Using the rules of Dungeons & Dragons 5e I wrote and ran a Jurassic Park One-Shot for my friends for my birthday in June 2019. The idea is a "prologue" that ties in directly to the events of the first Jurassic Park film by Steven Spielberg.
I'm a huge Jurassic Park fan so one of my priorities of the game was to make my players feel like they were living a full prologue to the film. Staying "pure" to the movie may not be as important to some DM(s) and that's completely okay. You could have someone shoot Muldoon and start an alternate universe by accident. Be prepared for player free will to surprise you when you least expect it.
For the setting, I played the 10 hour YouTube video "nature and jungle sounds" from Planet Earth on the flat screen in the living room so that no matter what music or sound effects I played during the game, that stayed consistent, filling the room with a jungle aura.
I put my diffuser behind the game table, put it on the green light setting, and put in all my forest scents. My whole house smelled like a tropical mountain path and a greenish sheen lit the corner of the room. I made good use of the Jurassic Park soundtrack by John Williams. Not everyone has to do this obviously, but it's one of my favorite albums of all time, so I have every song and music cue memorized so it was very easy to pull up the exact "mood" I needed from the album.
HERE IS THE PLAYLIST WHERE I STORED THINGS FOR THIS GAME:
The moment with seeing the brachiosaurus for the first time felt a little too short in person than it did as a concept. But my players all had nostalgic, crinkly-eyed smiles on their faces that were just too cute.
Judah and Craig:
Judah was designed specifically for my brother, so while many other characters are not super specific and sort of vague backstories, Judah's was very detailed because catered to player preference! (Judah was also based on a REAL thing! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fight-against-elephant-poaching-going-commando-180959071/)
For Craig, I took inspiration from Crichton's book directly. Young Tim and Lex Murphy, the two kids, describe that "mom has a new boyfriend" but their parents might be getting a divorce. So I took a little creative liberty and invented Craig to be the nameless father figure - why wasn't he around in the movie? Maybe he had an encounter at Jurassic Park himself, and afterwards, swore off his father-in-law and that damn island? I imagined that when their mother had the kids for the weekend, Craig had no idea she was sending them to go see grandpa at his "biological preserve". I ended up NOT running Craig as an NPC - I had an extra player show up who usually cannot join us because his life is busy, so I gave him the character sheet AND attached the following picture by paperclip to the back:
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I told him to look at the pic and then I said "Those are your kids." Obviously he recognized them from the movie and he was like "ooooooh, I GOTCHA. OKAY." I told him it's his secret though: he doesn't have to tell anyone that he has kids. That's just for his knowledge as a player.
