The Caste of Builders: What you Should Know

[Hawt Sommer]

Caste of Builders: Science/ Technology (Watched Closely by Initiates/ PKs)

Caste Color: Yellow
Caste symbol is metal angle square

In Ar, for example, early in the day, a member of the Builders will go to the roof on which the Home Stone is kept and place the primitive symbol of his trade, a metal angle square, before the Stone, praying to the Priest-Kings for the prosperity of his caste in the coming year.

WHAT DO THEY DO?

Architects Design buildings and direct their erection
Engineers Maintain various technologies permited by the Priest-Kings; assist Warriors in constructing siege engines
Draftsmen Record building plans and engineering schema; possess the unique and valued skill of being able to put heir caste-brothers' ideas and dreams down on scroll and ink.
Stonemasons Responsible for working with stone and brick, stonecarving, and heavy construction
Inventors and Technicians Deveop new technologies and engineering techniques; often have a short life expectancy due to sudden death by Blue Flame

Arcitecture:

Roads
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

Towers
Chemist/Architects
Created: 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

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

War Machines / Siege Engines

Catapults

< Request / Insert Discover Quote >

Electronics:

Tarn-Goads
He entered my apartment, carrying a metal rod about two feet long, with a leather loop attached. It had a switch in the handle, which could be set in two positions, on and off, like a simple torch. He wore another such instrument slung from his belt. “This is not a weapon,” he said. “It is not to be used as a weapon.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A tarn-goad,” he replied. He snapped the switch in the barrel to the “on” position and struck the table. It showered sparks in a sudden cascade of yellow light, but left the table unmarked.
Tarnsman of Gor, chapter three, page 34

Slave-Goads
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.

Energy Bulbs
Produce clear soft light for years
These bulbs, invented more than a century ago by the Caste of Builders, produce a clear, soft light for years without replacement.
Tarnsman

Fire-makers, Fire-drills
The man from the Caste of Builders then sat cross-legged on the ground and took from the pouch slung at his waist a tiny, cylindrical Gorean fire-maker, a small silverfish tube commonly used for igniting cooking fires.

Translators
One of the most interesting was the Translator, which could be set for various languages. ---------- Although the machines could be set for various languages, one term of the translation symmetry, at least in the machines I saw, was always Gorean. If I set the machine to, say, Language A and spoke Gorean into it, it would, after a fraction of a second, emit a succession of noises, which was the translation of my Gorean sentences into A. On the other hand, a new succession of noises in A would be received by the machine and emitted as a message in Gorean. (Tarnsman of Gor, chapter three, page 25)


Compasses and Navigational Equipment and Telescopes/binoculars/magnifying glasses

The walls were crowded, and I supposed many upon them used the long glasses of the Caste of Builders to observe the field of the stakes. (Nomads of Gor, chapter ten, page 113)

He took from a silken pouch lying before him on the palanquin a small glass, with glass petal edges like a flower, mounted on a silver stem about which curled silver leaves. Through this he looked on her more closely. (Nomads of Gor, chapter 11, page 131)

Builders Glass
I heard, about a half an Ahn later, Tenrik call up to the lookout.
The man carried a long glass of the builders.
"Can you make out their flag?" he cried.
"It is white," he cried, "with stripes of green. It bears on its field the head of a bosk!" (Raiders of Gor, Chapter 13, page 185)

I kept my course by the luminescent dial of my Gor compass, the needle of which pointed always to the Sardar Mountain Range, home of the Priest-Kings. Sometimes I guided my tarn by the stars, the same fixed stars I had seen from another angle above my head in the mountains of New Hampshire. (Tarnsman of Gor, chapter five, page 54)

Like most Gor compasses, mine contained a chronometer, and I took the compass, turned it over, and pressed the tab that would snap open the back and reveal the dial. (Tarnsman of Gor, chapter six, page 58)

…delighted to find my old maps and that device that serves Goreans as both compass and chronometer. (Tarnsman of Gor, Chapter 12, page 115)

Some four days after I had recovered the tarn, we sighted in the distance the Sardar Mountains. Had I possessed a Gorean compass, its needle would have pointed invariably to those mountains, as though to indicate the home of the Priest-Kings. (Outlaw of Gor, chapter twenty, page 179)


Hydraulics

At the same time from the escarpment came a smooth, rolling sound as a great weight was effortlessly balanced and lifted by hydraulic means. To my amazement, I saw that an immense opening had appeared in the wall. An enormous slab, perhaps fifty feet square, had slid upward and backward, revealing a great, dim, squarish tunnel beyond, a tunnel large enough for a flying tarn. (Tarnsman of Gor, chapter eighteen, page 158)