Otherworldly

Adventure calls at Plankbarrow Harbor, where many broken ships have come to rest and a twisted array of ropes and planks shaped into a town of sorts. A hideout for pirates and treasure seekers, with dangers lurking both on the rickety wooden piers and below the waves. If you plan on visiting, you had better keep your wits about you and a trusty dagger at hand. Not all encounters will be friendly, especially after dusk.

The Muses Wanderer outfit almost looks made for the Atriane Gloves from Senzafine, or vice versa. A great base for a pirate look, with the ostentatious hat by Attitude is an Artform adding a lot of flair (and sitting nicely on the curly hairstyle by Analog Dog). The necklace from Portal is rather understated but has an interesting design and the obsidian dagger from Oblivis Solem looks appropriately menacing.

I am late to report this, but LL has allowed the Faire two extra days before the Fairelands fade away, which means you will be able to explore, shop and raise money for RLF until the 7th of May!

What a lineup We Love Role-Play has for April! A really strong mix of avatar accessories and various builds, furnishings and landscaping. I dove right for the massive Gothic castle by Nocturna Deed, even though it clocks in at a hefty 800 prims. It makes gorgeous use of PBR and lights beautifully. Need a home for your brooding lord or reclusive vampire? This would certainly serve! I really like the way it is laid out as well and the fact that there are proper windows and doors. There are also quite a few rooms, allowing it to serve as a home for several people if so desired. In fact, it took me a while to discover the very cool crypt and the bloody dungeons.

The castle certainly seemed like a perfect home for the Skull Throne from MoonSha. It is similar in setup to the Dragon Throne I showed a few rounds back, but featuring a skull motif instead. It comes in a variety of base materials and with the included HUD you can change the fabric texture. The PG version includes single poses for male and female avatars as well as couple poses.

For my own outfit, the Eowyn gown and the Dragon shield by the Muses made me feel right at home. The gown layers leather and chainmail details on top of the fabric and comes in five colours with either black or brown leather details and either gold or silver chainmail. The sturdy shield comes both as a wearable and as a display version. And if you take a closer look at the second image, you can admire my lovely new eye appliers by Musa. I decided to play around with mismatched eyes and I love the effect here. These gorgeous eyes are sold in smaller packs or a fatpack and with the fatpack you get some great bonus colours as well. At the 30% off for the event, this is a great deal!

The Queen was gazing out the window when the knight was shown into the royal study. His eyes fell briefly on the cabinet next to the window, beautifully painted with unicorn holding the royal standard.  On the desk, a half-finished scroll and a bottle of ink sat next to a couple of leather-bound tomes. After a moment, the Queen turned away from the window and approached him. The royal crown gleamed on her head and in her hand, she held a small handkerchief embroidered with a black rose.

The Lady’s Favor from Schoen is one of those fabulous little role-play items that can add so much to a scene and it was the starting point for the rest of the setup. The beautiful gown by the Muses is certainly regal enough (and looks particularly stunning when lit right thanks to the use of materials) and with the gorgeous crown from Angelicus you have a look worthy of a queen.

For the decor, I used various pieces from Del-ka Aedilis, including the small cabinet that is available with four different paintings on the front.

This highly irregular vlogger has made a video again! This time to show off Dottie the Dalmatian, the latest Teeglepet which has been released at We Love Role-Play, and a gorgeous gown from returning favourite the Muses, also out at the same event. I think I will let the video do most of the talking this time, but of course you can find credits below the image as usual.

A market had sprung up in front of the castle, with colourful stalls selling all sorts of wares; fruits of all kinds, large wheels of cheese, fine fabrics, and so on. There was also a space set aside where horses for sale were hitched, waiting for buyers. One of them caught her eye, a pony with a golden coat. She had bought an apple from the fruit seller for herself, but now she held it out to the pony, who took it carefully. Later, she returned with a second apple, untied the pony from the post and asked if it would come with her. Together, they walked away from the market, pausing only to eye the cheese on the way out.

The 2022 Horse Show, with everything you could possibly need for your Teeglepets and Teegle Avatars, is here. Expect more than a few posts featuring new releases from the Horse Show from now until October 2nd, when it ends. In this post, you’ve got the simple but useful apple from Multifarious (it includes a hand animation for the human avatar) as well as the beautiful Sunny coat from artMEfashion.

But I do like trying to mix it up a bit, so in this post I am also featuring new(ish) releases from F&M Oblivion and Del-ka Aedilis for We Love Role-Play and the Fantasy Room.

Dreaming Thicket has a wonderful set of Venetian carnival masks available in a NextUp vendor at the Secret Garden event, in a variety of styles and colours and all for a very low price. I opted for a classic Columbina from my blogger set and managed to grab a Volto off the vendor for Ran. A bit of digging into our inventories produced some suitable Renaissance-inspired pieces from the Muses and Stitched, as well as hair for me by F&M Oblivion and boots for Ran by lassitude & ennui. The couple poses come from Nanta and Be My Mannequin and represent a couple of rare entries into the category of couple poses suitable for scenes of courtly love. More of these, please.

It is high time for some seasonally appropriate witchery. The Come, Behold Me! pose from Be My Mannequin? is suitably dramatic and here it is embellished with little flames in each hand and a magical aura swirling up from the ground. The altar behind me is from ContraptioN and was acquired for a mere L$50 last Friday, quite the bargain, and it features several texture options for the altar cloth as well as on/off switches for the lights. The build is from a previous Nomad gacha, a stone building with tall windows that works great as a small chapel.

The striking Morticia hair from Magika got even better when I realised it offers the option of a separate colour on a small section of the hair. By picking the multitone white and black texture for that section I was able to get this effect of white streaks at the front of the hair, which I absolutely love and really wish that more styles had. In this particular case, it also sets off the Herne Crown from Bliensen + MaiTai beautifully. You will find this lovely piece at the Narrative even and it offers several metal options via a HUD.

Fantavatar & Moonstruck has several Egyptian-inspired items out at the Fallen Gods 14th Anniversary Market, as well as an item in the Duat hunt, which led to this Cleopatra-inspired look. Given that, I could not resist placing her in a Roman villa and lounging on an opulent Roman both, both courtesy of Del-ka Aedilis though only the bed is a new release, for the Narrative Event.

Alia Baroque went all out with Renaissance decadence for the Ice & Fire event, bringing three gorgeous pieces from this Libertine that go beautifully together; the Optimo Dierum Throne, Gianicolo bench (free-standing and wall version) and Tales of Might divider. I cleared out one of the grand rooms in Fanatik’s Dungan Castle to make room for this setup and then Ran and I dressed in some of our favourite pieces from the Muses. Though not from the Ice & Fire event, I thought F&M Oblivion’s Sansa Stark-inspired hair was a suitable choice to go with my Lucrezia gown and my Fair Lady jewellery from Old Treasures.

Both the throne and the two versions of the bench offer several texture options for the seat, including marble and stone versions for the benches which allow them to be used in a garden as well. There are solo as well as couple animations and the latter include both cuddles and adult animations. The only thing I would have liked to see as far as the animations go are some more sits that work with long dresses, apart from that it is a fun selection. I particularly like the couple pose I used for the bench, which portrays them arguing.

I love well-researched period clothing and accessories and with this hennin Old Treasures has really hit the mark. A hennin is the classic “princess” headdress, a cone or steeple, often with a veil attached. They are associated with the late Middle Ages, particularly with Burgundy and France, which is why I opted for a Burgundian-style gown from the Muses to go with it. This is an older release, so it has two general fitmesh sizes rather than fitmesh for specific bodies, but that works fine for gowns.

When it comes to mesh heads for male avatars, the situation is starting to get pretty decent with several brands offering multiple choices. Slink, for example, is now up to four male mesh head with their latest two releases, Marcus and Ethan. As with the previous two (Anderson and Finn), they have a “sister” each among the female heads, in this case Miranda and Emma. While you could certainly make them look a lot more masculine, I decided to try both of them with the androgynous “Andy” skin from alaskametro (even though the body of the skin is actually female) since I wanted to see how pretty they would get. ;) I also used the Nyx hair from Wasabi for both looks and a set of outfits from the Muses.

A brief, late-night post. This beautiful garden feature from Simply Shelby caught my eye among at Redeux, not the least because of the informative notecard which taught me what a medieval turf bench is! I love when people really research their creations and this is great example of when doing that also results in an unusual and very original piece of decor. The turf bench comes with and without the central tree, allowing for various usage options, and includes single poses for men and women as well as some couple poses.

Redeux opens today at noon SL time and there you will find the Townhall from Del-ka Aedilis at 50% off. This is quite a large build (footprint is 26 x 27 m
and land impact is 174) with an open arched gallery, a spacious courtyard and several rooms both on the first and second floor. In one of the rooms on the second floor, I setup the Scribery Alcove from Roawenwood for the current round of We Love Role-Play. Both Ran and I are wearing new outfits from the Muses and these can also be found at We Love Role-Play.

A somewhat eclectic mix today, with everything from decor to new eyes. We’ll start big, though, with another building from Del-ka Aedilis. This one is from their medieval series, so it seemed to fit well with wearing a Viking-inspired gown by the Muses. The kitchen garden on the side is a separate item from the same series and can be combined with most any of their houses. The jewellery is more fantastical, a fairy-delicate set from lassitude & ennui that comes in a range of beautiful, shimmering mixed metals.

The braids are the latest style from Wasabi, which comes in a straight and a slightly windblown version where both the bangs and the braids have swung to one side. And then we have the eyes, the Oculi from FATE. Damien Fate calls them spiritual successors to the FATEeyes and that is fair enough, though they are quite different in many ways. The HUD is sleek and easy and even with just the included textures they are highly versatile as they tint beautifully. The HUD also allows very easy positioning vertically, horizontally and depth-wise.

There is also a free developer kit for making your own textures, something I am eager to have a go at. Their biggest new feature is properly speaking the realistically dilating and contracting pupil; it is perhaps not what excites me the most, though I need to play around with how it can affect expressions in photos and how it looks on video. Either way, I like these eyes a lot. They may not be the ultimate mesh eyes (for that, I would like BoM as well as appliers, but because these use special textures that won’t work), but they get close in that they offer both excellent positioning and easy customisation.

As my herd of Teegle horses has grown, I’ve found myself wishing for a stable that would fit in with the rest of my sim which is full of castles and the like. The latest release from Fanatik goes a long way to fulfil that wish. It may not be a full-on period stable, but it definitely looks great and suits my Teeglepets perfectly.

But that’s not all I’ve got for you! The Muses has a new mainstore, so I am showing off a favourite from their current collection of gowns, and Skin Within has another new skin out, the second after their return to Second Life. So do keep reading for more photos!