Let’s Play D&D With ‘Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm
Life will find a way this week when we invite the internet’s favorite dinosaur watching mathemagician to play D&D, it’s Ian Malcolm.
Jurassic Park is one of those movies that has managed to stay in our collective pop culture minds. This is definitely helped by the fact that there have been six movies to date. But the fact that the movie series is thirty years old, with the book first hitting shelves just three years prior, means that the dangerous Dino Park’s cultural longevity has lasted much longer than so many other movies from the ’90s.
This is definitely in part to the fact that dinosaurs have remained pretty cool, that the mix of computer-generated and practical effects were perfect and still hold up, and like I said, we’ve gotten a Jurassic Park movie as recently as 2022. But I think one of the things that’s kept Jurassic Park in our zeitgeist is this legendary meme of a man:
In case you didn’t hear Jurassic Park and more importantly, Dr. Ian Malcolm joined Magic the Gathering recently. Because life, y’know, finds a way. So let’s just add him to another favorite game of ours and play D&D with…
Ian Malcolm
There are a few characters in Jurassic Park that would be easy to make. In fact, we’ve taken a trip to Isla Nublar before when we made a (villain) sheet for John Hammond and some velociraptors. And a lot of the cast consists of adventuring archeologists who with just a little bit of a boost could have very Indiana-Jones-feeling sheets. They spend a lot of time outside, they explore, and they understand the local monster really well. They’re suited to the adventure.
But Ian Malcolm is another sort of character in Jurassic Park. He’s invited along by the insurance adjuster to determine how risky the park is. Malcolm is a mathematician with a special interest in chaos theory. In the grand scheme of adventures, he’s more of an indoor kid than the folks digging up dinosaurs all day.
So instead I decided to have some fun with this sheet.
I wanted to nod to chaos theory with a little extra chaos of our own by making him, in part, a Wild Magic Sorcerer. From there, he probably wanted to actually study this wild magic and went down the Wizard path. I figured that Wizards, like respected professional mathematicians, hone their knowledge in the classroom.
Divination Wizard gives him the ability to look at a situation and know what could happen next. This makes him the person an insurance adjuster would want to have around on an island full of dinosaurs while deciding what sort of premium Hammond will be paying.
These picks are also perfect for Ian Malcolm because his two defining characteristics I think are his intelligence and his charisma. Everyone loves this character thirty years later for a reason. Wizard and Sorcerer are the caster classes that focus on intelligence and charisma respectively. And because I refuse to believe that Jeff Goldblum is a regular human, Half-Elf gives him even more charisma.
How would you make Ian Malcolm for a Jurassic Park setting? Will you be picking up the Jurassic Park Magic cards? What movie, show, book, comic, or game should I make sheets from next time? Let us know in the comments!
Happy adventuring!
