So, I’m starting my article again after my PC crashed… and I hadn’t saved. What a joy. (et, oui, la version française arrive, je la poste demain)

For the start of the new school year – yes, I know, late – we’re going to talk about what a slave house is, one of the most important places in a Gorean city, let alone a Gorean roleplay sim. This will be the first in a series of articles on important roleplay locations in the Gor world.

And by way of introduction, let’s start by destroying an onlinism: a slave house is NOT a kennel. A kennel is, well, a kennel, i.e. a group of cages, complete with amenities, intended for the boarding of slaves. A city’s public cages are a kennel: slaves are housed, fed and cared for, and an owner can rent a cage for his possession while he does his business, knowing that it will be treated with care (for a pet, I mean). A kennel is used to lock up slaves at night, or when they’re not needed. In a tavern, a bathhouse, a middle-class or wealthy Gorean home, there’s usually a kennel, i.e. the room where the cages and mattresses of the household’s slaves are kept – the vast majority of slaves sleep in cages, in Gor’s world, it’s a tradition and a security. The place where slaves are breeded and trained is called a slave house.

1- The slave house

A slave house, which can also be called a slave compound, is an enclosed building, often structured in a rectangle around a central courtyard, or a group of buildings in an enclosed space, surrounded by gardens and high walls, depending on the luxury and wealth of the premises. In any case, it’s a pretty big place, since it has to house the staff, the owners and the slaves, plus everything else.

There are two types of slave house: public and private. The only real difference is that the former belongs to the city, and rents its building to slavers, while the latter belongs entirely to private entrepreneurs. As a slave house is much more expensive than a kennel, it’s usually a group of slavers, financed by the slavers caste and sometimes by the merchant caste, who manage the structure.

A slave house has a kennel, of course, but it also has training rooms, classrooms, baths, kitchens, apartments for the house staff, a showroom, a treatment room, a kennel for the guard sleens and, last but not least, basements and torture room.

The characteristic feature of Gorean slave houses is that the violent refinement of kajirae training requires specific structures:

Basements

When the head slaver receives captives who have not yet been tamed, he stocks them in cages in the basement, adjacent to a torture room, where all the equipment needed to break the captive’s will and begin the early stages of her training, before she can join the kennels on the surface, is located.

The reason these rooms are underground is to preserve the tranquility and sleep of the rest of the household. A captive at the start of her training cries, screams, protests, and it’s a disturbing noise that we prefer to avoid, by isolating them. The captives thus spend days in a cage, in the dark, often in the cold, which accentuates their distress and facilitates their training.

The showroom

In all slave houses, there is a reception room, usually next to the office of the local head slaver. It’s a richly decorated and furnished room, but more importantly, it’s equipped with stages or cushions, and often a small dance pit, or carpets.

This is the first room the visitor sees when entering the slave house, and it’s here that the house’s slaves are displayed for the customer, ready for sale. They’ll be displayed naked, doing their best to please the customer, under the merciless gaze of the master of the household. If the slave house can afford it, this is where the stimulation cage or cages are located.

The stimulation cage is a comfortable, low cage, richly adorned with furs, fabrics and cloths, beautiful and pleasant, open for all to see, but where the slave cannot stand without having to lower her head considerably, and where she is forbidden to speak or look up at anyone. There, an educator feeds her, further initiating her into pleasures, teaching her how to apply make-up, beauty products, combs, hair and body oils, perfumes, to enhance her beauty and give her a taste for refinement and pomp, while accentuating her loneliness, isolation, desire to be placed in the hands of a man and offered to him.

Depending on the taste of the master of the house, or the organization of the Slave House, the showroom can also be part of the courtyard garden. In this case, it is immediately accessible after the reception room.

The treatment room

Training kajirae involves not only physical damage, but also health and hygiene risks. So there’s almost always a treatment room, with its own pharmacy and cages for isolating the injured or sick. In a luxury slave house, there’s even a physician exclusively responsible for ensuring the slaves’ health.

This room is used for first aid, until a physician arrives to take care of the sick and injured. In this room, a slave who wants to starve herself is force-fed through a tube (see the link to this article on slave equipment).

The hall of mirrors

The Hall of Mirrors is usually the main training room in the slave house. Slaves in training are brought here, after their first few weeks of basic training, to undergo psychological conditioning that employs mirrors, which reflect back to them their own nudity and position, while they tirelessly repeat very simple lessons, on their knees, for hours a day, under the supervision of an educator. For more details, I refer you to this article, which explains it all.

2- Organization

A slave house is a microcosm, a small society within Gorean society, with its own hierarchy, necessary for the smooth running of the structure. Depending on the size of the slave house, you’ll need more or less staff, and, yes, you’ll need several slavers to take care of a complete breeding operation, which imposes this hierarchy all the more.

I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate a roleplay tip for slaver players: it’s impossible to properly manage more than 4 or 5 slaves at a time, and even less so in a training roleplay. Attempting to do so is bound to lead to major disappointments and frustrations; enough to put a player off his role, whether he’s a slave or a slaver. Ideally, a slaver should have no more than three slaves at a time, and should delegate or share the work with others.

Let’s take a quick look at the staff of a slave house:

The head slaver

The head of the household, in charge above all of giving orders, purchasing and, above all, selling products! He owns or rents the slaves’ house, either alone or in collaboration with his caste and the Merchant caste. In general, he’s a good manager and businessman, with commercial contacts all over the place. The best head slavers also have contacts with agents of the priest-kings (or kurris) who traffic in earthlings on acquisition trips (see this article on the subject), when they are not doing so themselves.

Assistant slavers

Not everyone can own their own household, and assistants are slavers who are paid by the head slaver and work on site. They are much more in touch with the products to be trained and educated, and are in charge of taking care of the living stock. These are the people with whom captives and slaves are most likely to associate. If, in the novels, you can count on one assistant for a dozen slaves, or even more, in Gorean roleplay, I recommend, as I said above, trying to have one for four slaves at most. See this article for the slaver’s roles.

Guards

These are mercenaries, of the warrior caste or not, whose job is simply to look after the household’s security. They sometimes include a sleen trainer who knows how to handle these animals, and is employed to track down any runaway slaves. More often than not, such roles are entrusted to NPCs, in Gorean roleplay.

Educators

This is something that seems to be little known to Gorean roleplayers, but every slave house that claims to educate female pleasure slaves has at least one educator. This is a particularly experienced female pleasure slave who is responsible for educating the other slaves in their role. For I recall the Gorean proverb: “A master trains, an educator educates”. I’ve never quite understood it myself: I mean, can’t a master teach his own slave to read? But that’s a Gorean code. When it comes to education, especially in the arts of pleasure and service, a specially-trained slave is in charge. She has a major role, and total authority over all the other slaves (and can punish as she sees fit). I describe this role a little more in this article.

PS: this role also comes in very handy in Gorean roleplay, to avoid being overloaded with too many slaves to train, since the educator can manage 2, or even 3, slaves herself.

Teachers

In the larger slave houses, slaves are taught a variety of skills and arts, which increases their cost. Slavers or educators either don’t master these skills, or have something else to do. For example, reading and writing, literature, singing and music, among other possible refinements. To this end, the slave house hires teachers, either free people or skilled slaves, to run classes within the slave house, under the supervision of a slaver.

Healers

As I mentioned earlier, in larger slave houses, especially those with livestock, there is usually a physician hired by the household, who works solely to look after the health and hygiene of the slaves. Often, this is the physician’s specialty (I talk about this in Physicians’ specialties, in this article). But it can also be an external doctor, who comes to do home visits and examinations.

3- Activities

Microcosms mean that a slave house is always bustling with activity. Training and educating slaves takes time and involves a lot of activities.

I won’t go into all the basic training of kajirae here, from their arrival as captives to their first lessons. I describe this work in detail in this article, which I recommend to you. Here, we’re going to talk about the activities in which all slaves can (and must) take part, from novices to the most highly trained among them.

Conditioning lessons

These take place in the Hall of Mirrors, often the main training room. Novices kneel, thighs open, in front of a mirror, repeating the same mantras over and over again, listening to explanations of their status, their nature, their condition as slaves, and answering the same key questions over and over again, for days on end, until their brains are conditioned to accept their state. As all this is often carried out using sexual pleasure as a carrot, and corporal punishment as a stick, with a badine, or even a slave goad, the educators enlist the help of the most experienced kajirae in the household, to supervise the novices. But even the most experienced kajirae can find themselves naked in front of the mirror, practicing over and over again.

Obedience lessons

Practiced only by slavers, these lessons serve to test the obedience of even the most experienced slaves. The aim is to impose humiliating orders, bullying, insults, difficult postures or lessons in endurance and suffering without rebelling or hesitating. These are public lessons, and if a slave fails, she is punished immediately, in front of all the others. Some trials may involve inflicting punishment on another slave, for no particular reason, to push obedience to the absolute. Some other trials may even involve endangering the life of the kajira, who may undergo simulated drowning or strangulation, and must resist struggling or rebelling.

Sex lessons

Practiced by slavers and educators alike, the name says it all. Since the notion of rape has no meaning for a slave, she’s taught to be used sexually, whether tenderly or violently, and to let herself be used, and to find pleasure in it. Of course, this only works with slow, gradual conditioning, which involves a lot of work on constant sexual arousal and prohibition of cum, mixing pleasure, desire, sensuality, violence and gentleness, so that the slave loses all inhibition and becomes sex-dependent. The lessons are there to keep the slave in a state of desire, and to teach her to serve sexually in every possible way, including enduring the sheer quantity of instruments that goreans like to use to fuck their slaves (see this chapter, which goes into detail on this subject). Oh, and of course, these lessons are given in private, as well as in full view of the other slaves and free!

Health & hygiene examinations

Once a week, all kajirae undergo a health and hygiene check-up. Since they are conditioned to understand that their bodies no longer belong to them, and that they must take care of them as the property of their master, these examinations are there to remind them that the slightest negligence will cost them dearly. They are scrutinized in detail, examined from every angle, weighed with care, and everything is recorded in medical follow-up files. These examinations also serve to prevent epidemics.

Exposure

As mentioned above, when an important customer comes to make a purchase, all the slaves trained enough to be bought are called, and they come to exhibit in front of the customer. As this is a very important exercise – the aim is to do everything to please and be sold – the master-slave-owner of the household regularly organizes a display session, to train the slaves. With whip in hand, he reviews each of them, before making the most pleasing serve, including sexually, or dance. And to distribute punishments and lashes to the less pleasant.

Classes:

A list of the main courses given to slaves during their training.

Posture training

Under the tutelage of an educator armed with her badine, and sometimes with a slave-driver who comes to check how things are going, the slaves learn the basic postures of the kajira (an article about them here), how to walk, how to kneel, how to prostrate themselves, how to wait, how to move, etc., the aim being to teach them to do all this sensually, whether provocatively, or subtly sensual and discreet. These classes are very hard, very severe, and physically exhausting.

Dance classes

Just as hard, exhausting and severe as the maintenance classes, these require, what’s more, the skills of an expert dancer. Assisted by an educator, she teaches the kajirae the art of dance. And what better way to check that the slaves have learned than to have them dance in front of men, to a set theme, as they learn the basic dances? Those who succeed in dancing in a pleasant and seductive way will end up sexually used and rewarded, those who don’t will be harshly punished.

PS: there’s rarely any music for these classes. Sometimes a tambourine, or a little singing, but nothing more.

Cooking & serving classes

A slave is a domestic servant; even if she’s only meant for pleasure, she must know how to cook, tidy a house, wash clothes, sew and darn, and above all, serve people properly. Classes are given by an educator and the most experienced slaves, and they often cook for the staff of the slaves’ house, wash their clothes, clean the house, etc. The tasks are divided up, and each slave is assigned a specific task. Tasks are divided up, and each in turn takes on a new task. Of course, if you’re not perfect at your task, you’ll be punished.

Beauty classes

Complementing the posture and sex classes, beauty classes teach kajirae hygiene, the use of creams, balms and perfume, and the art of styling hair, applying make-up and dressing to please. This is also where the kajirae learns certain tricks, such as how to use certain lubricants or aphrodisiacs, and how to facilitate and ensure her physical availability for sexual use. This is an important course, given by educators only.

Bathing classes

The kajira learns to bathe men and women, wash them, take care of their hair and massage them. She will also eventually learn to swim, as well as certain sexual techniques in the water. While these are always very strict courses, they are often appreciated by the slaves, who are rarely allowed to wash in baths.

Games

Life in a slave house is hard and strict, with little time for leisure. But there are still games played in this closed, authoritarian environment. Slavers often encourage or even take part in these games, either by giving pledges or inviting slaves to join in.

Dancing & singing : to pass an evening, and entertain the men, dancing and singing for pleasure are common. A well-trained girl may even take the opportunity to perform a sensual slave dance, in order to curry favor with a slaver, and perhaps spend the night with him, or win a treat.

Dice games : since kajirae have nothing to wager on dice games, they often play their chores as pawns, pledges to be made – to avoid risking punishment – or possibly binas beads won during training.

Guessing games & pledges: often organized by educators and slavers, these are guessing games, but sometimes also games of trivia on intimate subjects. Either the kajira answers the question, or she is given a challenge, which consists of something she has to do, again without any consequences that could lead to punishment.

Ball games : kajirae take it in turns to throw a small ball made of cloth or leather, filled with feathers to prevent the ball from hurting anyone. The aim is not to let the ball fall to the ground, which could result in a penalty or elimination.

Blind man’s bluff : the kajirae stand in a circle, or in a delimited space such as the inner courtyard. In the center of the circle, a blindfolded kajira, armed with a badine, must succeed in touching one of the other kajirae. The one touched then takes her place, and the game continues.

4- questions/answers

What do the kajirae eat?

Can you guess? gruel! In other words, a bland porridge made from degermed cereal grains, usually oats, barley or buckwheat, cooked in water, with the occasional vegetable, fish head or lard (tarsk fat). The staple food of the poorest peasants and workers, kajira eats that the vast majority of the time. Earning the right to a sweet treat, or even a buttered slice of toast or a mouthful of meat, is a privilege that drives the kajirae’s efforts to please as best they can.

What does a kennel look like?

In a slave house, it’s a room, more or less open to the outside, sometimes with braziers, and containing cages, in which are the straw mattresses where the slaves sleep. To keep warm, several slaves sleep in one cage, but this is not systematic. Nor do they always have blankets. When it’s bedtime, all the slaves enter their cages, which are locked until the next day. It’s best to make sure you don’t get the urge in the middle of the night!

Are there male educators?

Except in a slave house specializing in male pleasure slaves, never. And I don’t think I’ve come across a single mention of them in the novels, so I wouldn’t speculate on their existence.

Do female slavers exist?

Yes, and even head slavers who run entire households, including female pleasure slaves. But it’s rare, because it’s a socially difficult role to manage and quite dangerous. I talk about it in this article.

Is it okay to mix male and female slaves?

It’s not recommended, and it’s not without its problems, let me explain. One of the common punishments for a slave who has been unable to please during sexual use is to throw her into a cage of male slaves for the night, and I won’t draw you a picture of what happens to her. So, kajirae not only have contempt for male slaves, but many of them are scared to death of them. Of course, they’ll never mix in cages – the kennels are segregated – but it’s conceivable that they might cross paths or even socialize in the slave house.

Is there any other way to train slaves?

While strict authority and ruthless harshness are inevitable, especially when it comes to the basis of training and conditioning, yes, of course, slaves can be trained much more gently than described here. The gentler, more time-consuming method also produces fuller, more spontaneous and independent slaves, while ensuring that they take on their role and accept their nature. But, in a way, it’s a form of exoticism and, since this kind of gentler, less cruel treatment requires far more skill and psychological techniques, and therefore more time and work, it’s a more expensive kind of slave training, so it’s clearly rare.

How are slaves sold?

While every slave house has a showroom, most slaves, once trained, are sold at auction. Why is this? For two reasons. Firstly, because most slaves are poorly trained, and because their basic price is low, selling them on a stage at auction is a good way to drive up prices. Secondly, for the prestige of the slave house, auctioning an educated pleasure slave, who is made to dance and beg on the dais, extolling her skills and education, is excellent advertising to attract buyers who will come to see the rest of the stock in the slave house.

Are there first girl in a slave house?

Yes, but they are not educators and do not participate in slave training. They are the private property of one of the slavers in his chain, and have authority over his chain of slaves, that’s all. In the hierarchy of slaves in a slave house, the highest-ranking is the educator. It’s possible for a first girl to become an educator, but I insist that an educator is a luxury slave of pleasures, expertly trained in the best slave houses, not just a veteran slave.

Can slaves be let out during training?

Yes! but usually, for the first few days, on a leash and naked, for their first walks. These two details, in addition to having an educational and safety value, make it possible to clearly announce, without having to tell them: this slave is being trained, so don’t expect too much. In the novels, clearly, slaves undergoing training and education never leave the slave house unescorted, and this is very rare. In Gorean roleplay, I insist on allowing more freedom, as soon as the kajira has been trained enough to assume the basics of her role and status. Because I’ve spent days playing a kajira locked in a cage, or in a pen, with nobody to see while the rest of the town was swarming with people, and seriously, it’s very frustrating.

Who can be a slaver?

Only a member of the slaver caste can be a slaver, whether assistant or head of household. No one else will be allowed to open a slave’s house – forget the Torvi or Plains people slavers, or even Pani: they don’t recognize caste principles, or have their own castes and guilds, which are NOT recognized by the gorean slaver caste. It’s not just forbidden, is it? It’s a crime punishable by death under Gorean law!