The ancient Greek fishing village of Eleusis suffers since the Goddess Demeter cursed the land.

Graveyards are filled with freshly dug graves for the weak and the young who could not struggle any longer, their poor bodies giving up all heat after experiencing the first Winter known to mankind.

Graveside vigils are kept to protect the souls of loved ones until it is time to meet Charon, who ferrys them across the river and to the entrance of the Underworld. Safe passage requires a coin, but with the village in crisis, all coins have gone to the temple as offerings to Hera and Demeter, to remove the curse.

But some are too spent to pray, they simply lie on the grave with misguided notions that their body warmth can be exchanges. The epitaphs they’ve written a verbal reminder of how Demeter directly caused her young child’s life to expire.

How can these people’s dire grief be lifted? Perhaps never. But perhaps you – you YOU – would like to enter the world with me and try to help?

If you are interested in online role-play for educational purposes, please let me know! I’ll be organising some workshops in the second half of the year if I can find SL educators who are interested in taking part.

Artiste extraordinaire Beth (Stella Costello) created this statue to symbolise the sense of loss experienced by the people inside this story. Why is she broken? Whose loss? Which people are torn apart?

Stay tuned…. it gets worse!

And on the 10th day, Chris (CJ Carnot) created a whole new world. Can you guess what world it is?

Part of my Greek myth build is completed now! Here’s an image of the graveyard, where participants will tell and write stories in role. I’m going to also ask experienced students to make personifications of grief – I did a rather non-metaphorical example of a person expressing grief here:

I have to confess I bought a “basic mannequins prim” set online and just positioned each prim to make this statue. I think the set is a great bridge for non builders (like me!) to start using the tools more creatively. It only took me an hour, and I have zero building skills. There was a full permissions set available so that means I can give copies of the set to all my students and send them off on a task. It really focusses attention on the body, and is a reminder that the body can be and is present in an online drama and role-playing session in all sorts of ways.

And so the 3D sketch starts becoming transformed – atmosphere, details, effects, poses… the wonderful creation here of Stella Costello. This is truly exciting. Each step in making a new world and a new experience is fascinating – and of course seeing students and visitors enjoy the world is very rewarding, but this stage – is just magical!

The build in Second Life is moving along – the NMC team (Larry, Chris and Beth) have been terraforming and blocking out the space with prims. It’s interesting to watch the progress from 2D to 3D sketch and then to 3D finished build. Once the spatial elements are positioned and shaped, then the real fun begins!  

Now that the new sims are here, I’ve been working with Larry and co at the NMC to map out my part of the space. I sent the build team a detailed 20 page brief for one section (the literary role-playing area) and a 10 page brief for another section (the central University meeting point and gathering area)! Phew!

Yesterday I drew a rough map of the literary space into my moleskin and today I woke up to see it had been converted into a giant prim to map out the land! It was completely surreal to walk around in my own drawing. You might be able to tell from the drawing that my mapping and drawing skills leave a bit to be desired – Larry asked me what the cute little deer was and I had to explain that it was Cerberus, the vicious hound from hell!! Pffft