Category: Second Life

So, I’ve probably mentioned I’m really not one for the whole “Halloween season” thing, but a couple of years ago I dropped into Miskatonic County, the themed Full region held by Tobiath Tendaze, and tried their Halloween / horror first-person adventure / shoot-’em-up. As it has been a couple of years since that visit, I decided to drop back and see what has changed with the new adventure, Tales of Miskatonic County: Dragon Rising.

In the shadows and back alleys of Miskatonic, evil has returned. Cultists have raised portals and called forth horrors from the abyssal plains to attack the city. Their goal is to restore the reign of the Great Old Ones. This Halloween, a titan will rise!

– Introduction to Tales of Miskatonic County: Dragon Rising

Visitors to the region are delivered to a landing point where the essentials can be picked up – a HUD and a revolver. Both of which are available via boards on the walls of the landing point.

When obtaining the HUD, may be asked to join the region’s Experience. This is a necessary part of the activity, so you should click on the Yes button. Don’t worry about the control permissions being granted over your avatar – these are necessary to the game and will be revoked when you leave the region (those who have previously accepted the Miskatonic experience need only touch the board to receive a fresh HUD).

Once the Experience has been accepted, the game HUD will automatically attach to your screen, and – unseen – a character sheet is created for you, if one does not already exist. This records and saves your progress, and allows you to leave the experience at any time (removing the HUD), and then re-join it at a later time, your progress being automatically uploaded to the new HUD. If you wish to delete all of your progress and start over, click the red cube at the landing point.

I’m not going to explain the HUD in all its glory here, as it includes an option to receive an explanatory note card, so I’ll leave you with a quick image-based overview (right). Do note that the three numbered elements of the HUD can be moved independently around your screen.

Once the HUD is attached, click the Pistol sign on the wall to obtain what looks to be a Colt Python .357 Magnum. While this may not be “the most powerful handgun in the world” (as a certain cinematic cop might say through gritted teeth), you will need it to blast the various nasties you’ll be encountering, preferably before they do you a serious mischief.

To find said nasties, take the teleport portal just outside the landing point down to the ground level and the edge of the town of Miskatonic. On arrival, you’ll need to switch to Mouselook to aim and fire your gun (left mouse-click). The nasties themselves may be wandering the various locations, others might be spawned via a “gateway” and others may burst forth in front of (or behind) you unexpectedly. When they attack you, they will cause damage to your health, shields and armour – so shooting sooner rather than later is advised. Such damage will recover over time, but should your health reach “zero”, you’ll be teleported to the town’s care centre where you can use a hospital bed to recover.

You can also help recover your health in several ways: by consuming the food and drinks that might be found within some of the buildings (which you can move around in 3rd person view as the nasties do not enter them), or by collecting any first aid kits you might find, or by using the energy vials some of the nasties might leave behind when “killed”. In all three cases, left-click the object in question to “add” it to a slot in the HUD’s inventory, then click the slot itself to “consume” the item it contains.

It is possible to simply run around blasting nasties, using the teleport portals (tunnels and covered bridges) to move between the town’s different locations to locate them. However, there is also at least one story awaiting discovery by touching various books, etc., and then reading the contents via the HUD.

However, there are also NPCs – non-player characters – awaiting discovery. Touching one will open a “dialogue” conducted via the HUD that will both provide information (possibly via more than one touch or by clicking the HUD info panel), and one or more quest options, including a list of possible quests which you can opt to complete. (you can select up to 5 quests at a time, opening opportunities for varied game play).

Quests vary in content from continuing the shoot-the-nasty format through to performing rescuing or finding items. Again a note card available through the Help options in the HUD will provide information on the various quests that many be available.

All of which adds up to the opportunity for first-person entertainment.  As with 2019, I found that while the instructions on using the HUD, following quests, etc., to be very detailed, the broader brush-strokes of the main story seem to be poorly presented. What is the coming “titan”? What role does it play in the actual activities within the region? Perhaps this is only discovered by completing all quests, etc., which admittedly I have not done.  I will say that I found the shoot-’em-up aspect oddly addictive – as I did in 2019 -, although this was tempered by the fact that the game HUD seemed exceptionally slow to respond / update, even when I was the only person in the region.

Nevertheless, if adventure games / hunts are your thing, Dragon Rising may well be worth the time poking at.

SLurl Details

• Tales of Miskatonic County: Dragon Rising (Miskatonic County, rated Moderate)

Tucked into the mouth of the river Esk on Yorkshire’s rugged coast is the town of Whitby. It’s a place that many from outside of Great Britain might not have heard of, yet it is a place steeped in history and literature. It was, for example, the place from which Captain James Cook learned the ropes (literally and figuratively) as a merchant navy seaman. In fact, the ship on which he completed his first great voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1768-1771), HMS Endeavour, was originally a Whitby “Cat” collier (called the Earl of Pembroke). It is a town overlooked by the ruins of a once great Abbey that, in 664, hosted a synod called by King Oswiu of Northumbria, in order to set fast the rule that his kingdom would calculate Easter and observe the monastic tonsure according to the customs of Rome.

In terms of writing and literature, Whitby was the home to the first known Anglo Saxon monk, Cædmon, who resided at the Abbey during the abbacy of St Hilda (657–680). It was also visited by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, whilst the likes of Elizabeth Gaskell, Lewis Carroll and G.P. Taylor all used it within works of fiction and short stories. And most famously of all, in terms of literature, it was in part the inspiration of, and setting for, Bram Stroker’s masterpiece of Gothic fiction (although arguably, it is far more than that): Dracula.

All of which acts as a long way of introducing the latest public build by Hera (zee9): Whitby: Birth of Dracula, opened as a part of the Halloween season in Second Life, and which is reached via her “Neverland X” landing point, sharing the space with the teleport to Drune Gotham, which I wrote about in September 2021. Now, given I am a huge fan of Hera’s work (and oft wish my photographs could do it real justice), when I say this is yet another superb build, some might opt to see my words as fangirl fussing. However, as one explores Whitby: Birth of Dracula, slowing peeling open its layers of composition, then it becomes obvious that it really has been cleverly brought into being.

The first thing to note about the setting is that it is not intended as a representation of Whitby past or present. Nor is it entirely the Whitby glimpsed through the pages of Stoker’s novel. Rather, it is a rich melding of elements, from the actual locations that feature in the story and are present in Whitby to this day, to representations of the things that are said to have influenced his ideas for the story and elements of Victorian life with which he would have been familiar, through to interpretations as to how Stoker might have imagined scenes from his story as he walked through Whitby’s streets, attempting to thresh out the tale he’d been working on since well before taking a family holiday to the town.

Thus it is that visitors arriving in the setting (DO make sure you have your viewer set to Use Shared Environment via World → Environment) find themselves on the east bank of the river Esk, a stylised version of Whitby’s waterfront hugging the feet of the coastal hills behind. Caught in a brooding night, these streets offer clever little points of interest for those who walk them. There is the bookshop, for example, displaying a large volume on Vlad the Impaler, a touch that evokes both the idea (now regarded by scholars as mistaken), that the character of Dracula was inspired by the infamous Wallachian prince, and the reality that Stoker first came across the name “Dracula” whilst perusing Whitby’s library. Across the street sits a tavern – pubs being very common in Whitby, it being a sailor’s town – that both suggests a place with Stoker himself might have partaken the odd tipple and a place where, within the novel, rumours of night terrors might be softly spoken by frightened townsfolk.

Further along the streets visitor will come across the place of business of Madame Blavatsky, offering both funeral services and occult / spiritual services. It offers a clever linking of many of the underpinning themes within Stoker’s novel on matters of religion, life, death, and afterlife with the life and work of Madame Helen Blavatsky. Whist Stoker may not have met her, her thinking did much to elevate matters of the occult, spiritualism and life and death amongst Victorians, which may also have influenced his writing.

Then there are the famous Whitby steps. While the ones within this setting may not count 199, they do wind up to the headland where sits Hera’s interpretation of both St. Mary’s Church and the ruins of the Abbey that formed such a backdrop to Stoker’s tale. The church, carefully aligned east-to-west, as one would expect, is furnished within and sits with gravestones without. The real St. Mary’s offered further inspiration for Stoker; whilst walking through the graveyard, he came upon a headstone bearing the name “Swales”, which in turn became the name of Dracula’s first victim, after he came ashore at Whitby thanks to the ship he was travelling board ran aground close to the town’s East Cliffs.

The wrecking of Dracula’s ship within the novel actually draws upon a piece of local legend from Stoker’s time: the beaching of the Russian vessel Dmitri. Within Whitby: birth of Dracula, Hera directly references Dracula’s arrival, a sailing vessel lying aground just off the headland, bloody bodies of her crew on her decks, victims of his insatiable appetite, and her precious (to Dracula, at least) cargo still in her hold.

Up on the headland is a further building, representing the manor house said to have been erected in the 1500s in part using stone from the ruins of the Abbey (which fell to the Danes in a series of raids along the coast between 867-870). Here, the building is offered as a combination of potential settings from the book. The hearse and gargoyles to the front suggest it is the place of shelter for Dracula, as do some of the pictures on the walls inside. However, the interior with its large, uncurtained conservatory, mirrored washrooms and comfortable bedrooms, perhaps also suggest it to be the house in which Mrs. Westenra, her daughter Lucy and Lucy’s friend Mina stay whilst holidaying in Whitby; whilst the placement of certain items on tables and within carry cases suggest it might also represent the living quarters for Dr. John Seward at his asylum, the place from which he, Harker and others used to execute their hunting of the vampire under the guidance of Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

To the rear of this house is a garden that extends out to a crypt. This offers further echoes of Dracula, although the glass coffin within the tomb itself is perhaps suggestive of the resting place for fair Lucy, after her being turned, but before her final fate befell her after death. Or, perhaps, it is presented as a place for Mina, once her fate is sealed (unless Dracula is first killed).

And therein lies the magic of Whitby: birth of Dracula. Just is the novel has no singular protagonist, but is instead presented as an epistolary novel, speaking with multiple voices, so does Hera’s setting speak in many voices, each whispering a different interpretation of the places we come across whilst visiting, with some telling the story in their own words and those telling a broader tale of Stoker’s relationship with the town. Different they may be, but together they nevertheless offer the harmony of a setting that perfectly encapsulates the atmospheric essence of Stoker’s novel whilst living our imaginations free to call forth all of the characters within its pages – and even Stoker himself as he vacated in the quiet town of Whitby in the 1980s.

SLurl Details

• Neverland X Landing Point (Cloud Lake, rated Adult)