Otherworldly

I am mixing my time periods wildly here with several new releases from the November round of We Love Role-Play, but I love the end result. In the pre-furnished Shadow Mansion from Death Row Designs, I setup the Tudor Wall Table Set from Simply Shelby. It has a really fantastic reflection cube and great dusty textures for the mirrors, making for lovely reflections with a really old-timey look to them.

The dress is by Senzafine, very gothic in its style and beautifully textured. The Zelda pumps by Grasshopper Street are a little late in style, but suited the look nicely even so. And the final touch from WLRP is the very cool Mechanism Hand by lassitude & ennui, a delicate Steampunk-styled replacement hand that comes in four different textures and can be used on both hands at the same time or just on one. Very ladylike and elegant.

Celebrate the bounty of the harvest with the beautiful Vangsta table from NeonSheep, available both with and without the decor (the decor also included separately) and with and without PBR. It has a rustic elegance which works both for a more modern setting and for a role-play setting. Here I have also added apples in baskets and sacks from Lore’s Apple Harvest fatpack. I am also using the holdable basket and the holdable apple. Don’t they look delicious? Each item comes in four different apple textures to represent different apple varieties. Both of these great autumn decor sets are available at We Love Role-Play for a discount and you still have a few more days to get them before this round closes.

My outfit is also from We Love Role-Play, a very pretty Norse-inspired gown by Rakshasa with a coat that has a knitted look belted over it. The gown and the coat can be worn separately and there are also bracers included for wearing over the sleeves. As usual the fatpack offers excellent customisation options where you can mix and match all the available colours. And with it I am wearing the final piece from the event, the Yrsa necklace from lassitude & ennui, with runes inscribed on the central spiral piece. It comes in three colour variants, each of which also includes a blood-streaked version.

Have you upgraded to a PBR viewer yet? If not, and if your computer can handle it, do make the jump! The benefits when it comes to textures is amazing and showcased beautifully in the latest release from Fanatik, the Altamira Cavern. With this building kit you get 26 mesh building elements, 6 props and a texture HUD that includes 3 variations on the rock materials. You also get 7 pre-built cave examples, to give a sense of what you can do with this kit. I headed over to Fanatik’s own demo on their sim and shot a quick little video to show off the beauty of the PBR textures. As usual, you can find credits at the end.

Another round of We Love Role-Play awaits you and my first picks for showcasing from the July round is an expansive Roman merchant set from Del-ka Aedilis and a collar from Drunken Brokkr. The merchant set includes a variety of excellent decor pieces for furnishing a Roman (or Roman-inspired) shop—or a kitchen, for that matter—and the collar works as a slave collar for a variety of settings as it offers texture options for both the leather and metal. I decided to setup a scene of a wealthy household’s slave girl shopping for her mistress; already her basket is full of previous purchases. I took some liberties with her dress from Senzafine (available at Midsummer Enchantment, which closes today), it is rather too fancy and more Grecian-inspired than Roman, and her pretty leather shoes from lassitude & ennui aren’t precisely Roman either.

The latest release from Del-ka Aedilis is a set of Roman cult shrines to various deities, each with different offerings of fruits and breads. You’ll find these at the current round of We Love Role-Play and while there were not truly Roman dresses or accessories this round, I decided to create more of a fantasy priestess look to go with the shrines.

First, we have the Sassa dress from Rakshasa. I absolutely adore the options this dress comes with as you can have long, short or no sleeves and you have tons of different sections that you can choose different textures for. I went for different hues of leather, imagining a somewhat archaic look for this priestess.  She also wears a headdress from Bliensen + MaiTai which happens to fit really well with the Karma hair from the Truth Collective, a style which has a braid and also a small section tied off on the top of the head. The headdress has a nice patina, making it look like something that has been in use for a long time.

She also has footwear from lassitude & ennui, but the shots I ended up using do not show them enough so I will have to revisit them.

The April round of We Love Role-Play opens today and you can whet your appetite with the Shopping Guide as well as with the blog posts that are starting to crop up. Such as this one!

For this post, I am mixing up the releases from lassitude & ennui, Moth & Moon and Misteria, the result being a fae who rides in the Wild Hunt, here on the prowl on her on with her black steed. The soft green skin from Moth & Moon blends nicely with the Dryad gloves from Misteria (BOM layers and appliers included), and the Wild Hunt shoulder piece from lassitude & ennui adds a touch of menace. This is not a fae you want to meet in the woods on the wrong night.

I am also using a new release that isn’t from WLRP but which deserves a special mention because I find it so neat. RVN Store is a new-to-me store which I came across at the Level event and they have several different add-on deformers for mesh heads. Now, I have seen deformers for mesh bodies before, which allow you to achieve shape variations that the sliders can’t do. But with such body alterations you run the risk of clothing not fitting, so I haven’t found them that interesting. But face deformers? I had not seen those before and I am excited. The set that I am using pieces from here is called Chic Cheeks and it alters your upper and lower cheekbones. Perfect if you like sharper cheekbones. I am also really intrigued by their nose deformers since I am a sucker for strong noses, so I may have to give those a try too.

A pinch of magic, a pinch of engineering. That’s what you get when you mix the Potion Crafter’s Cauldron from Contraption with the outfit from Petrichor & Ersch for the Engine Room. 

The cauldron is a fun scripted prop which includes a few animations (the second image shows one of them, the others use poses from chanimations) and options for the look of the cauldron and whether it is setup to boil or not. The potion bottles it hands out also have a few scripted special effects for either throwing the bottle or drinking it.

The Verayne outfit consists of several items with HUDs for further customisation of both textures and what pieces are shown. The belt, for example, comes with several different attachments that can be shown or hidden.  The earrings are not part of the set, I picked them up at Dark Mouse at one of the weekend sales. Very pretty and fits both modern and fantasy looks. And the pretty lace gloves are from lassitude & ennui for Chronicles & Legends.

Finally, the braided hairstyle is from Wasabi and comes with an optional shamrock accessory.

Sometimes, you just want to do a good old-fashioned romance cover and the “Die With You” couple pose from Be My Mannequin? for The Grid event definitely suited that idea. Did our swashbuckling hero liberate his love from a harem only to run afoul of rival pirates? Because surely he is a pirate too with that shirt. ;)

We’re both wearing gorgeous outfits from toksik, who recently did a 50% off sale on all except their newest release. I paired my Allure set with the Sarabande slippers from lassitude & ennui, a lovely pair of leather slippers that are out for the current round of We Love Role-Play. Ran is wearing the Eternal blouse and pants, with the Bloodlust boots. The ship is Neptune’s Revenge from Maxwell Graf at Rustica.

And speaking of sales, my hair (of which you can’t see that much) is from Magika who is currently doing a 50% off sale on all her hairs. Stock up!

I did warn that there would be more videos for the 2022 Horse Show and here we go. With cool new idles for the horses and a fancy new cloak for myself, a video was definitely needed. Plus, it made it easier to offer a good look at the three different Dragonkin tack/mod sets from Idunn’s Clutch. I go through all the new items in the video, but for a quick and easy overview of the credits, scroll to the end of this post. On the way, you’ll pass a few photos; I am particularly pleased with the first one but the rest are pretty cool looks at the horses too.

The faerie leads you through a flowering field towards a secret door beneath a hill. Will you dare to follow her? If you do, will you ever emerge into the world again and will a hundred years have passed in a day?

We Love Role-Play is open for another round and I love how the releases from deviousMind and lassitude & ennui go together (you’ll see the latter in the second photo) for a dryad/faerie look. To find the perfect spot to photo this, I paid a long overdue visit to Ode and found it as lovely as I remembered.

deviousMind’s April outfit is a bikini made up of flowers, butterflies and bees. You can choose between three levels of coverage for both top and bottom. The Dryad shoes from lassitude & ennui are low, lace-up boots that look as if they’re made from leaves. Both the bikini and the shoes are for Maitreya Lara only.

Both poses used are from Be My Mannequin? The first is Pandora (includes the key prop) from the Pandora’s Box fatpack and the second is Vastness from the Star Gazer fatpack.

Need those perfect pants for layering under coats and corsets or tucking into boots? Then these striped pants by lassitude & ennui, available as appliers or as BOM, have you covered. Well, half of you, anyway. They come in 7 colour versions for 120L$ per pair or a mere 360L$ for the fatpack and you can find them at the Engine Room together with other cool Steampunk-inspired items.

The sleek, elegant hair is Wasabi’s latest release, Delaney, which is out at Uber. It represent a (trial) return to offering single colour packs. You can get this hair in just one shade range (about 60 colors) for 275L$ or you can get the Absolute Pack for 400L$ as usual. This hair offers four style options.

With a touch of magic from Enchantment’s Nutcracker round a winter saga of a beautiful princess and a dashing prince comes to life. The fairytale gown in luscious holiday-red is Louise from R3D Studio, with lovely rose ornaments anda lace drape over the arms and down the back. The hairstyle is from F&M Oblivion, an ornate updo called Star Empress. The prince wears the elegant Marquis outfit from Last Ride and his pose is one of the offerings from Be My Mannequin for the event.

The spooky season may be over, but since October was a busy month for me, it seems I still have some darkness to work out. Or perhaps it is just a result of being inspired by some nifty releases such as the Arch to Hell from Fantavatar & Moonstruck and the Blind Prophet headcovering by lassitude & ennui. The latter is available at the just-opened November round of We Love Role-Play and features a peculiar kind of headcovering that covers your eyes and sports a pair of horns. In fact, it makes it look like the horns are part of you and the cloth draped over them and decorated with metal symbols. Its truly weird and unique.

Journeying alone, she keeps to the less known roads, always with her bow and arrows within easy reach on her horse. The slight, elegant mare is a little too fine to pass as a common traveller’s horse and her own garb might also arouse too much interest. On this evening, she passes near the eastern shore of the peninsula. Some distance out into the water, a pair of houses on tall stilts are visible, their lights beckoning in an inviting fashion.

One does not simply walk into Faerie, even if one finds one of the gates that leads there. Faerie is an ever-changing realm of both beauty and terror and one needs to be prepared for the dangers that lurk within. A trusty steed, bold and well protected by armour, is a good companion for a perilous journey. An enchanted dagger at one’s side might also help, and jewellery infused with charms of good luck.

(Also, as an aside, if you have not read The Call by Peadar O’Guilin, do so if you want to read a truly frightening account of Faerie.)