left in the window. After criticalling his spot hidden roll, he see nothing but a quiet dockyard, a warehouse across the road, and an eerie quiet. Then, a thin cloud of steam appears above head height next to the warebouse. I ask Rosco if he keeps looking, and he does, after a success on an intelligence roll (INT x 5), Rosco realises he’s looking at something breathing.
He steps aside to let Ramón take a look, and looks around the small office for something elasticand some small stones or similar objects. Neither Ramón nor Maya (who had been woken by this point) saw what Rosco had, but while Ramón was looking again, Rosco used an elastic band to fire a small object through the hole, which goes whistling past the warehouse a short distance before landing in the bushes. The noise of this attracts the attention of the Metriacanthosaur by the warehouse, and on turning it’s head and upper torso to look, Ramón briefly sees the creature thanks to it’s camouflage being slower to adapt than it is to move. Seeing it slowly facing back into the brush, Ramón failed the subsequent sanity check but only lost a few points (the dice-gods were rather kind throughout the game and nobody ended up panicking and running away!). Rosco also notices the creature putting it’s nose down to the ground and sniffing at something on the floor, later realising it’s some of his own chewing tobacco. The players decided to continue using their improvised slingshot to fire a few small pebbles at the roof of the warehouse to try and tempt the creature away, and after a few attempts, and more importantly not hitting the creature with their projectiles, the animal moved around the other side of the building. The rest of the night passes in tense silence until the sun is well above the horizon.
“Mr Hammond, The phones are working”
The next morning, after a tentative start, not knowing if the Metriacanthosaur was still at the docks or if it was solely a nocturnal hunter, the players went back to one of the other buildings in the docks to disassemble a vending machine they’d found the previous day to try and get a motor from it. Eugine, as the team’s engineer, and Maya, with her experience in stagecraft and prop maintenance, successfully took the machine apart, retrieving a number of year-old snacks, and a small DC electirc motor. Eugine then used this (with further Electrical Repair rolls) to make a small hand crank generator to briefly power the harbourmaster’s telephone.
I gave the players enough power to make three phone calls, but told them that they couldn’t call out from the island from this phone, and after finding a phone directory in a filing cabinet, they tried to call The East Dock, The Emergency Bunker, and the Island’s Geothermal Power Plant. I was really hoping they’d call the visitor’s centre so I could give them an answer phone message – “Thank you for calling Jurassic Park Visitors’ Services, our opening hours are…” but alas they didn’t chose it as one of their three calls.
On dialling the East Dock, they got no response, and no dial tone. On dialling both the Power Plant and the Emergency Bunker, they heard the phones ring out, but nobody answered. This gave the players some more information, telling them that yes, there were some places that still had power, but that the island was truly as abandoned (of human inhabitants at least!) as it seemed.
The players then decided they would make their way across the island to the Emergency Bunker, as it was the easiest place they could get to which had power, but was still on the way towards the potential site of rescue – the airfield on the west coast of the island. They collected some scaffold poles from the warehouses and lashed some kitchen knives from the workers bunkhouse to make improvised spears, ransacked the dock’s security gatehouse checkpoint and collected keys for a garage (that they hadn’t found yet) and a Gate Master Key, among others.
Finally they set off inland toward the island’s interior.
“Sure. I’m in a gas-powered jeep…”
On leaving the North Dock compound, the party started walking along the road inland, and after five minutes or so, I gave everyone the option of a spot hidden check, only Maya passed it, and so noticed an overgrown track leading off the side of the utility road. after a minute of discussion, the group decided to follow the overgrown track, and a short while later found a small, single story double garage hidden in the forest. On finding the doors locked, Ramón remembered that he had a key from the docks that was labelled as being for a garage, so he tired to use it in the lock, opening the door to reveal an overgrown Jeep Wrangler Sahara painted up in a strange grey and red colour scheme.
A short while later, after finding some jerry-cans of petrol, cleaning some spark-plugs, and using their hand-crank generator to kickstart the alternator, the party all piled into the jeep with their scaffolding-poles-cum-spears, and began the drive to the Visitor’s centre area. Some time after entering the park proper, the party are driving along the tarmac’d tour road when their path is blocked by what at first seems to be a large boulder but was in fact a sleeping triceratops. Before any discussion could be had Rosco, being the only person who gave their character driving skill, decided it was time to put it to the test and drove the jeep “around the non-spiky end” of the animal; barely succeeding in a roll to not run over the creature’s tail.
Map by TomMakesMaps
Some more driving later, and navigating using the map I’d purchased from TomMakesMaps, they arrive to the rear of the famous “Jurassic Park” tour gate, to find the “doors” closed. Eugine steps out of the car to go and find (after some searching) an override switch so that they can push the gates open, then returns to the Jeep so Rosco can “gingerly” push the left hand gate open with the Jeep. the gate opens a fraction, then stops.
Unsure of what might be blocking the gate, the team begin to argue over what to do next, and in the end Maya gives up on the whispered argument, gets out of the Jeep and goes over to try pushing the other gate open. It’s at this point that I have to crack out my abysmal hand drawing skills and hand her player the sketch on the left in the image below:
There’s a Tyrannosaur on the other side of the gate, thankfully for Maya it appears to be sleeping, and facing away from her as she pushes open the right hand gate. She just succeeds on her sanity check, and makes her way back to the Jeep and describes to the three men what she’s just seen. The players decide the best thing to do is to back the Jeep up, use it to push open the right hand gate, and then speed off as soon as they’re clear.
This plan, though possibly a bit mad (anyone who’s played with a cat would perhaps think it’s better to drive at a constant pace!) works for them and they drove past the animal and on their way. Eugine succeeded on a spot hidden roll as they did so, and I passed him the above note, informing him that the Tyrannosaur was not asleep, but watched them drive on past.
Arriving at the Visitor’s centre, they group search the building, finding the control room still had power and a working telephone, though no way to know how to “call out”. Maya has the bright idea to check the conference room, thinking that they must have to make calls from there to people on the mainland, so goes off by herself to investigate, finding a set of instructions to “Dial 9 to make calls off the island”.
Putting all this together, and after a drawn out discussion of “who to call” Rosco calls his US Marshall’s head office, and informs them (a little counter-characterally) that Ramón died in the crash, and that the three survivors need to be rescued from Isla Nublar. They are told to get to the airfield on the island’s west coast, and a helicopter will come and collect them in two hours time. Ramón would later call on his Cartel compatriots to come and collect him under their own steam.
Meanwhile, Eugine and Ramón had decided they would make use of the Visitor’s Centre’s kitchen to see if they could cook up some food, given the building still had power, they reasoned that perhaps the freezers and refridgerators were still working. This is where perhaps the weirdest part of the session came up. For in the freezer was a very definitely frozen but pristine Velociraptor carcass; and Ramón decided that this was the time to try fillet of dinosaur, the rest I leave to your imagination, dear reader.
The party, now sated and with a clear path to safety, looked at the map and thought to themselves “we don’t need two hours to get to the airstrip, let’s check out the emergency bunker”. Driving their Jeep the short ride to the bunker, Ramón, Rosco and Eugene went inside and raided Muldoon’s weapon’s locker, meanwhile Maya, by this point understandably paranoid, stayed in the Jeep, rather unhappy at the extra detour.
While the majority of her party was inside, Maya watches the Tyrannosaur walk across the road behind the vehicle, making it’s way toward the Visitor’s Centre, now fresh from it’s resting. Once they returned, buoyed by the discovery of weaponry and keen to return to the Visitor’s Centre to collect supplies “just in case” Maya had the unenviable task of convincing them to do anything else.
The group eventually decided to leave, not wishing to risk an encounter with Rexy, so instead sped their way across the remainder of the island, stashing the Jeep in a small aircraft hangar at the airstrip, and waited to be evacuated by rescue helicopter without further incident.
Epilogue; Standoff at the cliffside road.
About as soon as the rescue helicopter left the ground at the airstrip carrying Maya, Rosco and Eugene to safety, Ramón jumped back into the Jeep and started back toward the Emergency Shelter, judging that to be the safest place to wait for his comrades to come and collect him. Turning the Jeep around a corner as he left the airstrip to return inland, his vehicle comes face-to-face with none other than the island’s resident Tyrannosaur. Ramón stops the Jeep, and the two start at each other for a minute before he loses his nerve and pulling a fast 3-point turn, beelines back to the airfield, reasoning a large airstrp would afford a lot of space to out-drive the animal.
After ten minutes idling on the runway, Ramón decides it must be safe now to return, and starts back once more. Cautiously making the turn again, there’s no sign of Rexy. He guns the Engine with the plan to drive at break-neck speed past all comers to return to the relative safety of the Emergency Bunker. Just as Rexy bursts through the foliage to his right.
Ben D B
6 November 2026
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