World Building: The Clan Chieftain -Patronage, Power, and Slave Breeding on Hyperborea

It Takes a Group, Even on Hyperborea

The Limits of A Single Swordsman

Not all who live on Hyperborea can afford to become great warriors, well-equipped to face the myriad of natural, human, and eldritch threats of the world. Neither can all such threats be survived by the sword skill of a single man. As much as Hyperborea lends itself to the free wheeling libertarian, going where he will; slaying who he must; and enslaving who he likes; it is a world given to the formation of strong and protective communities.

Abandonment and Re-Colonization

Hyperborea is a land of ongoing change, renewal, and growth. Settlers constantly push out into regenerated lands, long abandoned by ancient peoples fleeing the ravaging power of Eldritch beings. Easy sea and river access mean relatively easy travel. Just one farm over, may be folk of a different language group, religion, and ancestry. As such, old, carried-forward power structures from home territories are not useful. They are as likely to create cultural strife on the frontier as they are unity.

Ad Hoc Power

Instead, a more ad hoc system emerged that could quickly form and as quickly be abandoned. This is the institution of the Hyperborean clan chiefs: meritocratic patrons who emerge to support and organize their neighbors.

Clan Chieftains

Sooner or later, a man will tend to stand out, marked by his deeds or great wealth. He may be a farmer outside the gates of a great city that leaves its peasantry to their own problems, a frontiersman in the wilds, or a trapper roving the mountains. What makes them progress from local heroes (or villains) is they they start helping out their neighbors.

This is an ingrained Hyperborean behavior that is millennia old. Formed out of self-interest and transmitted to all parts of the world, it grows communities and reduces the risk to individuals - especially the emerging chieftain. .

He typically helps by:

• Buying and storing excess grain against disasters

• Visits to see how his fellows are doing

• Small loans

• Adjudicating disputes

• Dealing directly with outside dangers, or organizing posses

• Building community structures such as wharfs, granaries, and especially temples.

There is no official recognition or statement of intent to become a clan chieftain: it evolves naturally. Fogrim for example is on such a path: a fearsome and prosperous warrior with many slave girls, he is locally respected and sees his neighbors problems as his own. In time (if left alone by Gerard) he would emerge as a local chieftain.

Slave Breeding: Dynastic Pacts the Hyperborean Way

Masters typically breed their strongest and most attractive slaves.

There is no greater tie than friendship, but lacking that blood ties will do nicely. Just as noble families consolidate power through dynastic marriages, chieftains also make dynastic bonds. However, they do not marry off their children. Hyperborea’s widespread female slavery creates a different option: dynastic adoption.

This has three advantages:

Absorbing Excess Fertility

Successful Hyperboren men tend to have lots of slave girls. The more pretty girls a man has chained in his slave pen, the more chances he has to screw up with the breeding drugs. Abortifacient treatments can be dangerous and a master may opt to allow a favorite slave to bring a child to term, rather than risk her death.

Not all Hyperborean men want children, and few wish to see more than one or two running around. Giving newborns to subject families is a good solution to what follows keeping caged girls by the bed.

Protecting Free Women

Free women hate slave girls. They compete for the attention of their husbands, and enjoy/suffer sexual experiences their husbands can never subject them to. However, free women see slaves girls as necessary for reducing their childbearing burden. Both maternal and infant mortality on Hyperborea are high.

Dynastic adoption solves this. Not only only does it put a family under a chief's formal protection, but it also means a household needs fewer slaves.

Slave Girl Domination

Some masters enjoy the idea of breeding their slaves. It is an exercise in power, and all the more attractive to them as breeding is the one indignity most Hyperborean slave girls will actively resist. Such masters make breeding another tool of domination and slave training. A slave is made to beg to be bred, to kneel and present herself for chaining in the breeding hut, and to thank her master after he is done with her. The more bitterly she does these, the more satisfying it is for the master to command them.

(Some such men breed several slaves at a time. The slaves will know that most of them will have their pregnancies terminated, but one or two will be made to carry their infants to term. Their torment in going days or even weeks without knowing, is part of their master’s game.)

Dynastic adoption is an good fit for the breeding habits of such masters. They may breed their girls more freely, knowing the infants will have loyal homes. Greater political power means more slaves taken in raids or commerce, and in turn more breeding.

From Community to Clan

Bred slaves enjoy better feeding and kenneling.

Dynastic adoption ties a subject to a chieftain - but it also ties subjects to subjects. Here is its power. Even the most disparate group of strangers can be welded into a united, family clan within a generation.

The nuts and bolts of the mechanism can vary. More aggressive chieftains will not wait to be asked: they will offer adoptions. This forces recipients of their support to "shit or get off the pot" as it were - especially important where one chieftain’s influence may come up against another's.

Some subjects (or ‘landsmen’) may send a slave girl to their chieftain to serve in his slave pen until she becomes pregnant. Then, the chief returns her.

How Clan-building Affects Slave-holding

Bharaji girls are preferred breeding slaves. Their recovery is superhuman and their breeding cycles are only 3 months: perfect for rapidly repopulating a lost region.

A Chieftain may breed his Bharaji girls as often as three times a year, if needed.

When a local hero decides to build a clan chieftaincy, his needs change. He will begin purchasing slave girls specifically for breeding. He will also need more slave girls, to help support those he has impregnated.

Any kind will do as breeding slaves, though Shang, Bharaji, and Ansaru are preferred as they are genetically engineered transhumans:

• they have low maternal mortality

• recover completely

• have shorter gestation periods

• give birth to heavier infants

Bharaji girls are exceptional in that they recover completely within a month of giving birth. The only way a bred Bharaji can then be told from an unbred one, is that the bred one produces milk.

Newborns are kept in a nursery for as little time as possible, usually not more than a month. Then they are given to their adoptive families, and the slave girl can be put to dairy.

Some chieftains offer cheese and fresh milk to prospective landsman as a hint that it is time to ally up. Others ask if a chief is ‘selling milk,’ to signal their willingness to enter into formal alliance.

Is This Going to be In a Story?

If (if!) Gerard survives Aymund, he will return to Dura - as a man of considerable achievement, wealth, and with many slaves. He is keen to embrace Hyperborean identity and has become quite comfortable with subjecting his females to his whims!

Slave breeding will very much be a thing.

John Norman Held Back - What Explicit Gorean Slave Sex Would Have Looked Like in the Gor Books

What would that look like, and how can 'Sex, Swords, and Sandals' writers take that forward?

John Norman never gives us explicit sex. Sometimes he comments in between bouts of sex between characters, but you don’t get a gritty, sticky, blow by blow (pardon the pun) of what happens after Tarl drags a girl to his bed. Let’s look at possible reasons why, and what Gorean slave may actually have been like if presented in explicit detail.

Possible reasons why:

1 - It’s not his thing.

Sexual bondage of Gorean slaves is the dominant feature of the Gor books, but also, so is story. Characters have changing fortunes and opinions, there’s the politics and life of a whole world to present.

I don't think this is the reason though: Norman spends so much content talking about how slaves are taken, broken, and trained, why would he then hold back right at the most fun bit?

2 - He may have been squeamish.

This doesn’t hold water, either. Firstly, why would a squeamish person write about the hunting, training, and use of sex slaves, at all? Also, Gor is the product of the ‘60s. By 1970 he had 5 books out firmly establishing his universe - and giving him plenty of room to experiment with explicit writing:

Tarnsman of Gor (1966)
Outlaw of Gor (1967)
Priest-Kings of Gor (1968)
Nomads of Gor (1969)
Assassin of Gor (1970)

John Norman created this sub genre. He isn’t shy about a damn thing.

3 - He was not allowed to by the publisher.

Consider that right before, or just as as sex begins, his slaves make clear how much they want to have sex with their masters. Their cries are always of pleasure. They beg for their masters’ touch. Why is Norman so keen to make clear the slave girls are giving active consent? Because otherwise, his books can be slammed for dealing with rape just for the sake of titillation. That’s an open and shut ‘no no’ for any publisher.

Leaving out explicit sex wasn’t enough to protect the Gor books; in the 80s they suffered a backlash no one should have been surprised by. Nowadays however, after a generation of Internet use, we know a lot more about the staggering range, diversity, and truly eccentric nature of human sexual interests and fetishes. People aren’t worried about fetishists being weird monsters who will kill them and rape their children, because they’ve discovered that THEY are those fetishists. 50 Shades of Grey is mainstream - who would have seen that coming? Judging people by their sexual interests and fetishes is invitation to a circular firing squad.

Now, 54 years after Tarnsman of Gor was published, let’s try and figure out what it was about Gorean slave sex that his editors likely found so disturbing. Fortunately, John Norman has given us plenty of clues.

Buckle up - this is going to get disturbing, even for Gor fans. You’ve been warned.

A Look At The 'True' Gorean Lifestyle - Abject Sexual Slavery

Slavery is never practiced by kind-hearted people. Slave owners aren't known for taking the time to think about how their slaves might feel about what's going on. Look up how women are treated in human trafficking right now. And whenever slave owners did stop to think about such things, their slave holding culture had the institutions in place to make sure they didn't think about it too long.

Aristotle wrote of what he called 'natural slaves.' In Hinduism the less fortunate are suffering for actions in their past lives. Then there is always the argument that 'someone else will profit from this, if I don't. It’s better if its me.'

Picture if you will a man, fully celebrated by his culture for keeping gorgeous, naked, young women in cages. Is he one day going to give them some clothes, and ask them to be on their way with an apology and a handjob, for old times sake?

Some men will do that (in any slave holding culture). Most men though, won't. Ask yourself; does your phone or tablet have chips in it made by a manufacturer who exploits their workers? If so, what have you done about that?

With the choice made to set aside all empathy for a group, this allows the choosers to impose any treatment upon said group, without reservation, be it forced labor, sex, sadism, cannibalism, or extermination. This choice is the central characteristic of Gorean slave sex. The choice to enslave.

The Rape and Dubious Consent of the Kajira

No Gorean slave girl decides within a couple of days that actually, she loves master, who also coincidentally has chosen just that moment to pin her down, force her legs apart, and fuck her. This is done to imply in the Gor books that people are having sex.

They are not.

Sex is consenting between two people who just really hit it off, even if they don't understand why, or each other. Or brain wave patterns sync with our partner's when we're having sex. There is eye contact. There is participation. There's chemistry (sex without chemistry is very unsatisfying. Just go to the bathroom and use your hand, next time).

Goreans never have sex with their slaves. Instead, they impose power over them. In Julius Caesar's words, 'the strong take what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.' John Norman doesn't hide this from us; this is what the 'whip of the furs' is. Gorean slave girls are 'used.' They are used to teach them their place. They are used to break resistance. A Gorean slave girl is likely used as soon as she is captured or bought -- it sets the tone of the relationship at its start. They are used often, to reinforce their understanding of where they kneel in the hierarchy, and for the double rush it gives their masters: one of sexual delight, and the other, a tremendous sense of power.

In my John Norman inspired books, the main characters almost never kiss slave girls (and when they do, its because there's something weird going on between them). Instead, the most common sexual encounter begins with a naked slave girl kneeling at their feet, to suck them off. This is common, low impact, and not often noteworthy to the characters.

Consider this excerpt:

“Before me were two naked girls who had opened the door for me. Both knelt at my feet, thighs tightly together, and resting back on their heels. One had her wrists bound in front of her, a slender, dark-haired Shemite who was fit for a harem of ancient Assyria. The other had her wrists cuffed behind her back, a gently tanned, petite, Caucasian girl with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes. It was the slave girl he had kidnapped from the criminal Lukor's mansion.

"He has not returned yet, master," said the Shemite. Ninli, I think he had named her.

The blonde looked up at me, her blue eyes wide.

A mistake.

"He said he would be back by dawn," I loosened my belt and pulled out my penis. "It is not like him to be incorrect about such things."

I grabbed the blonde by her hair and pulled her to me. She quickly opened her mouth and took in my penis. Her mouth was warm; she began to bob her head back and forth.

"What's this one's name?"

"Master Fogrim has not named her yet," Ninli shook her head.

I surveyed the girls hanging chained along the far wall.

“Where is Yura?" I asked. The Shang girl Yura was his current favorite. A subtle beast; she looked like a swimwear model whisked away from a Beijing fashion week.

“He took her with him, Master.”

The blonde Armanean pushed her head forward till my penis touched the back of her throat. Well-trained, she did not gag.

"How old is this one?" I asked.

"She is 19, Master," said Ninli.

"Did your master say anything about where he was going? Or why he took a woman with him? Anything at all?"

"No, Master. I am sorry."

The blonde stroked my penis with her tongue, rolling back the foreskin and licking clean the area around the crown. I seized her hair with both hands and pumped her head until I came. I did not let her move until I was finished. Then, I pulled myself clear. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth wide for me to see.

She remained like that, awaiting my command.

"Excellent girl," I wiped my penis dry on her bared throat. "Tell your master when you see him, but I need to speak with him urgently."

"Yes, Master," said Ninli.

I cupped the blonde’s jaw, shut her mouth, and nodded to her.

Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. Then she opened and showed me her empty mouth.

"Good Slave," I stroked her hair.

I turned and left the room.”

-Temple Girls and Spies, Book 7 in the Tales from Hyperborea

This is a non reciprocal activity. It is performed from a vulnerable position. It is demanded casually, and failure to obey - and to satisfy - have grave consequences. It also literally leaves a taste in the slave girl's mouth to remind her of what her status is. In Tales from Hyperborea, free women do not even know what semen tastes like - oral sex is so correlated with slavery, free women will not perform it. As such, slave girls in the stories find fellatio a truly degrading activity - to commit it, is to accept and actively support their own enslavement, and the idea that the taste of cum belongs in their mouths.

It may seem unfair to block the trivializing (and glorification?) of rape, when we trivialize and glorify murder all the time, presenting it casually and callously, however we see fit based on genre, medium, and intention. And it is unfair. However, when you look around a crowded room, some of those people haven’t been murdered. But, some of them have likely been raped. It is a sensitive matter to write about because for many it is the stuff of nightmares, not fantasy stories.

So, is it genre appropriate to write a graphic, detailed, elaborate rape scene in a Gorean style book?

Absolutely.

Is anyone going to then? Not any time soon, and not on most publishing platforms.

In one of my books, the main character tracks down a slave girl who has run away in part because she was to be given to him, for breeding. In that brutal world, a master may give one of his slave girls to another man, so he may stud her, as token of comradeship. The main character is annoyed the hot little slave is missing - but more than that, angry that in running away, she has caused her master, his friend, to lose face.

After he captures her, he scolds her for what she has done - and then he uses her. An explicit sex scene follows. It is not a rape scene. Yet, I try to make clear that the slave girl is not not enthusiastic. She doesn't protest, refuse, or otherwise resist - but she is very much shown her place:

"You cannot breed me!" She had the defiance of the wronged in a courtroom. "Only my Master can breed me!"

"I am not interested in your weird lovers’ quarrel," I began to disrobe, "and any man who puts his dick between your perfect little buttocks, can make you pregnant. As I am going to do to you now, Slave."

Her expression changed; fear stilled her tongue.

I lay down my clothes and my pack. From inside my pack, I produced four, sharpened, wooden stakes, some rope, and a hammer. I hammered each stake into the ground around her, forming the points of a rectangle. I released one slender ankle from the hogtie, and tied it to a stake. Then the other ankle, to the other stake. Last I tied her wrists to the forward stakes. Thus, Layla ended up on her hands and knees, each limb secured to a separate point of the invisible rectangle.

"Just like in the breeding hut," I slapped her behind. It was warm and soft. "But I want to breed you here, so you will always remember what happened to you when you ran away."

She looked straight ahead, trying to blank her face. I could make out a suppressed pout. Forgrim had spoiled her: no female back at the Red Water slave camp would have behaved this way. Much less a woman under his cruel discipline.

I knelt beside her. I gripped her throat and ran the other hand down the gentle curve of her back, feeling the muscles on either side of the spine, the rise of her buttocks, how they felt cupped in my hand. Her ankles tugged at their ropes, her hands curled into fists.

"Lovely beast, I reached under and stroked her flat belly. "You are perfect." I gripped her by her chin and forced her head to face mine. "A fine little bitch, Layla."

Her dark brown eyes rebuked me.

Afterwards he whips her. Then, he leads her away, naked and bound by her wrists.

Gorean Slave Sex Would Have Been Rough

The intersection between sex and violence is so strong, it is one of the world's biggest social problems. The brain pathways for the two are closely related. The plight of female migrant domestic workers in the Middle East makes clear how vicious this can be. It would only be worse with actual sex slavery.

Graphic, rough sex is (sadly) abundantly missing in John Norman's Gor novels. Slaves are certainly whipped and beaten, but it is never implied that this may be a part of the lovemaking.

Let us leave aside truly vicious sadism - John Norman's men are quite happy to own beautiful young women in excellent physical health, and take pains to keep them that way. However, that does not preclude rough sex. John Norman doesn’t dive into it, but you know these girls are getting thrown about and manhandled. At the very least, some slapping, biting, spanking, and very hard drilling must be going on. This feeds back into imposing dominance. On the worse end, these girls would be getting thrashed just to hear them squeal. This quickly moves into sadism, which would be another aspect of graphic depictions of Gorean slave sex.

Sadism: Whipping, Branding, and Torturing the Kajira

Imagine that the world has ended, and you are stranded on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific. It is idyllic, quiet, and it will be centuries before anyone ever comes here again.

Trapped on this paradise island with you is stunningly beautiful girl. Maybe you capture her by accident in a hunting snare. Maybe she says she'll do anything for you if you keep her alive. Perhaps she just always wanted to crawl after a man, on a leash. Whatever the genesis, you now have a delightful slave girl.

It would be a real shame if you didn't string her up by her wrists and whip her - just a few times, while she insists yes, as she jumps from foot to foot, that you are her master. If she drops something, you would have no choice but to make her crawl round and round in circles on her hands and feet, chanting that she will do better next time master, with you sitting watching her with your whip at your side. You find some metal flotsam - wouldn't her thigh look good with your initial branded into it? As the sun goes down, you wait for the iron to heat as she struggles beside you, bound to a tree trunk.

Sadism is literally the delight we get in the suffering of others. Whether it is glee at an idiot's failures on a Youtube video, or the spanking of a slave girl on the furs. Everyone has a little bit of it. Owning helpless slave girls would see it developed. Gorean slaves suffer a great deal of sadism in their training and general duties - it follows that they would also suffer sadism in sex.

What sort of sadism would Gorean slaves be put to? It depends on their owners and their owners' cultures, but they are least protected in that John Norman never writes about masters who mutilate or scar their girls. An explicit Gorean sex scene would involve 'non bruising' actions such as slapping, spanking, and whipping with soft and wide-bladed whips. Tension and physical tortures such as long kneeling, squatting, or suspension by feet or hands may feature.

In one of my books, the main character uses two slave girls but finds a way to add a new, sadistic element to his pleasure:

“Come, pets.”

They smiled and crawled forward on their hands and knees. I pulled their heads into place between my thighs and they got to work. They licked my balls and penis, taking turns blowing my cock. They kept looking at each other and giggling, and then up at me.

I wrapped their leashes around my hand. In the other, I held the whip.

It is another indescribable feeling, seeing beautiful slave girls such. You are their universe; all they want is your approval. Everything they fear, is your whip.

I could feel the ejaculation coming on. I stood up in the bed, my foot on their chains so they could not rise up from their elbows and knees. I grabbed my penis and sprayed semen over their backs. I squeezed out every drop, both girls remained still.

I got off the bed, pulled up a stool, and sat to watch them.

"Keep very still," I said, raising the whip. "If any of my seed drips off your backs, I will will thrash and crucify you."

-Tendrils of the Mi-Go, Book 5 in the Tales from Hyperborea

(Crucifixion here involves no nails - the slave girl is just tied in position to the cross and left hanging like that, for a few long, painful, hours.)

A slave owner has already decided that cruelty and the denial of empathy are going to be the foundation of his relationship with his slaves. As such, he is freed to explore his sadism with them. A Gorean would do things to his slave girls he would not dream of doing to anyone else. The slaves will suffer what they must.

It is not only physical tortures that a Gorean would use to torment his slave girls with. Psychological ones would be as prominent, if not more so, and far more powerful. It's time to talk about degradation: the wheel upon which so much of Gorean sex would spin.

Going Well Beyond Slave Positions - Degradation in Gorean Sex

The first thing that happens to a girl when she falls slave on Gor, is that she's stripped naked. She may be kept in a tight cage, or crammed into an overcapacity cell with other naked captives. She will be fed slops, perhaps by hand, if she is even fed at all at first. Most powerful of all, her name will taken from her. The most insulting renaming I can remember from a Gor novel is a slave girl who is renamed ‘Pudding.’

Everything about a slave girl's life from the moment she is stripped, is utterly degrading. Goreans enjoy degrading their Gorean slaves, John Norman certainly does. Degradation isn't just another form of sadism - it is a tool of domination. When a caged girl is given a hunk of moldy bread, she will wait till she is desperate before she finally breaks down and eats it. When she does, the casualty is her dignity, her pride.

The next step is to give her a piece of bread her master has stamped on. She eventually capitulates and eats that too. The step after would be bread used to wipe up her master's piss - or his semen.

The gradual stepping down teaches the slave girl to reset her bounds of what is acceptable. After a week of semen-bread, she will be delighted to have stepped-on bread. After a month of mashed and fermented insect guts, semen-bread will make her cry tears of gratitude and lick her masters' feet, rubbing her breasts against legs in true adoration.

Degradation makes a slave girl stop acting like a kidnapped princess, and start acting like a slave girl. The more servile and base she becomes, the more contemptible her master will find her, and the more degrading his treatment of her will be. It does not matter; as long as she is clean when he drags her to his bed, and when she comes into his view as, naked and with a bell at her throat, she goes about her duties, he is satisfied. He will treat her worse than a dog, and she will find such treatment unremarkable. She has come to find it acceptable.

Whatever else we may conjecture about what explicit sex scenes in the Gor novels could have been, we know at least that they would have been utterly degrading. In my writing I've got slave girl's eating cum off the floor. They lick their master's penises clean of smegma every morning. They eat out other slaves for the entertainment of men, swap cum till it spills down their necks and breasts, and eat it off their skin.

Nothing is off the table. This randomly happens to one slave girl who is unfortunately in the right place at the right time:

"Why are you in cages, and not chained for milking?"

"We are waiting to be bred," said the Shang.

I pulled out my knife. There were gasps from some of the girls, and the caged ones tried to shrink back. The Shang stared at me; her eyes were large, dark, intelligent.

I went to her cage and cut away the leather thongs that tied it shut. I opened the cage door.

"Out."

The Shang crawled out on her hands and knees.

"There," I pointed to the brick square.

She crawled to the middle of it. I took one shackle, opened it, and fastened it around her ankle. Then I secured her other ankle, and then both her wrists. She knelt on her hands and knees.

I pulled down my pants, got down behind her, and got to work. Her body was thrown forward with each stroke, her hair tossing. She started to moan; I cupped one hand over her mouth.

When I ejaculated, I pulled her close against me. I held her like that for a few moments, she lowered her head down to the tiles and began panting. Then I stood and shook myself clean; semen dripped onto her back.

I uncuffed her wrists and ankles and led her by her hair to one of the milking shed.

"Kneel."

She knelt under a bar, the collar hanging down by her face.

I lifted her long, silk-soft hair out of the way, and pressed the collar against her warm, sweaty skin. It clicked as it locked. Then I took each of her wrists and shackled them as well.

"What do you say?" I said.

"Thank you, Master."

I left the stable.

-Dagon’s Price, Book 3 in the Tales from Hyperborea

The character was just investigating an area of a camp. He had no idea what he would find there. After he was done with her, he didn’t give that slave girl a second thought. The thoroughly degraded slave girls of that universe expect things like that to happen to them, and worse.

Stockholm Syndrome: Gorean Slave Sex would Have Been Sustainable

Stockholm Syndrome may as well be called Slavery Survival Syndrome: it is a behavior that took root early in human history. Those enslaved who had it, survived. Gorean slave girls survive quite well, which is all their genes care about. Becoming a powerful animal's pet is good survival strategy; I cite the existence of pets as proof of this.

Being utterly powerless before a master who thoroughly degrades her and is amused by her suffering, is not a good place for a slave girl to be. Yet, what most threatens her is that she is easily replaced. If a Gorean doesn't like his slave girl he will sell her - or even kill her.

Given these, the Gorean slave girl learns first not to resist, and then to participate (as best as she is allowed). This protects her from the dangers of not being 'pleasing,' and ultimately what little favor there is to be had. In the Gor books, slave girls compete for little pastries or a piece of ribbon. This is how John Norman shows us the complete power their masters have over them. Their slaves will do anything for a pastry - it is the nicest thing that can ever hope for.

The successful Gorean slave girl is one who:

• is utterly subservient to her master

• has no expectations about her treatment

• is a great performer in bed, and adores her master.

• Is truly happy in the rare moments when she wins tokens of his favor (a pastry, a real kiss, be given a blanket for one night)

• believes she deserves to be treated this way, and will actively fight to remain so.

Her master will always find her pleasing, and will delight in having such a servile sex pet, likely one of several he pits against each other for limited favors.

The less successful slave girls don't make it. They are killed 'off camera.’

Dark shit, eh?

I did warn you. Gor is a dark world, where people do dark things to each other. Never forget the gravity of this or its subject matter. John Norman sanitizes Gor for us with sword fights that Tarl Cabot enters without fear and wins within a few lines.

And that’s fine. This is a fantasy.

Just as fun is the fantasy of markets filled with beautiful, twenty-something, slave girls, who mysteriously have no VDs, and are all somehow just a good, hard, fuck away from lying gratefully leashed and oiled at a man’s feet.

Reading Between the Lines

Whatever the reason we don’t have deep, explicit, slave sex in the Gor books, John Norman has still given us more than enough hints as to the possible nature of the Gorean lifestyle. It is for writers inspired by his work to explore this, and see where this takes the Slaves, Sword and Sandals genre, next.

Worldbuilding: Temple Girls

“The foulest Babylonian custom is that which compels every woman of the land to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger at least once in her life … most sit down in the sacred plot of Aphrodite, with crowns of cord on their heads; there is a great multitude of women coming and going; passages marked by line run every way through the crowd, by which the men pass and make their choice. Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple; but while he casts the money, he must say, "I invite you in the name of Mylitta". It does not matter what sum the money is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects no one. “

- Herodotus, 440 BC

The use of ‘temple girls’ for sex began in the ancient Near East, taking various forms in Babylon, Sumer, and among the Hittites. It survived even into relatively recent history through the institution of the Davadisi in India. Early human colonists took the practice to Hyperborea where it flourished.

Fertility Rituals

All Hyperborean fertility rituals involve sex. Fertility sex worship is for two reasons; for favorable harvest, or for abundant breeding.

Harvest rituals are about winning over a god, usually Shub Niggurath. Farmers will breed a virgin slave girl and offer the blood of her deflowering to the goddess’s shrine. Those near forests were Dark Young lurk will travel to their sacred gathering places and cast the blood there.

More prosperous (or desperate) farmers will go a step further than offering blood. Before the planting season they will breed a slave or slaves, wait till they manifest morning sickness, and then sacrifice the victims by blade or fire. Those in Dark Young-infested lands will stake their offerings out by the edge of the forest, and return the next day to collect and burn any human remains.

Whatever the perceived results of such practices, they have a eugenic outcome. It is the lazier, slower, or sickly slaves that are sacrificed in this manner. It also serves to help maintain discipline on a farm. In the months before harvest a farmer’s slave girls are at their most pleasing.

Slave girls are in no such danger over where breeding is the objective. Here, the goal is simply to impregnate slaves and see healthy offspring born. Such practices are common in cities where slave breeding supplements the high death rates of low tech, urban living.

Ritual Magic

Magic and worship are essentially the same for Hyperboreans; forming pacts with demons for favors. Where sex is a ritual/spell component, not just any slave girl will do. Instead, a temple’s own, consecrated slave girls are used - this allows priests to maintain a monopoly over these rituals.

Slave girls are usually consecrated by some or all of the following:

• restricted or special diet

• seclusion from commoners

• ritual cleansing

• indoctrination into the cult’s mysteries

The status of temple girls depends on their roles. In a faith where they are invested in, such as the Servants of the Mi-Go, the most senior temple girls are not slaves at all, but sex priestesses recruited from the faithful. Sex priestesses are well trained, educated, and may be quite powerful - even to the point of controlling their temples. As such, in the patriarchal world of Hyperborea, the temple is one area where women may wield as power as their male peers.

However, in faiths where temple girls have roles that require minimal investment, they are slaves. In the Cult of Yog which is Darfur’s dominant faith, temple girls are sacrificed after sex. Such girls are quickly and easily consecrated, and kept caged till such time as they are needed. Before major religious festivals the temples are filled with such victims.

Control

Cults also use sex and temple girls to exert control over their followers. By making sex with temple girls a source of prestige, cults may limit access in exchange for power and privilege. A clever sex priestess will have her own following of helpless male followers, who may keep far lovelier females chained and kneeling at their feet, but be very much slaves themselves.

Conversely, encouraging - or demanding - women worshipers to join as temple girls, is a demonstration of the temple’s power. Those women who refuse may be shunned, or otherwise socially punished. In extreme cases, they may even suffer stoning or ‘honor killings.’

Wealth

Temple girl slaves are a form of wealth, in and of themselves. Accumulated and beautiful flesh has considerable value - which also makes temples a choice target for raiders. Temple slaves are also prostituted out to the faithful for direct revenue.

The Gor Series: Marauders of Gor

Picture Credit: Chris Achilleos

The Gor Series: Marauders of Gor

Marauders of Gor is a powerful story in the Gor series. In it John Norman tells the tale of a much matured, crueler Tarl Cabot - who knows what he wants and has no reservations about taking it. He is more Gorean, but more important than that he has grown and has certainty of purpose now. Gor won’t be changing him anymore; now he will be changing Gor. This becomes part of the tone of the Gor series.

In Marauders of Gor Tarl goes to the icy wastes of Torvaldsland where he finds a transplanted Viking culture that very much echoes his own changes. In contrast with the decadent, delicate, cultured world of Ar in Assassin of Gor with its slave dances and colored silks, Torvaldsland is a monstrous, barbaric land of monstrous barbaric men (and indeed, monsters as well). It is a place where death may come at any time to even an armed free person - and is far more deadly for a slave girl.  

Spoiler Warning!

The Barbaric Sex Slavery of Torvaldsland

The Threat of Death

In Ar, there is a professionalism among slavers that protects sex slaves to some degree. Emotions are secondary to logic; a girl may live as long as she has value. In violent Torvaldsland a slave girl has no such guarantee. Surrounded by violent men who enjoy killing - and drunkenness - there is a mortal menace hanging over their Gorean slavery at all times. Consider the fate of the male slave Tarsk who had attempted to strike a slave girl (an overstepping of Torvaldsland bounds).

His punishment would be heavy indeed. The snake is a single-bladed whip, weighted, of braided leather, eight feet long and about a half an inch to an inch thick. It is capable of lifting the flesh from a man’s back. Sometimes it is set with tiny particles of metal. It was not impossible that he would die under its blows.

This was a commuted sentence: he was to have been killed but Tarl intervened and suggested a whipping instead.

Female slaves are just as likely to be killed. Norman describes how the raiders will use them as bait if need be:

When food is low it is not unknown … to use a bond-maid … for bait in such a manner. The least pleasing girl is always used. This practice, of course, encourages bondmaids to vie vigorously to please their masters.

And true disobedience really only has one solution.

“Drink,” said the Forkbeard.

She lifted it to her lips, and tasted it. She closed her eyes, and twisted her face.

“It is too bitter,” she wept.

She felt the knife of the Forkbeard at her belly. “Drink,” said he.

Marauders of Gor is a primal, violent book with berserkers blinding themselves in rage and eating the flesh of their enemies. Yet, Norman holds back from showing us slave girls executed and turned into scarecrows in the fields, stuffed and mounted inside slave pens as daily reminders, or fed to the other girls. I suspect he was simply uncomfortable writing such content and preferred to have Tarl simply relate that such cruelty existed there. You will find nothing as disturbing as those three examples in Marauder of Gor.

Degradation and Sadism

Aside from the ever present threat of sudden and violent death, the conditions Gorean slave girls are submitted to in Torvaldsland are a magnitude more base than what’s endured by their kajira sisters in the ‘civilized’ south. During a chase at sea, one slave girl is hung from the stern of the ship as a trophy:

Her hands were jerked over her head. Then, by her fettered wrists, she moaning, her naked body twisting against the mast, foot by foot, she was drawn to five feet below the spar. She dangled there, in pain, her body that of a stripped bond-maid, exquisite, tempting, squirming, a taunt to the blood of the men of Thorgard of Scagnar.

Later when the danger is passed, she is again hung as a trophy but from the prow of the ship:

Gorm put a rope on her neck and pulled her to the prow, She was held by another crewman, he fastened her at the prow. Her back was bent over it. Her wrists and ankles drawn back, were tied at its sides. She was roped to it, too, at the belly and throat.

New slave girls are renamed by their masters, which is not unusual, but these are particularly degrading and emphasize that their value is entirely in how their masters see them. One girl, Aelgifu, is renamed ‘Pudding.’ Another, a Peggy Stevens from Earth, becomes ‘Honey Cake.’

Casual cruelty is very much a feature in this book of the Gor series. Torvaldslanders are as ready to indulge their sadism as they are their taste for alcohol:

One, who had irritated an oarsman, her hands held,was beaten, crying out, with his belt. Released, she began to kiss him, weeping, trying to please him. Men laughed.

The best example is where the slave girl Thyri, for a mean-spirited attempt to deny her enemy the male slave Tarsk the sights of a slave market, is punished by being given to Tarsk to be raped.  

“She is yours until morning,” the Forkbeard told the young thrall. “Use her behind

the tent.”

“My thanks, my Jarl!” he cried.

“My Jarl!” wept Thyri.

He turned about, dragging her by the right wrist … The Forkbeard, and I, and his men, laughed.

“I hope,” said the Forkbeard, “he will not make her scream all night behind the tent. I wish

to obtain a good night’s rest.”

“It would be a shame,” said I, “to interfere with his pleasure.”

“If necessary,” said the Forkbeard, “I will simply have him gag her with her own kirtle.”

“Excellent,” I said.

Tarl’s Attitudes to Sex Slavery

Marauders is book 9 of the Gor series and Tarl, who at this point is a prosperous Gorean slaver, has grown in his outlook to be very much a full-fledged Gorean. He sees slave girls as lovely possessions to be enjoyed, kept in chains, and firmly thrashed whenever uppity.

We see how his attitudes have changed most in how he describes them. Tarl is delighted by their beauty and revels in his license to look upon them in a way he cannot a free woman:

This left nineteen girls at the wall. I admired the taste of Forkbeard. They were beauties. My choices would have been the same.

I handed the horn to Thyri, who, in her collar, naked, between two of the benches,knelt at my feet.

“Yes, Jarl,” said she, and ran to fill it, from the great vat.

How marvelously beautiful is a naked, collared woman.

Honey Cake, too, I thought, would make him a delicious little slave.

We would all enjoy her.

The best example of all is in his assessment of a newly captured girl:

Hilda the Haughty was a superb piece of female flesh. In almost any market she would surely have drawn a high price ... She had a fair throat, good shoulders; she was marvelously breasted … if the Forkbeard wished to breed her she would bear healthy, strong young to his thralls … her thighs, too, were lovely, and her calves; her ankles, while not thick, as Pretty Ankles had asserted, were heavier than those of Thyri, or Pretty Ankles. I had no objection to Hilda’s ankles; I found them quite lovely; they would take a common girl fetter nicely, with about a quarter inch tolerance.

There is not one woman in Marauders of Gor that he sees as a person (to be fair, all the girls in it are slaves or shortly go on to be enslaved). This is a bit surprising; his character would be stronger if we could contrast his attitudes towards free women.

This may say more about John Norman at this point rather than Tarl Cabot.  

Tarl’s sadism has also developed; he enjoys the tormenting his slaves (a bit) and exercising his complete power over them; he’s not a john with a hooker -- he’s a master with a slave girl:

“Go now to the kitchen of the hall,” said he. “In the fire there, burn your clothing, completely.”

Weeping, clutching her clothing, she ran to the hall. The men and bond-maids laughed muchly. I, too, roared with laughter.

I looked away from her, paying her no more attention. I heard her moan, and rub her body on the post.

“I need you Tarl Red Hair,” she whimpered.

I would let her smolder for another Ahn or two.

The slave girl knows that she must please her master, and that she will be punished, and perhaps

harshly if she does not; this makes her not only desperate to please the brute who fondles her, but also produces in her a genuine fear of him; this fear on her part enhances her receptivity and responsiveness … if she should not be afraid, it is no great matter; any woman, if the master wishes, can be taught fear.

Between seeing beautiful slave girls as delightful meat to be enjoyed, and from crossing beyond sexual pleasure to sadistic pleasure in the punishment and torment of slave girls, Tarl has achieved peak Gorean. Gor, and all its taboo wonders, have become his.

Go Read It!

I give Marauders of Gor 5/5. It is a particularly primal and barbaric book in the Gor series, and I think that is when Sword and Sex Slave fiction is at its best.

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The Gor Series: Assassin of Gor

Picture Credit: Boris Vallejo

The Gor Series: Assassin of Gor

Assassin of Gor is the 5th book in John Norman’s Gor Series, but the first one I encountered. It was my discovery of BDSM and got me writing Gorean style fiction! As such, I’d like to begin my examination of Norman’s Gor series the same way I did.

Most Gor series reviews follow a tone of; “well this is cool fantasy story but its too bad about the disturbing sexy bits…” Well, fuck those reviews. I liked the Gor books, and I like BDSM. Now lets dive in.

(Spoilers ahead)

Assassin of Gor follows Tarl Cabot, an Earth human transported to brutal Gor, as he operates incognito as Kuruus the Assassin; investigating who wants him dead and the mysterious success of a slaver’s ‘house’ at acquiring ‘barbarian’ women. It’s a fun book and Norman put a good deal of work into the story, characters, and world-building. Let’s looks at how Norman deals with the culture of sex slavery on Gor.

Gor’s Sex Slave Industry

Assassin of Gor gives us a full on breakdown on how slave girls are treated in the city of Ar. From the ‘iron pen’ kennels where slaves are kept en masse underground:

“The pens seemed humid and, though we were below ground, warm from the heat of the bodies. The only sanitation facility was an open metal mesh, supported by close-set horizontal bars, in the bottom of the cages, beneath which, some five feet below, was a cement floor, washed down and cleaned by slaves once daily. There was a feed trough at one side of each cage and a low watering pan on the other, both filled by means of tubes from the catwalk. … The female slaves, like the men, were unclothed, and wore collars; their collars, however, were not the typical locked collar of the female slave but, since they were only in the iron pens, a narrow band of iron, with a number, hammered about their neck.”

To strict breaking rituals:

"Each girl in her processing," said Ho-Tu, "after her fingerprinting, is given five strokes of the lash, that she may feel it and know what it means. After that, to ensure prompt obedience, it is commonly enough to merely move one's hand toward the leather."

To elaborate training far beyond simple obedience:

“Elizabeth was, however, to my satisfaction, taught a large number of things which, to  my mind, were more appropriate to the training of slave girls, including a large number of dances, dozens of songs, and an unbelievable variety of kisses and caresses.”

And finally to dramatic slave auctions that are part entertainment spectacles.

The auctioneer sprang to the block and, from the darkness at the foot of the steps, was hurled a chain leash, and then two more. He held them for a moment and then, keeping them taut … in the darkness, there came the sudden, startling, savage report of a slave whip, snapped three times. Then, regally, in black cloaks, with hoods, three women climbed the stairs to the block, backs straight, heads high”

Norman has fleshed out a world where humans are fair game as livestock. The slavery females are put to (male slavery is only referred to superficially; it is very much there in Gor but not the focus of the story), is utterly abject. The only thing that keeps them alive is the physical value of their beauty, and how far they commit themselves to being desirable slave girls. Experienced handlers who may even be ex-sex slaves themselves, identify any level of resistance and confront it. The slaves are left with only one choice: fully submit to their new lives as property, completely at the mercy of men who will keep them chained and on their knees - or die.

In Assassin, all the slaves choose submission. This is too convenient; at least a few would refuse from the start and others would act up later: and the slavers would have to put them to death. Norman does not address this I think for three reasons:

1 - I don’t think he was comfortable writing about women getting butchered, and shown to the others.

2 - There isn’t much gore in the Gor series. Heads on pikes - and graphic sex - are not its thing.

3 - Norman genuinely believes all women would choose slavery (sigh).

It is a detailed piece of world building and it follows naturally from the world Norman has set up - which is not too different from most of the ancient and medieval world. It is easy to forget in these times that Gor is a fantasy reflection of what has been a very real world for most of human history.

Phyllis and Virginia

The book follows the breaking, training, and sale of Phyllis and Virginia, two girls from Earth. Both are less than delighted about this and resist accordingly. However they are taught to obey (by a female trainer), and commit themselves to their training for their own self-preservation. Over time however, Virginia especially comes to accept Gorean slavery as the new normal. Come the end of the book, both characters have changed to accept their roles in the Gorean world.

Vella

Vella / Elizabeth Cardwell however, has a peculiar relationship with Gorean slavery. Masquerading as a slave, she is treated to no shortage of indignities by her trainer and the men of the House of Cenrus. To her, her time as a slave is more a submission holiday than anything else. At the end of the book she has a brush with actual slavery which disturbs her: unlike the other girls, Vella has not had to make a genuine choice about submission. She is still very much Elizabeth Cardwell. This will come back to haunt her - and Tarl - later.

Tarl and Vella

Tarl is very much a boy scout towards her in this book. A boy scout who’s quite comfortable with beautiful women being kidnapped, broken, and trained as sex slaves, but a boy scout towards her. I think this is in part because anything further was beyond the scope of Assassin of Gor. Looking back however, Tarl and Vella have a lot of sex - and she is presented to him as a helpless, lovely, obedient slave. Tarl could at any time have turned around and properly enslaved the beauty - and yet he doesn’t. 

This is partly because the Gor series covers Tarl’s character growth of adapting to the ways of Gor. He begins not entirely enthusiastic about Gorean slavery (and quite happy to make exceptions when it suits him), before he goes on to become quite comfortable with it.

Phyllis’s Homosexuality

Here John Norman shits the bed. Phyllis is gay:

"But I warn you," said Elizabeth, "she hates men!"

And Norman has her ‘converted’ after being used by a ‘real man’ Gorean:

"Your master is a beast, slave," Virginia informed Phyllis.

"I know," smiled Phyllis, "Mistress." She took the cloth of Ho-Sorl's sleeve between

her teeth, delicately, pulling at it.

Norman was a New Wave writer exploring the sexual Wild West of what is today is not just BDSM culture, but part of a wider world of fetishes and turn ons one should (literally) not read too much into. However, he is also very much a creature of his times. His handling of Phyllis’s sexuality is unexamined and crass at best. At worst it is abundantly homophobic.

I don’t condemn Norman (a man now in his late ‘80s) for buying into the fictions of him time. However, as with any author, it is important to understand his influences and times when studying his work.

Go Read It!

I give Assassin of Gor a solid 5/5. It is an interesting world, a good story, even the minor characters are interesting -- and the sex slavery is hot.

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World Building: The Slave Girls Brought by Landing Beasts

When the Great Old Ones came to Earth they needed slaves; to worship them, build their cyclopean cities - and to be eaten. These they picked from across time, favoring humans above others because of their fertility, abundance - and mental and physical weakness

They brought these humans to the Carboniferous period using Landing Beasts: dimension-crossing creatures part ambush predator and part spacecraft. Landing Beasts would snatch captives right out of space and time, suspend them in eggs, and fly them back to the Earth of 300 million BC.

There, they break atmosphere, most landing within the shrouded continent-battleground that lies behind the Mist Wall. Whatever fate befalls them there is unknown to any (sane and living) human.

However, many Landing Beasts descend off course, disoriented as they enter fully into our universe, or lead astray by Hyperborean sorcerers. Those human that survive the crash landings that follow, are quickly recovered by opportunistic raiders, slavers, and magicians.

Male survivors are quite rare and so assumed to blessed in some way. Women however are seen as nothing more than prime slave stock; arrivals from brutal cultures where only strong but submissive females get to live.

Here's a breakdown on the origins of most of these females, found in abundance at any Hyperborean slave market.

Ancient North Eurasians, 24,000 BC

The ancient north Eurasians are a people that survived the Last Glacial Maximum; a world of drought, deserts, and titanic glaciers. They persisted in the Siberian steppes before mixing with neighboring peoples as the planet warmed again – spreading a new trait they had evolved; blonde hair.

Siberian females are considered difficult to break, but once trained are especially servile to their Hyperborea masters. This is because their earlier lives were worse.

Shang, 70,000 AD

As climate change baked the planet, along the equator and tropics the Earth was abandoned; people moved to cooler temperatures - or tunneled underground.

Among those who descended where the ‘Shang’ – tribal descendents of those East Asian nations that lasted long enough unlock the underworld. Mostly ‘Chinese’ in origin, 50,000 years of change has made the term meaningless. It is a concept lost in time, along with their once great technology.

The Shang are genetically engineered with better disease resistance, stronger bodies, and faster recovery. This makes them more valuable and strenuous and outdoor roles, such as farming and mining.

Life in the underground caves was marginal; while hunters would often come back with large game, low status females survived on mostly foraged diets of rock scums and blind insects. Raiding between tribes was common, with men slain and women enslaved. As such Shang females take readily to their new lives: they are little different from their old ones.

Neolithic Anatolians, 12,000 BC

The Neolithic saw the development of agriculture and with it the mass organization of tribes into settled, temple-building, communities. At the forefront of this cultural shift were the peoples of Western Asia. They quickly spread into Africa and Europe; their descendents traveling as far as England where they built Stonehenge.

The success and booming population of the Anatolians is what draws the Landing Beasts to hunt from them. They are no better adapted to surviving slavery than any other group, but they are numerous. Hyperboreans prune their Anatolians aggressively.

Bharaji, 2200 AD

Great Bharaji is an city of 10 billion people under the Subcontinent. It was built as a refuge against climate change, and while the Shang world collapsed into tribalism, Great Bharaji survives run by an ancient, artificial intelligence.

However, it is simply too large and populous to be closely governed. Great Bharaji is a fractured mess of competing, giant, underslums. While those who control the slums enjoy great wealth and power, most however live crammed in beehive-like cells, with access to no better than Bronze Age technology.

Bharaji slave girls are genetically engineered for good health, long life, and marginal living conditions. Raised under the powerful social control of the teeming slums, Hypberborean slavers find them pliable.

Iberian Beakers, 2800 BC

The 'Beaker People' are a culture that expanded across Western Europe, reaching from as far north as Scotland to as far south as Sardinia. Like the Neolithic Anatolians, their sudden growth is what draws the landing beasts to raid them.

Ansaru, 31,000 AD

While the Shang and Bharaji survived underground, a new civilization rose out of the jungles around the inland sea of terraformed, Central Australia. These were the Ansaru; a blended people of Eurasian genetics. They expanded into the transformed world creating a sea lane empire from the Pacific islands to the Straits of Sumatra. Their power derived from their sailing galleys, salvaged dark age machines, and mass slave breeding plantations.

Like the far future Shang and Bharaji, Ansaru are genetically engineered for health and fitness.

***

And that’s it for the biggest groups brought by the Landing Beasts! Later, I’ll be doing a post on the ‘native’ slave girls of Hyperborea.

Russians of Gor: The Most Gorean Covers of John Norman's Book were Russian

As you may have guessed, my writing is heavily inspired and influenced by John Norman’s Gor books. While doing a bit of research, I ran into these gems. They are the covers for the Russian editions of the Gorean series - and they are a lot more Gorean than the English-language ones! Check out how metal they are:

These made my day.

World Building: Hyperborean Slave Breeding Pits

In Tales Hyperborean Book 6, Gerard gets to visit a slave breeding pit in Ebugal. Breeding pits are too big to deal with within the confines of the story, so they got themselves an article.

Origin of the Breeding Pits - Shub Niggurath Worship

Dark Young, Picture credit Unknown

Shub Niggurath is the Outer God of fertility. She spits out creatures known as the Dark Young, which she then consumes. Those that escape from her though grow into giant, tree-like beasts with hoofed legs and a crown of huge tentacles. Wherever she or they go, life springs.

Shub Niggurath is worshiped all over Hyperborea by farmers and breeders. She is (as far as humans know) neutral in the war of the gods, and all seek her favor.

Breeding pits evolved in the deep, ancient history of Hyperborea, estimated by Shemite priest-viziers to predate the arrival of the first Shemite priest kings in Hyperborea, 20,000 years before Gerard's arrival. The pits evolved from ancient Shub Niggurath worship and the post conquest/slave capture rituals of her followers. In ‘deep woodlands under the darkest of the moon’ (HPL), a victim would be sacrificed on a stone altar to her. This would draw the Dark Young out of the old forests, who would then consume the victim.

Slave girls (taken in war, or shed by Landing Beasts) would be kept in pits around the altar. These pits would be protected by overhead, criss-crossing bars to keep the Dark Young from eating the slaves as well.

After the worship ritual, these slaves would be made to drink a potion made from the milk of the Dark Young. This potion renders slave girls immediately fertile and ready to breed.

Over time the pits became permanently occupied and towns and villages formed around them. The essential layouts of the pits would remain, and new pits would be added around the initial ones as the settlement grew. The pits are commonly linked together by underground train systems, and made accessible by cell doors for ease of access.

Dark Trees

Strange, leafless, black trees would begin growing at the sites: these are subterranean creatures related to the Dark Young, with roots going down quite deep. Whether they are multiple creatures or all extrusions coming from one, is unclear, as it is sacrilegious to excavate them. These trees are fed blood and tapped for their sap, which has fertility powers similar to that of Dark Young milk.

Breeding Pits and Hyperborean Cities

The Power of City Elites

The power of a town or city comes from its population. The bigger a Hyperborean settlement, the more it offers in terms of tax base, conscription, desperate colonists to fling at cosmic god-scorched lands, and the free and endless supply of slaves (see below).

However, cities in Hyperborea (as were all cities until the 20th century) are ad hoc death camps. Cramped and filthy, they are rampant with disease. Those miserable enough to be living there tend to have poor nutrition, high infant mortality, and poor life expectancy. The net population growth of these settlements is negative: they need constant replenishment.

Some city dwellers buy and adopt slave-born infants from farmers, so they may better play the odds against infant mortality. However, they will only ever adopt 2 to 3 children, and never at the scales that the city elites would like them to. Further, artisans and professionals in Hyperborean cities have no real interest in adopting infants. They would rather put that money towards buying lovely slaves girl to serve in their kitchens and beds.

To solve this, city and royal elites came up with a now widely practiced solution, to maintain and grow their power by keeping Hyperborea's settlements artificially teeming.

The Slum and Breeding Pit System

Even among the free, Hyperborean society is highly stratified. In every town there is a significant sized class of poor slum dwellers.

Slave-born infants from the city breeding pit are given to these slum dwellers who receive a grain stipend for each infant they adopt. This is an attractive bonus: slum dwellers with large families enjoy a higher caloric intake than those who choose not to adopt.

However, grain is not all a child needs. Large slum families go to suffer even greater poverty, and there are no meaningful opportunities in the city slums. In order to leave the slums (which are walled off) slum dwellers must pay a fee. Most, however, cannot pay it. This condemns them to remain within their slum district walls, essentially a captive population.

Slum dwellers are taxed annually: those in arrears for taxes are noted. When the town satrap decides more troops or slaves are needed, he sends in the city guard. From the pool of debtors, sons are conscripted to become spearmen and archers for local or royal armies, and the daughters are enslaved. These seizures are carefully managed to help maintain the fiction that the system is not rigged, and that if those in the slums only worked hard enough, they would succeed…

Most of the females seized by the town will spend some time in its breeding pits. The infants born of the slaves are given to slum dwellers, and the cycle repeats. The bred slaves are then released back to the city's stock (to do municipal tasks, or be sold at the slave market for the city’s financial gain). However, if a slave girl is deemed an exceptional example, she will be kept in the pits and bred again. And again.

Master Breeders and ‘Special Breeds’

In most settlements, the breeding pits are controlled by semi-independent, master breeders who are part priest, part public servant (which is arguably the lot of most public servants on Hyperborea). These master breeders mostly see that the sites are well watered with (mostly) animal blood, and that the tapping of Dark Tree sap is managed (Dark Young do not come to sites that have become settlements). They are given responsibility for the towns breeding pit targets and usually have one or two "special breeds" that they and the master breeders before them, have been developing over centuries or even millennia.

The offspring of special breed slaves are carefully tracked in later life and invited back (or captured) to mate with the original stock and cement the bloodlines. Special breed slaves are typically females with a distinctive physical characteristic deemed valuable (large breasts on otherwise slender bodies, breasts that produce high amounts of milk) or give birth to unusually large, strong, or fierce men. Such "warrior breeds" often form the elite bodyguard of a satrap or priest king, and are presented as their superhuman symbols and regents to the general population.

The Life of a Breeding Pit Slave Girl

Any slave girl owned by the city may be rotated in to serve in the city’s breeding pit. There she will be packed into a pit with other slaves, while men selected to do the breeding assess her. If selected, the slave girl is dragged to a different pit where she will be put on her hands and knees, her wrists and ankles chained to metal rings set in the ground. Fertility runes will be painted on her back and crotch, and a prayer recited to Shub Niggurath. Then the breeding man will enter, and force her to drink a potion called the “milk of Shub Niggurath;" a purple blend of fermented goats’ milk and Dark Tree sap.

One drop of the sap is enough to render the slave immediately fertile, and guarantees she will be impregnated.

Two drops of the sap makes the slave hyper-fertile and birth quadruplets or quintuplets, but her life expectancy will drop sharply (this is rarely seen as a problem by breeders, given that most Hyperborean slave girls are culled on reaching middle-age).

If given three drops, she will mutate. This is never done except to give thanks to Shub Niggurath - or to make an example of a slave to the others.

After breeding, the slave girl is returned to her normal tasks. When she can no longer work she will be sent to a nursery, where she will remain until after birthing and the infants separated from her. The slave then goes back to normal rotation, unless she has been flagged as high-value by the master breeder. If so, she is returned to the breeding pits for more breeding.

Shang and Bharaji slave girls are preferred in the pits: this is because they are designed humans from the far future, genetically engineered for toughness and high immunity. This makes them excellent for breeding.

Outer Mutant Transformation: Gofnn Hupadgh

Gofnn Hupadgh Picture Credit Unknown

Rapid, high intensity breeding does great damage to a slaves’ health. After four or five such breedings, she becomes too weak. At this point, her life will end in three ways:

1 - she is slaughtered and her blood used to water the Black Trees of the breeding pit. Fertility in the pits will briefly rise. This is the fate of most such unfortunates.

2 - she is made into a trophy. As above, but her skull will be taken and her breeding history carved into it. This is usually the fate of special breed girls; their skulls are not only a physical record but a trophy of the master breeders success.

3 - she is given three drops of Shub Niggurath’s milk to transform her into a Gofnn Hupadgh, an Outer Mutant. Outer mutants can be satyr-like beasts, but no two are the same. They often sport fangs, claws, and hooves but not in any pattern that makes sense to the normal human mind. They are functionally immortal (though they can be slain).

These Outer Mutants are kept in cells in a lower, catacomb level of the pits, where the trophy skulls are stored and the Shub Niggurath milk produced. This catacomb is holy ground: it can only be accessed by the master breeder and high-ranking worshipers.

The Men who Get to Breed

The highest preference is given to outsiders: wandering strangers from distant lands are coveted: the more distant and alien, the better. Regardless of whatever local prejudices may exist, master breeders understand objectively that a mixed gene pool means improved health.

Second preference is given to warriors, trappers, and bounty hunters: men living dangerous lives who by necessity need to be in good physical condition. This is taken as (limited) indicator of their fitness to breed.

The last preference goes to those in power. The town elites are not above visiting the breeding pits for the sheer delight of breeding beautiful young slave girls. The master breeder must balance both his professional and spiritual integrity, with the political expedience of being semi-beholden to such people.

Book 6 of the Hyperborea details deals with Gerard to visit to a breeding pit. Follow the link below to get the first book in the series, absolutely free and with no obligation :-).

Enjoy!

Alice, Tormentor of Eager, Lovely, Slave Girls

Worldbuilding: Why Hyperboreans Share Their Slaves (NSFW)

There is a problematic matter in Book 4 that was not anticipated: why is Gerard sharing his slave girls with Fogrim? He does so with no sign of jealousy or possessiveness. This is an oversight on my part, and is corrected in Book 5.

However, Hyperborean customs in this matter should be examined.

Why Do they Share?

"Where is Layla?" I asked.

"I do not know. I thought that you had taken her last night, to breed her, as planned."

Book 4 begins with Gerard going to a slave pen to drag out Fogrim's slave, Layla, in order to breed her (Layla as it turns out, has her own ideas about this). Gerard makes use of Fogrim's other slaves, with as much reservation as he would a cup in a friend's kitchen. Likewise, Fogrim discusses how much he enjoys having sex with Gerard's girls, Amber and Haley.

Setting aside Gerard's feelings on the matter, why is Fogrim so comfortable with letting another man have sex with his slave girls, even as far as breeding one of his favorites?

The Quality of Quantity

abundance

Everywhere on Hyperborea, one will find highly attractive slave girls. Many fall literally right out of the sky in the vicinity of the Mist Wall, or along its latitude as failed landing beasts deorbit. A good portion of the slaves in Hyperborea's markets are Siberians and Anatolian's from the Neolithic past, and Shang and Bharaji from the deep future (Tales of Hyperborea, Book 1).

The majority however are bred. Hyperborea's humans are generally Bronze Age. Specialization is low and most are involved in farming. However, unlike farmers in the Ancient and Medieval period, Hyperborean farmers are slave owners. Even one with a small farm will own at least 5 to 10 slave girls. Hyperborean farmers do not farm so much as manage; they are slave drivers managing intelligent livestock who do the work, and are bred to produce more slaves.These bred slaves, raised from birth to their station, are most of what end up in Hyperborea's markets.

Lastly of course, there are free women who go on to become enslaved. Some are captured in raids or wars. Most though end up enslaved to settle debts, or as punishment for crimes.

CHEAP

With abundance comes low prices.A beautiful young woman can be purchased for a fistful of coins (gold, yes, but a fistful all the same). Hyperborean slave markets are generally glutted, especially at seaports (supplied by pirate raiders); near the Mist Wall; rich agricultural areas; and where slave-breeding is mandated to maintain large populations (Shem). Slave traders make their profit in quantity.

disposable

Hyperboreans are quick to discard their slave girls. They may be sacrificed to please Gods, sold off for quick liquidity, or simply traded away for the delight of new females, or because they are getting older.

The disposable status of slave girls is a direct function of their low cost and high abundance. Only a handful of slave girls will make it past the age of 40; once aging becomes noticeable the average slave girl becomes worthless.

As Such…

Given that beautiful slave women are abundant, cheap, and not highly regarded, Hyperborea Masters have no concerns to do with scarcity or deprivation where they are concerned. As such, they have low attachment to their slave girls. They will often see unique value in some of them, but in the end, they see them as ultimately interchangeable. The last thing a Hyperborean master sees a slave girl as, is human.

Courtesy and Politeness

Having established the reasons for Hyperborea attitudes, let us examine how these play out in their culture.

Slave girls, like any common property, are seen by Hyperborean masters as things to be shared with their friends and guests. The sharing of a slave girl with a guest, likewise necessitates the guest to return the favor. Fogrim shares his slaves with Gerard; this forces Gerard to share his own with Fogrim, even though he is not excited at the idea. The cost of refusal would be to insult Fogrim's hospitality.

Bonding Between Masters

Another reason Hyperborean men will allow others to enjoy their slave girls is to build bonds with each other. It is a way of reinforcing alliances and unit cohesion.

I missed this out in Books 2 and 3; should Gerard join another gang of raiders or slavers, such bonding will occur.

Enjoyment

Hyperborea men enjoy having sex with slave girls! Customs and social practices that allow them to have sex with more than the ones they personally own, are to their benefit.

Additionally, they benefit the slave girls. Shared girls learn new tricks, are trained to meet new expectations, and enjoy the novelty of different men. Mostly slave girls on Hyperborea are sexual submissives; those brought by the landing beasts are almost exclusively so. Sexual submissives (to varying degrees of course) enjoy and even crave sexual slavery.

On that note, all of Gerard's slave girls are sexual submissives. He has an unerring sense for finding them. However, he has become Hyperborean enough that he would not care, either way. He buys in wholeheartedly to Jean-Paul Sartre's argument that there are no rules, and that instead he should live authentically by his own.

Under his rules, no beautiful young woman is safe from his chains.

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Worldbuilding: Pleasure Gardens of Eden? - Small Hyperborean Farms (NSFW)

The Hyperborean Tales take place in a unique world; one of ancient barbarian cultures pitted against cosmic beings, alien races, and each other. It’s a world that deserves some development so I’m diving into some extensive worldbuilding. Since Book 4 begins on a farm, I figured I’d share some of that today.

Origins

Small farms on Hyperborea started less out of any agricultural need, and more because successful warriors had taken more female captives than they knew what to do with.

Where could they keep them?

How could they feed them?

What if it rains?

If a warrior chooses not to sell his slaves, then he may instead settle with them. Especially if he is a soldier from a successful military campaign, along with captured females he will have captured land. Having displaced the local power, with possession of land and coerced labor, he can become the next local power.

There are a variety of basic and secondary needs that small farms are well set up to address on Hyperborea. Their success not only benefits them, but also the larger economy and social structures of the world’s villages, towns, and cities.

Basic Needs

Food

Agriculture is labor-intensive. When not pleasuring their masters, slaves will find most of the time taken up with tending to fields of grain, fruit, and vegetables. Livestock add another dimension: slave girls may work as shepherdesses, or be set to fishing.

Dairy

One big difference between an ancient or classical era farm and a Hyperborean one, is that cattle and goats are not used for dairy production. Instead, the slave girls are. Masters will either breed their slaves, or feed them herbs that induce lactation. Milking slave girls has its benefits: the milk produced is very sweet and high in fats, superior to cow’s milk. It also encourages stronger bonds between the slaves and their master.

Goods and Simple Manufacturing

Food isn't the only thing needed on a farm. Slaves may be set to weaving, sewing, baking, pottery, or leatherworking. All of these tasks require some degree of specialization to be done effectively, and this is often burdensome on a small harem farm. As such, farms will tend to specialize in one or two of these tasks, and trade with their neighbors who in turn specialize in other tasks. This has the added benefit of encouraging warrior farmers to maintain good relations with each other.

Mining and metalworking

Mining and metalworking are a variant set of manufacturing needs. If they are in regions gifted with easily accessed minerals, farms will also set their slaves to mining ore, or coal. Metalworking however is rarely done by slave girls; it is too dangerous to the masters.

Protection

There is no point in having slaves and land, if you cannot keep yourself and your property safe. Harem farm girls are also set to work building mud walls, erecting palisades, digging pits and setting traps. The farmer master may also have a fortified farmhouse. This would be built from stone, and even protected by a small moat. Ramparts on the roof provide an advantage to a defender or defenders.

If a farmer master is powerful enough to have a fortified farmhouse, he will also have the support of his own sons, or tenant farmers. Tenant farmers have no claim to the lands they work, but they would own their own slaves. They serve the same function of medieval vassals: alloted land to work – to which they set their slaves - in exchange for military service when the farm as a whole is threatened.

Captivity

The Hyperborean master must of course keep his slaves secure. The ideal farm is isolated or cut off in some way, perhaps in a choking desert or beset by Dunkleosteus-infested waters. This makes escape impractical at the least, and ideally quite deadly. Slaves would be kept in secure barracks or pens, or even pits that can be sealed over with a single point of entry and exit. They would be secured with chains, sometimes several girls linked by a single coffle. Their legs may also be hobbled to prevent them from running, and they may wear bells at their collars so they can be easily located. Harem farm girls would also almost always be kept naked. This is to offer them poor environmental protection should they choose to attempt an escape, and no way to hide tools.

There are also informal systems of control. Some farmer masters may encourage some slaves to be informants on the others in exchange for simple favors and privileges. Other masters may simply set up their slaves to have overlapping responsibilities with zero-sum solutions. This ensures that the girls will turn against each other, and feud. Divide and preserve the conquest.

Sex

Let us not forget the primary draw for a warrior to keep many females as slaves. Harem farms become a place where play areas can be erected, complete with chains, bondage structures, whipping posts, and more. Fertility and aphrodisiac herbs may be grown in quantity. Every farm would have a breeding chamber; a room with perhaps an idol of Set, the serpent god of fertility. Chaining rings, muzzles, gags, and lubricant would be present to aid a master when breeding.

Slave areas such as barracks and bathing pools would also be designed to enhance the opportunities open to the farmer master. Barracks for example may have large beds of hay available for a master’s late night visit. The morning bathing area could be set up to face an open window of the farmer master’s bedchamber.

Secondary Needs

Heirs

A farmer master can breed as many children as he likes, by his slaves. Those offspring he wishes to raise as his own children, he may do so.

If he has a wife, should she wish children, she will insist that he breed at least several slaves at a time. This gives the wife the power to pit the slaves’ fertility against Hyperborea’s high infant mortality (as during the ancient era, two thirds of children die before maturity). Those that survive she will adopt as her own.

Using the slaves also protects the wife from the high risk of death during childbirth (unless she chooses to risk it for her own reasons). This risk is forced onto the slaves.

Like most forms of domestication,it is a good deal. The wives get children at no cost or risk to themselves, and in exchange, they do not murder their husband’s slave girls.

The Growth of Cities

Hyperborean cities, like all others on Earth until the 20th century, have a net negative population growth. This means they only grow through immigration; they are too unsafe and unsanitary to produce enough people, left to their own devices. Their death rates will always exceed the fertility rates.

As such, Hyperborean city dwellers (who tend to be poorer than their rural counterparts, and may only own one or two girls), are keen to adopt children to make up for high infant mortality. The adoption trade between small farms and nearby cities is highly lucrative. A larger proportion of slave girls in such farms are pregnant at any given time, feeding the urban demand for children.

Taxes

It is the slave girls who bear the brunt of these costs. If a farm is taxed by a nearby city or lord, that tax will come in grain or simple goods such as leather or cloth. If that tax cannot be paid for any reason, slave girls will be levied instead.

Sacrifices

A religious farmer master always sees the potential of his slaves as gifts to his gods. Especially when he may come home with a new girl or girls, there is great fear among his other females. That is when it is most likely that he will take the oldest or least pleasing, to the altar to be sacrificed.

However, if he is particularly grateful for the support of his gods, he may instead take the girl he values the most to the altar. A slave owned by a religious Hyperborean is never safe.

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Worldbuilding: Maps of Hyperborea

So I got Wondercraft recently and have been using it to help figure out the world of Hyperborea. Here’s the Black River region, where books 1-3 of the Tales of Hyperborea happen:

The ring of mountains around the ‘Battleground of the Gods,’ is cloaked in the Mist Wall.

Closer up, here’s Red River:

Here’s where Book 4 is happening, the region of Darfur. Darfur is inspired by R. E Howard’s Darfar - which in turn was inspired by the actual region of Darfur, in Western Sudan. Likewise, my Darfur is a rich region where humans are primarily, but not mostly, of Sub-Saharan origin:

Source: Lovecraft.fandom.com

Note the Mi-Go dominated in the South, Yarth-Tanophk. The Mi-Go, Yith, Elder Things, Flying Polyps, and Shoggoths are all out in force in Hyperborea. Some have use for humans as troops, slaves, and sacrifices. Others have no interest in them at all - and as likely to exterminate them when they find them, as not.

The Mi-Go do not make an appearance in Book 4, but a piece of their work does. The Mi-Go are genetic and cybernetic engineers, altering other creatures - and themselves - as readily as we would Lego bricks. This poses more than a little risk - and opportunity - for the people of Darfur.

Here is the world map so far; there are continents “off map” to the West, that I’m still trying to figure out.

Book 4 is at 11,000 words so far. I am aiming to top it out at 15,000. Speaking of book 4, here is the latest writing inspiration, the lovely Krystal Boyd: