Rolling dice and outrunning dinosaurs may seem like a fun game night, but Jurassic Park’s TTRPG highlights one of the franchise’s biggest missed opportunities. It might come as a surprise, but before TTRPGs became mainstream, Jurassic Park let players embark on their own tabletop adventures.
However, practically extinct in game stores, hobby rooms, and beyond the collections of a few avid dinosaur enthusiasts, The Lost World: Jurassic Park Role-Playing Game Book remains positively obscure. A curiosity for pop culture paleontologists, it raises questions: What was this game like? What happened to it? And like the dinosaurs of Site B, can it be resurrected by those dedicated enough to unearth it?
Wait, There Was a Jurassic Park TTRPG?
In The '90s, Jurassic Park Invited Players to Get Lost
It is unsurprising that, like any major cinematic franchise, Jurassic Park inspired an extensive line of merchandise and spin-off media from the very start. When The Lost World: Jurassic Park hit theaters, it seemed like nothing was safe from the "Site B" logo, whether stamped onto toys, apparel, or anything else molded into the shape of a dinosaur.
Naturally, Jurassic Park expanded into gaming, with board games and various titles for consoles like the Sega Game Gear. However, few realized the franchise also took its first steps into the world of TTRPGs. Yet, rather than hitting the ground running with the earth-shattering impact of a rampaging Tyrannosaurus, The Lost World: Jurassic Park Role-Playing Book feels more like a fossil buried beneath a mountain of 1990s merchandise; obscure, but fascinating in its existence alone.
Written by Greg Farshtey, The Lost World: Jurassic Park Role-Playing Book stands out from other TTRPGs inspired by popular franchises due to its unique mechanics and execution. Instead of a traditional system like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, it is a hybrid of a D6-based system and a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style game.
In 1997, reports surfaced that hackers had attacked The Lost World: Jurassic Park website, altering the movie’s title to "The Duck World: Jurassic Pond." Over time, some have speculated that this was not a real cyberattack but rather a bizarre PR stunt designed to promote the film.
Inspired by the 1997 film, it does not offer players much room to create their own adventures. Instead, they follow pre-generated story scenarios, either solo or with friends, that loosely follow the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Each scenario begins with a quick overview of the objectives, after which players select characters, make choices, and roll dice to determine their fates.
Unlike standard TTRPGs, The Lost World does not feature many character customization options. Instead of traditional character sheets, players receive pre-generated “character cards” featuring key figures from the movie, including Kelly Malcolm, Roland Tembo, and Sarah Harding. Each character has four core stats: Agility, Strength, Perception, and Mind, defining their abilities.
The gameplay follows a format similar to Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels, with players reading passages and making decisions such as, "If you think the Stegosaurus is a plant-eater, go to page 3." Challenges requiring dice rolls use a simple D6 system, adding a character’s relevant stat to determine success or failure, somewhat akin to Powered by the Apocalypse games like Masks: A New Generation.
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Instead of a traditional monster manual, dinosaur and plant cards serve as encounters, while DNA cards introduce randomized events to keep playthroughs dynamic. While The Lost World: Jurassic Park Role-Playing Book does many things differently from conventional TTRPGs, it is clearly designed for a younger audience. The game lacks the depth of systems like Pathfinder 2e, instead focusing on straightforward mechanics to introduce newcomers to tabletop roleplaying.
Roleplaying itself is minimal, and character creation is nonexistent, but for what it aimed to do, it was a creative and fun experiment. It provided kids with a way to interact with the Jurassic Park franchise beyond standard board games or video game tie-ins, offering a more imaginative take on adventuring through Site B.
Why a Jurassic World TTRPG is a Missed Opportunity
Something Has Survived, But It Wasn't The Jurassic Park TTRPG
Although The Lost World: Jurassic Park Role-Playing Book lacked depth in mechanics and character customization, the idea of a Jurassic Park TTRPG is far from a bad one. In fact, it highlights a major untapped corner of the Jurassic World franchise. While several tie-in board games have been released over the years and supposedly a Jurassic World TTRPG sourcebook was in development before being canceled, there has not been a true tabletop RPG for the franchise since The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
Even games inspired by the series, like Escape from Dino Island and Outgunned, have attempted to capture the thrill of dinosaur-based action but never received an official endorsement. Looking at the potential of the franchise and the ideas previous attempts have literally brought to the table, perhaps, like the scientists of Jurassic Park, Universal could take those bits and fragments and create something truly wondrous.
While adult fans of Jurassic Park would love to embark on their own dinosaur-driven adventures, The Lost World: Jurassic Park Role-Playing Book had some solid ideas, particularly in its accessibility for younger players. A game designed to ease new players into TTRPGs, perhaps even teaching them to be first-time GMs, feels like a natural evolution of what the previous Jurassic Park TTRPG attempted.
In addition to the original Jurassic Park: Survival, another canceled project, Jurassic World: Survivor by Splash Damage Games, was uncovered. The game would have followed customized characters stranded on Isla Nublar after the Indominus Rex incident, forcing them to navigate the island's many dangers, including dinosaurs, BioSyn agents, and eco-terrorists, in a fight for survival.
A modern adaptation using a Powered by the Apocalypse (PBTA) system, similar to Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game, would be a perfect fit. With streamlined mechanics and a focus on roleplay, teamwork, and character-driven storytelling, it is easy to imagine playbooks based on classic Jurassic Park archetypes (e.g. The Scientist, The Hacker, The Hunter) each with unique abilities and backstory-building questions.
Even if the game leaned toward younger protagonists, akin to Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous or Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, a Kids on Bikes-style system that lets players create their own companion dinosaur, like a "Bumpy" or a "Blue," would be a fun way to immerse them in the world.
One of the biggest shortcomings of The Lost World: Jurassic Park Role-Playing Book was its limited scope. While it offered multiple outcomes and some level of replayability, it did not truly allow players to craft their own stories. Yet, Jurassic Park as a franchise is exploding with storytelling potential.
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A modern game could include everything from mid-quels, like Jurassic Park: Survival and Jurassic Park: The Game, where players must escape Isla Nublar after Nedry’s sabotage, to open-world campaigns set after Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, where humans and dinosaurs struggle to coexist.
With a world so rich in adventure, mystery, and danger, it feels like a missed opportunity that Jurassic World has yet to embrace a full-fledged tabletop RPG; one that lets players step into the chaos, forge their own survival stories, and bring the franchise to life in a whole new way.
Why It's the Perfect Time to Release a Jurassic World TTRPG
The Dawn of a New "Jurassic Era" Presents New Opportunities
Jurassic World’s failure to produce a new TTRPG is perhaps one of the franchise’s biggest missed opportunities. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World: Chaos Theory opened a world of new storytelling possibilities in the Jurassic Park universe, yet offered no official way for fans to tell their own, outside of the Department of Prehistoric Wildlife viral campaign.
Now, with dinosaurs nearly extinct again and Jurassic World Dominion’s ending about to be undone by Jurassic World Rebirth, it feels like much of that potential was squandered. However, it is not too late to explore it, and a TTRPG would be the perfect way to expand the Jurassic World series.
With the franchise shifting gears once more, there is no better time to let players forge their own stories. While little is known about why Universal’s dinosaur TTRPG never took off, that does not mean the idea is not worth revisiting, especially in today’s pop culture landscape. It was a different time in 1997, but the world of tabletop gaming has changed dramatically since then.
The developers of The Lost World: Jurassic Park The Role-Playing Game Book system, West End Games, were well known for developing TTRPGs based on popular franchises, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Men in Black, and Ghostbusters.
Thanks to the rise of media like Critical Role and the resurgence of roleplaying games, now feels like the perfect moment for a Jurassic Park tabletop experience, especially with Jurassic World Rebirth and Jurassic World: Chaos Theory Season 3 set for 2025. Meanwhile, countless other franchises have already embraced the format.
Star Wars, Aliens, and Blade Runner have all found their way onto tabletops, making the absence of Jurassic Park, a franchise rich in lore and world-building, rather odd. If a Jurassic Park RPG were released today, it could prove wildly popular and provide exactly what the franchise needs as it enters a new era.
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The best measure of a franchise’s impact is how much people want to immerse themselves in its world. Whether they dream of being a Hogwarts student, a Jedi Knight, or a dinosaur hunter, fans crave opportunities to tell their own stories. Jurassic Park has always been about the thrill of discovery, the awe of science, and the chaos that can result from it.
With still so many stories to tell, ideas to explore, and reasons to revisit Jurassic Park’s iconic locations, a TTRPG could be the key to unlocking them as imagination runs wild once more.
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Jurassic Park
Scientists bring back dinosaurs for an amusement park, but everyone learns that the dinosaurs cannot be contained in the Jurassic Park franchise.
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The Lost World: Jurassic Park
PG-13
AdventureAction
Science Fiction- Release Date
- May 23, 1997
- Runtime
- 129 minutes
- Director
- Steven Spielberg
Cast
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Jeff Goldblum
Ian Malcolm
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Julianne Moore
Sarah Harding
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Pete Postlethwaite
Roland Tembo
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Arliss Howard
Peter Ludlow
WHERE TO WATCH
Streaming
RENT
BUY
Following up on the Steven Spielberg classic adapted from the works of Michael Crichton, The Lost World: Jurassic Park is an action-adventure film that changes perspective and focuses on Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm as he is sent to investigate Isla Sorna as InGen attempts to resolve its financial woes by selling dinosaurs off to create a new theme park. However, as Malcolm warns the executives of the danger of this, terror is brought stateside when the previously contained threats run loose.
