Types of building

 Builders of Roads

SEE Gorean Roads between cities. 

The road, like most Gorean roads, was built like a wall in the earth and was intended to last a hundred generations. The Gorean, having little idea of progress in our sense, takes great care in his building and workmanship. What he builds he expects men to use until the storms of time have worn it to dust. Yet this road, for all the loving craft of the Caste of Builders which had been lavished upon it, was only an unpretentious, subsidiary road, hardly wide enough for two carts to pass. Indeed, even the main roads to Ko-ro- ba were a far cry from the great highways that led to and from a metropolis like Ar. 

Outlaw

Materials used for building roads

This was not the only breach in the walls, of course, but it was that which was nearest to our lodgings. Here some hundreds, at least, were laboring. Others, of course, on the other side of the wall, would be gathering up tumbled stone, loading it and removing it from the area. The walls of Ar, in effect, had become a quarry. This would, I suppose, depress the market for stone in various cities, perhaps even as far away as Venna. There were many uses for such stone, but most had to do with materials for building, paving and fill. Much of the stone would be pounded into gravel by prisoners and slaves far from the city. This gravel was used mainly for bedding primary roads and paving secondary roads. There were, at present, nineteen such breaches about the city. These breaches, multiplying the avenues of possible assault on the city, were not randomly located. They were set at tactically optimum sites for such assaults and distributed in such a manner as to require the maximum dispersal of defensive forces. The pursued objective, of course, (pg. 118) was to multiply and join breaches, until the razing of the walls of Ar was complete. 

Magicians

Streets of Ar made of stone with large flat stepping stones for crossing street in rain

I was barefooted and not used to so walking the stone streets of Ar. Hooded, it was further difficult to pick my way. Particularly was I angered by the occasional large, flat blocks of stone placed across the streets, low enough to permit a wagon to pass over them, and separated by enough distance to allow the passage of a wagon's wheels, but surely a threat to a tethered fool, shackled and hooded, led on a chain behind a wagon. The purpose of the blocks, which are used where the streets are curbed, is to provide stepping stones for crossing the street when there have been heavy rains.

Assassin

Types of Buildings, Materials, & Architecture

Flat narrow bricks common in southern Gorean architechture

There, some fifty yards away, kneeling, huddled together against the brick wall of a public building, the wall composed of the flat, narrow bricks common in southern Gorean architecture, was a group of some one hundred to one hundred and fifty females.

Mercenaries

Glazing substance for the outside of cylinders

The marvelous glazing substances of the Caste of Builders, long prohibited as frivolous and expensive, began to appear on the walls of the cylinders, even on the walls of the city itself. 

Outlaw

Blocks of colored stone to pave streets

Graveled streets are now being paved with blocks of colored stone set in patterns to delight the eye. 

Outlaw - Taking place in Tharna

Marble floor on the Seminium

Within the entrance to the Semnium was a marble-floored, lofty hall. Passageways and stairways led variously from this broad vestibule. 

Mercenaries

Mosaics on walls of Seminium

The walls were adorned with mosaics, scenes generally of civic life, prominent among them were scenes of public gatherings, conferences and processions. One depicted the laying of the first stone in Torcadinos walls, an act which presumably would have taken place more than seven hundred years ago, when, according to the legends, the first wall, only a dozen feet high, was built to encircle and protect a great, sprawling encampment at the joining of trade routes.

Mercenaries

Steel and iron girders used in building of towers

Although we had come up several flights, we were probably not more than seventy or eighty feet Gorean from the street level. Without girders, frame steel and timber iron, as the Goreans say wrought in the iron shops, such as are used in the towers, physics, even indexed to the Gorean gravity, is quick to impose its inexorable limits on heights. Such buildings tend to be vulnerable to structural stresses, and are sometimes weakened by slight movements of the earth. Sometimes walls give way; sometimes entire floors collapse.

Mercenaries

What the job entailed

Builders had to work within local ordinances regarding various structures

There, in one wall, was a long crack. The floor creaked, too, in places, as one trod upon it. I trusted this was merely from the disrepair and age of the boards. Insulae are seldom maintained well. They are cheap to build, and easily replaced. Their structure is primarily wood and brick. There are ordinances governing how high they may be built. 

Mercenaries 

Sharing techniques with other members of the caste

Further, members of castes such as the Physicians and Builders use the fairs for the dissemination of information and techniques among Caste Brothers, as is prescribed in their codes in spite of the fact that their respective cities may be hostile. 

Priest Kings

Similarly men of such castes as the Physicians and Builders make use of the fairs to disseminate and exchange information pertaining to their respective crafts.

Outlaw

Building roads

Do you know where lies the old in of Ragnar, on the old west road? he asked. Yes, she said. It is now abandoned, is it not? It is not now in use, he said, though it is occasionally reopened when there is an overflow of folks from Torvaldsland, come for the fair. Some two years ago the merchants and builders had opened the road of Cyprianus, named for the engineer in charge of the project, which led to the fairs rather from the southwest. This had considerably reduced the traffic on the road of Clearchus, now to its north, which had approached the fairs in such a way as to favor the traffic from the northwest, with the result that several of the establishments on the road of Clearchus had been abandoned or relocated. One advantage of the more southern route is that it passes through less rough terrain, terrain which provides less cover for highwaymen. In particular, it does not pass, for several pasangs, though the woods of Clearchus. 

Players

Known Accomplishments of Builders

Developed Slave Goad with Caste of Physicians

On the other side of the belt, there hung a slave goad, rather like the tarn goad, except that it is designed to be used as an instrument for the control of human beings rather than tarns. It was, like the tarn goad, developed jointly by the Caste of Physicians and that of the Builders, the Physicians contributing knowledge of the pain fibers of human beings, the networks of nerve endings, and the Builders contributing certain principles and techniques developed in the construction and manufacture of energy bulbs. Unlike the tarn goad which has a simple on-off switch in the handle, the slave goad works with both a switch and a dial, and the intensity of the charge administered can be varied from an infliction which is only distinctly unpleasant to one which is instantly lethal. 

Assassin