Over the years I’ve collected a great many things, and most of them involve my various stories in writing and roleplay and tend to be artwork of various settings and the characters who inhabit them.
Since 2008 or so I’ve primarily used Second Life as the engine for my stories and settings because I can build them in 3D for the enjoyment of anyone interested.
In 2011 I set up a little place called “Trotsdale” for the fans of the pop-culture phenomenon that was “Gen 4” MLP – but as a different place with different stories and heroes from the TV show.
Initially the location was to simply be a town where players could hang out and soak in the ambiance of a place similar to the TV show. The town proper was mostly built by a fellow on SL named OldVamp who was my right-hand man for the whole thing. None of it would have went very far without his help.
In any roleplay setting you need a ‘storyteller’ character to illustrate the world and it’s history for the players, and in MLP this function is fulfilled by Alicorns… So, I had to make my own, and Aurora was created.
After a year or so I decided to expand the setting to the lands Aurora controlled, and this became the setting of Roanoak, of which Aurora was Empress.
Aurora has had a bunch of very epic artwork made of her – mostly concerned with her talent and the history of her lands…
Roanoak ran for about four years until, in 2015, some friends of mine wanted to start a new roleplay setting in Second Life – one based upon the fanfiction “Fallout Equestria”.
I was happy enough to oblige, and using the backstory set up years earlier rolled Roanoak’s clock forward about 200 years…
In doing this though, I had to move beyond Aurora’s world and Aurora herself. And through a complicated series of events, Iridae came onto the scene to illustrate the next chapter.
Unlike Aurora, who the players met in the middle of the story, Iridae began along with the players… Initially she was a unicorn, and through a year long series of trials and tribulations eventually became Aurora’s successor. Iridae got the same all-star treatment as Aurora, but this time the art included physical items…
My ‘pony period’ in SL was from 2011 to 2021 – a decade of world building and adventure imagined, penned, and often built by yours truly… It was a pretty epic time and was filled with fantastic people – and the conventions and general vacation trips to Disneyland and Las Vegas just to hang out with them were equally memorable.
I kind of miss it, truth be told. But as I enter year two of my forced vacation from the second job that it was, I’m content to continue missing it.
Listening to "The Grey Havens" by The Lord of the Rings & James Galway