There is a mod, and forgive me for not remembering where I got it from (my computer is still packed up from moving or I would check), that will let you add hair to any male sim. It has options for the degree of hairiness too. Though, I'm not entirely sure how it works with naked clothes. I haven't tried it a ton as I got way too busy with school and then moving.

And yeah... that picture. Yum. That would make a lovely wallpaper.

When my brother gets home from work I'll see if he can hook my cpu up to his monitor for a few minutes so I can look. I have a feeling I got it at one of the adult sites, and there is no way in hell I am going there on my parents computer.

YES!!! That is exactly what I spent an entire Saturday trying to make! Now Egelric and the various Malcolms can be all hairy again! *joy!* I foresee a lot of shirtless Sims in our future. Don't spend all those karma points in one place now.

The good news is: IT WORKS!!

The bad news is: it doesn't work for everybody. I tried it on Egelric and Leofric first, and it didn't do anything. Then I tried it on some of my most recently created characters -- Saeward, Enna of Leinster, and still-hot-out-of-the-oven Robert Curthose -- and it worked GREAT.

So now I have to figure out what's up. I read that this mod assigns the body hair color based on the Sim's hair color, so maybe there is a problem with Egelric and Leof wearing a custom, non-color-binned hair? I think my other three test subjects are all wearing binned hair. I will also look at their genetics and see if there's a difference. In the worst case (like maybe the Sims are just too damned old) I can always clone their looks onto new Sims with SimPE.

Yay!!!

I suspect that Malcolm would have had the same problem as Egelric and Leofric. I really did try to strike a balance between age of Sim and relative phwoariness when I picked Saeward, I swear!

Seriously, not even a little phwoar for Mysterious Reeve?

Now, I really like Saeward's beard, so obviously phwoariness is in the eye of the beholder. I would love to get a handful of that and give it a tug.

I do agree about the hair, however, it's a little flippy and pixie-like and, oh, sexually ambiguous. It probably looks better after he has slept in it though.

...... and yet, there's a smouldering quality about him too. Guess he doesn't like being confronted 'half naked' (or is that 'fully' naked? ) and asked to pose for the camera

Well done. I wouldn't know where to begin with simPE, personally. I'd be afraid of really screwing things up.

I'd better start running before Egelric tries to punch me in the face

That's the house of Atheric the sculptor. I've been working a lot on the village below Nothelm Keep these last weeks, starting with the wealthy street, Matildasweg. Mainly because that's where Shirtless K. McSilversmith is going to be moving in.

Wow, this village is so beautiful ! You must have had spent so much time to do it. Did you do the interiors too ? Will you give us a tour of the village ?

~Your French Friend~

hahaha Oh, no! The life of an illuminator had to be extra, extra boring. I've seen the Book of Kells! Work like that does not just happen overnight. And probably also happened in complete silence.

But I'm fairly certain that you could provide us with a compelling narrative about an illuminator. For some reason, when I try to picture a story about an illuminator, it involves a passionate but somehow taboo romance. I can just see him caught in the throes of a violent and destructive passion, set atop a cluttered, candle-lit desk.

Well, Penelope, my Lotherian illuminator is a widower, so he could be having a passionate affair... with a married woman, say. Like the supposedly puritanical wife of Alred's grim steward. And his young apprentice had his first child at 15 so he probably got into some interesting desktop situations as well.

It's funny, though, the person I imagined having a passionate, illicit affair among throngs of lit candles was Shirtless K. I started decorating his house with his wares, and of course you can't have those candlesticks in the game without the candles stuck in them, so it looks like the guy must invest in dozens of wax candles to dazzle people with the beauty of his work when people come in to shop. And to distract them from the awesomeness of his naked chest. But oh my God at night that place looks like a Den of Looooove if I ever saw one. (Which I haven't, OK?) It just needs rose petals strewn upon the floor.

François, the mindset in 11th century Scotland, the coasts of northern England, and especially Man and Ireland was probably rather different from what it was in Italy and France. The people lived in fear of Viking raids, so they were already banding into small, fortified communities long before I started this story. Quite a few of the very, very old Anglo-Saxon stone churches looked more like early castles than churches. They were built to be defensible. And the sort of tall, round stone tower like the one Eirik was imprisoned in were built in many Irish and Manx monasteries to give the monks a place to watch for Vikings, and to hide in if they came. (They readily killed monks and sacked and burned churches.) Oftentimes there would not even be a door on the bottom floor, and you could only get inside by climbing a ladder that the monks would bring inside if they were under attack. Unfortunately if the Vikings could get a fire lit in the tower, the whole thing acted like a chimney instead, and the monks got burned alive.

This is actually useful information to keep in mind as you're reading the story. According to our history books, the Viking reign of terror is over, but think about how the situation looks to the Gaels of the 11th century. The Irish and the Manxmen and the Scots finally get their countries back from the Norsemen, and then along comes men like Whitehand and Eirik with their fleets. They've already taken Man. For all anyone knows, the terror is beginning again.

Cumbria was surprisingly neglected during this time period. King William never really got his hands on it, and it was sort of left to the "tender mercies" of the Scots. (Who, as you know, have something of a reputation for raping and pillaging in these parts.)

In terms of the story, Sigefrith has been hiding out in Aed's shadow for most of the time, though lately the situation is getting somewhat reversed and Sigefrith is becoming more influential due to his ability to squeeze the most out of his distant blood ties to foreign nobles, and generally speaking his ability to network. He is such a schmoozer.

Of course it should be obvious how fragile a kingdom built up on diplomatic alliances can be. He doesn't have a powerful army, and he doesn't even have access to the sea except through the benevolence of the lords that live between him and the coast and who will (he hopes) allow him to march to the sea if necessary to move his army by ship. And of course Whitehand's benevolence in terms of allowing any ships of his to sail.

Next year things should get quite interesting in that respect. Sigefrith is counting on having that march to the sea open to him, plus Eirik being at the coast waiting for him with troop ships. Otherwise he is going to have a devil of a time getting any aid to the Danish king's invasion, and if he doesn't help out, he knows he's not going to get a piece of the spoils. (Of course he is hoping to get Hwaelnaess back, or more...)

Sigefrith is actually spending a lot of time pacing the floor at night and doing whatever nervous habits he does, worrying about how he's going to pull this off. But only Malcolm and Eadie know the truth of that.

As for Shirtless K, the K was supposed to be for Kilted, but now I keep thinking of "Special K" with that giant red K on the box... hmm I am tempted to give him some unpronounceable eight-syllable foreign name beginning with K, and have the local folks start calling him "Shirtless K" for real... He can be a formidable challenger to Beddy in the Shirtless Stakes.

Me toooooo. Eirik + pirates...**sigh** That sounds oh-so badass. Like Eirik himself, of course.
It's not that he's all that conventionally attractive - he's got a rather horsey face and I'm not a big fan of blonds - but he's so completely full of awesome that I love him all the same.
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I'm romantic, literary, cynical, and a diehard Alred Sebright groupie.

I don't have BV yet anyway, but even so I think chapters at sea are out of my league. Sims 2 doesn't lend itself to outdoor scenes anyway, unless you can't see the landscape for the trees and buildings. I would love to do some, but I can't even begin to imagine how I would pull it off.

I don't think Sigefrith would personally go back to Hwaelnaess unless he got a bigger chunk of earth out of the deal than Lothere. If he was made an earl on the scale of Harold in his Earl of Wessex days, he might reconsider, but I think he does like being a king. However, Hwaelnaess would be a perfect place for Caedwulf to cut his teeth, and in later years it could be Drage's inheritance, assuming of course that Caedwulf does not die without issue. Hwaelnaess would be a great base from which to attack OR defend London too.

The situation with Whitehand is getting delicate, and Eirik is about to make it a lot worse. Sigefrith is going to have to choose between them. We'll see how he balances loyalty, diplomacy, family, and pragmatism.

What has Whitehand done to become such a bastard, though, really? He didn't let the men rape Sigi after all, and he's perfectly correct in looking at Eirik as a threat. If anything he has simply handled the threat in the wrong way, and made things worse for himself. Also, he is pretty hot.

It would be difficult to get a Slav or Russian all the way to Lothere, though we do know they get around since Leofwine broke his leg jousting with a guy from Kiev.

BUT! It would be tough to explain the kilt.

Actually I was thinking of making him a Manxman, maybe one with some Norse ancestry or from a Norse-speaking area, but with a Gaelic name. So, written phonetically, it would come out with a K, like Kjarval for Cearball or Konkovar for Cecily's father (if memory serves) for Connchobar.

Some nice tongue twister like Cú Coicéle or Cú Crúachu, that makes people go "What?" every time he tries to tell his name... heheh He would learn to say "Just call me K."

Those proposed Russian names sound like hacking up a hairball!

It is very hard to find info about Manx names, or Man in general. The only site I have bookmarked with Manx names is here. Though they date from much later, you can see the Gaelic influence. At least if you are familiar with old Gaelic names and know how they are pronounced.

I freely use Old Irish words and names in my story for any of the three tribes of Gaels, since in 1100 the 3 languages were practically the same. An Irish Gaelic-speaker and a Scottish Gaelic-speaker would have understood each other much better then than now. And I would bet there was a strong feeling of brotherhood as a result, in the cases where they actually met each other, and given that they were constantly being attacked by Vikings etc. during much of the early Middle Ages. As Cearball said to Hetty: "We're all Gaels." Not to be confused with the dastardly Welshmen.

The letter K did not exist in Gaelic, but the Norsemen didn't have C, so that's what they used for a hard C-sound. So I am just picking names starting with C and working from there. Now that I've started, I'm going to have to come up with a doozy for the poor gentleman.

I found it.

Definitely before Christmas. I am starting to see how to work him into the story. I should save him for a point where we need some comic relief.