Second Life Adventures 3: Kingdom of Sands

Originally published at I Am Completely Serious. You can comment here or there.

Today I am making a really long post about design decisions made by the makers of a Second Life Gorean role-play sim. I hope you’re up for that.

Kingdom of Sand/Purgatorio/1001 Nights is, as is often the case when a Westerner devises a fantasy culture incorporating slavery, based loosely on the Middle East. Yeah, okay, fellow white people. (That’s you I’m looking at funny, Jane Yolen. Frank Herbert. Jennifer Roberson. C. S. Lewis.)

Second Life has a lot of Gorean areas, and visually, most of them are kind of a mish-mash of medieval Western European and Middle Eastern elements, with the European predominating. My understanding is that the books leaned more the other way, but there’s a lot of cross-pollination between the Gorean areas and the (obviously Europe-inspired) Elven ones - enough that some of the more conservative Elven-themed sims, like Avilion, will often warn you immediately upon entry that you better not go practicing any slavery in here.

You’ll also find branches of the same clothing and weapons sellers in both types of areas, and when Goreans and elves build prefab, they buy from the same people. (Julia Hathor, Baron Grayson, and Kriss Lehmann probably account for 25% of the Elvish and Gorean landscape.) The Gorean sims tend to read a little like NC-17-rated versions of the Elven ones.

Kingdom of Sands sticks to genre convention:

Cobras are the shorthand. Carpet sellers are also good.

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