Location: Sewers of Solarya
By Tempest Homewood, Guest Writer

I don’t have Professor Onomatopoeia’s gift for phony Victorian prose, so I’m going to drop the Dickens and just BEAT THE DICKENS out of Ignatius.

He asked me to jaunt about the sewers of a region know as Solarya.  I like adventuring in Second Life, with its virtual jungles, mountains, and underground rivers.  I do much of this in real life, and it’s clever to see what designers can do with the vast resources available to builders in-world.  For his students’ benefit, I’ll add that SL is not a substitute for these real-life activities; it is a non-competitive alternative to gaming online and I like the way we build our own world around our crazy ideas.

When I heard “sewer” I imagined some horror-story maze, full of evil creatures set to carry me off. Instead, my friend Kikiri and I got lost in a maze of filthy tunnels. I design clothing in SL, adventure wear that is, to put it mildly, “distressed.”  So the two of us walked, crawled, and ran about the Victorian sewers of Solarya.  In the end, it was boring stuff, there being no objective to this maze of well textured stone and wood.  Other than a few (non-moving) giant spiders, there didn’t seem to be much point to it all.  Well, at least I got to see how my ragamuffin Victorian dresses looked in the underworld. I might be unfair to the builders; parts of this maze were clearly unfinished, so there may be more in store for us when all is completed.

Some passages led into the basements of Victorian buildings—future club-houses for sewer gangs? That would be cool—an entire Steampunk-salvage industry exists and it’s a fascinating and somewhat dangerous sub-culture.

But some advice: builders in SL need to provide some sort of peril to these landscapes, at least a goal, and not simply concentrate on their looks. Even a crazy fun-house I found, Cave of Doom, had silly traps and tricks such as a guillotine that would (temporarily) chop off an avatar’s head.  Luckily, a few regions in Second Life offer gaming of a sort—a treasure-hunt with perils and rewards, in the form of (guess what) Linden Dollars.

Girl needs to buy a new dress, after all. Oh, and Iggster?  YOU are going to pay me back by posing as a pirate in some photos for my newest line of clothing.  Hope you like wearing long hair…and tattoos. No shirt permitted. I know you love that look. Heeheehee.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

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