Fairhaven

When you visit Fairhaven in OpenSim, it might remind you of a roleplay sim. Or, if you're new to Second Life / OpenSimulator, you might wonder how to "play the game" here at all. While Fairhaven may be a bit of both, at its heart, it's an attempt to recreate daily life in a 1557 village in Somerset, the West Country of England, grounded in real historical research rather than invented fantasy.

1557 was a tense, uncertain year. Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, and the first queen to reign over England in her own right, was working to reverse the Protestant Reformation her father and brother, Edward VI, had set in motion. For ordinary people, that meant confusion and real danger: practicing the wrong religion, or even being suspected of it, could get you in serious trouble.

Somerset and the Bristol Channel were a long way from London, but in a world that was quietly shrinking, they weren't as remote as they seemed. The daily life of Fairhaven's residents — their trades, their worries, their daily choices — reflects the larger currents moving through England and Europe at the time.

The region is built across nine sims on the Genesis Roleplay Grid, laid out in a 3x3 grid. Each sim represents a different facet of Tudor life — trade, farming, faith, and more — shown in the diagram to the right.

The first sim underway is Havenmouth, at the mouth of the River Haven (a fictional river) where it meets the Bristol Channel. Havenmouth centers on harbor trade, wharfside nautical businesses, Crown-held farmland worked by tenants, and the noxious trades kept upriver and clear of the village. The area also features the dramatic mudflats typical of the region — shaped by some of the highest tidal ranges in the world — and shows how people adapted their lives around them.