Added D-318 - Rank is height. Standing is the highest floor you (or your Cartographer) reached. Outside titles mean little: a duke's son who never climbed ranks below a scarred Porter. The proof is the height stone (§38).
- Who lives in the city:
- transients, the majority, who arrive, climb, die or leave, so the streets are full of strangers;
- old frontier families, who run the inns, workshops and salvage yards, and look down on newcomers; Amended D-370 they, the makers and most of the Guild's officials are Footfolk (§25);
- Tower-tech makers, engineers and artisans who turn salvage into devices, a powerful class, because they make what the world buys;
- the broken: veterans too hurt to climb, widows and orphans of expeditions, living off the Tower's leftovers.
- Added D-323 Rank is worn. Tower stone and Tower relics are how rank is displayed. The most powerful people usually wear a Tower relic on their person, even when it harms them: it burns, chills, drags or weighs, and they wear it anyway, because being seen with it matters more. Relics are plentiful enough to be a class marker, and costly enough to be a fortune (§29).
- Added D-324 Rank is built. Architecture follows the ladder:
- the bottom lives in the ruins, in buildings patched together out of them;
- the middle lives in plain, classical human houses;
- the top lives in houses whose human-built base is crowned with pieces brought down from the Tower. The Tower is huge, so the pieces are out of all proportion to the house beneath: an arch fragment wider than the facade, a cornice block the size of a floor. The effect is grotesque, and meant to be;
- institutions (the Guild, the factions' halls) build like the top.