Developing Primal Reserve: Making the Dinosaur RPG I Wanted to Play

I have wanted to make a dinosaur RPG for a long time.

More specifically, I wanted to make the kind of dinosaur RPG where you are trapped somewhere with very large animals, everything is going wrong, the lights are flickering, somebody has lost track of what is inside which enclosure, and suddenly getting from one building to another becomes a very serious problem.

You can probably guess where the inspiration came from.

The problem, of course, is that I didn’t want to just make “Jurassic Park with the serial numbers filed off” and call it good. I wanted the game to capture that feeling, but I also wanted it to have its own identity. At one point I ran a Savage Worlds one-shot that stranded folks on the island, but it didn’t quite feel right. It needed to be its own thing. That ended up being the first real design challenge behind Primal Reserve.

The original idea was actually pretty small. I was thinking in terms of an eight-page RPG. Something quick, easy to learn, easy to run, and focused entirely on survival. You’d make a character, pick a few abilities, have some rules for dinosaurs, and get right into the game.

That got out of hand pretty quickly.

The setting became Calder Island, home of the Calder Research Reserve, built by Helix Biosystems. Helix has managed to reconstruct prehistoric animals through genetics, synthetic biology, and what I am sure is a completely responsible amount of corporate ambition. Scientists, technicians, security personnel, investors, journalists, and guests all come to the island to see what Helix has created.

Then the fences start failing.

The harder question was figuring out what I actually wanted players to do.

I didn’t want the game to turn into a tactical dinosaur combat RPG. There are plenty of games where fighting monsters is the point, and those games can be great. That wasn’t the experience I wanted here. If a Tyrannosaurus shows up, I don’t want the players immediately calculating how many rounds it will take to reduce it to zero hit points.

I want someone to say, “Where’s the car?”

That became one of the central ideas of the whole game. The characters are capable people, but they’re still just people. They might be scientists, security officers, veterinarians, engineers, guides, or corporate executives. They have useful skills. They can solve problems. They can make smart decisions. They can also get stepped on.

The rules eventually summed that up pretty well. A rifle doesn’t make you equal to a six-ton predator. A locked door is useful until the power goes out. A vehicle is safe until something blocks the road. Once I had that in my head, the rest of the game started taking shape.

Another important decision was how to treat the dinosaurs themselves. They’re dangerous, obviously. Some of them are extremely dangerous. But I didn’t want every animal encounter to begin with “roll initiative.”

The animals needed to act like animals. A predator might be hungry. A herbivore might be frightened. Something might be defending its young. A territorial animal might just want the characters to back away. A stampeding herd might be more dangerous than any carnivore in the game.

That became a pretty major part of the design. Understanding what an animal wants can be just as important as having a weapon.

It also gave me a much wider range of encounters to work with. A Triceratops doesn’t have to be a boss fight. It might be standing in the road with a juvenile nearby. A Gallimimus herd doesn’t have to care about you at all. The problem is that something scared fifty of them and now they’re all running directly toward you. A Brachiosaurus may barely notice that you’re there, right up until it gets startled next to the building you’re hiding inside. That made the island feel much more alive to me.

It also helped Primal Reserve slowly develop its own personality. I knew I wanted corporate secrets, failing infrastructure, tropical storms, labs, emergency systems, security doors, stranded personnel, and animals moving into places they aren’t supposed to be. Calder Island started feeling less like a backdrop and more like a machine that was gradually breaking down around the players.

And somewhere along the way, my little eight-page RPG became forty pages.

There are twenty prehistoric animals now. There are disaster rules, injury rules, stress, character roles, Calder Island locations, random tables, a character sheet, and a starting scenario.

Still, the original idea is basically intact:

The lights go out.

The fences fail.

Something is moving through the trees.

What do you do?

Primal Reserve is coming to Itch and RPG-Trader soon. I’ll keep you all updated on the progress.