ISAAC CALON
Project Leadership | Game Design | Narrative/Documentation
Shroud Isle - A Dungeons and Dragonsâ„¢ Mega-Adventure
Project Overview
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Shroud Isle was a third-edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign meant to take players from 1st to 14th level, which represents hundreds of hours of play time over the course of months or years.

The players took the roles of members of an expeditionary force visiting a remote, tropical island perpetually shrouded in thick fog. Over the course of their adventure they would fight monsters, gain treasure, unravel secrets, and (of course) find themselves central characters in an eons-old struggle for the fate of the known world.
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Much like any of my projects, my goals with Shroud Isle were to tell an engaging story while empowering my players to affect its course, all within a framework of balanced rules and rewarding progression.
Execution
I created dozens of characters, encounter locations, monsters, Gods, magic spells, magical and mundane equipment, character classes, races, and alternate rules systems to work in the excellent framework provided by D&D 3E and 3.5E. My chief concerns were by necessity player engagement and balance within the system.
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Shroud Isle existed for 25 individual play sessions over the course of two years, with each session lasting between four and eight hours. As a "home brew" campaign where I was creating most everything in the game, I spent on average one hour preparing for each hour of play time.
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This preparation included updating the campaign wiki, planning plot points, creating and balancing encounters, drawing maps, placing treasure, writing descriptions of creatures and places, and organizing the real-life concerns of pulling together a group of between four and eight diverse people to play my interactive story.
Set into a coastal cliffside, this multi-floor ancient temple housed many semi-aquatic horrors that struck from the flowing pools.
This cavern contained a narrow path above a darkened pit where everything was coated with guano—the result of the cavern being the home of thousands of bats. Disturbing the bats was dangerous as they swarmed throughout the chamber and caused the PCs to fall into the guano pit below, which doubled as the home of a giant, disgusting ambush predator.
The walls and ceiling of this tomb were made entirely of packed earth and coffins, many of which contained restless dead which burst or fell from their containers to attack the PCs.
Set into a coastal cliffside, this multi-floor ancient temple housed many semi-aquatic horrors that struck from the flowing pools.
Results
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Shroud Isle was an enormously successful campaign. It acted as an unyielding instructor and mentor in macro- and micro-design, mechanics balance, player engagement and progression, storytelling, and many of the soft and hard skills I use every day to organize my workload, run meetings, pitch ideas, and play.
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My players were enthusiastic about the game, and the only limitation of the campaign proved to be our abilities to work around the everyday scheduling of real life (a common complaint of the medium).
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I am currently exploring the adaptation of the story and characters of Shroud Isle into other media.

Many of my designs appeared on my monster-focused blog, Unnatural20, which I also maintained for two years after the Shroud Isle campaign came to a close.
One of the original monsters created for my campaign.
One of the original monsters created for my campaign.
The cover image for the 150-page Shroud Isle wiki.
Just one of the many flavour images I took as samples for my Unnatural20 blog, a website dedicated to pen-and-paper monster and encounter design.
The cover image for the 150-page Shroud Isle wiki.