Blacksand City - Upper City

The Upper City resembles the business district of any high-class starport. It is clean, well-run and comfortable without being opulent or tacky. Well-dressed businesspeople meet and make deals with local and offworld concerns, and everything has a strong feeling of respectability and civilisation. Some of the business being conducted is indeed legitimate, but many of these meetings concern piracy, murder and various forms of large-scale violence. Nothing is said openly in the Upper City; euphemisms and polite fictions are used to maintain the illusion of legitimacy even when arranging genocide.
Most visitors from the Imperium gravitate to the Grand Hotel, which occupies one of the largest buildings on Theev. It has its own shuttle landing area on the roof and sufficient entertainment facilities that guests do not really need to go anywhere else. The Grand Hotel has a special arrangement with the Imperial Navy; on the rare occasions a naval ship passes through the system the hotel provides a ‘shoreside liberty package’ to crewmembers at a very steep discount. This is presented as a courtesy to the navy, which keeps the spacelanes safe and thus enables places like the Grand Hotel to make a profit, but it also helps the Lords of Theev impede any investigation that might be conducted. Hotel staff are adept at making sure crews remain distracted and unable to obtain much in the way of useful information.
There are numerous other hotels in the Upper City of course, each with their own character. Some are also the dwellings of the Lords of Theev, who typically occupy a few floors as their own private preserve and run the rest of the building as a profit-making concern. In some cases, a hotel forms part of a skyscraper, with the remainder either made up of living quarters for workers or offices for businesses. Living standards are good in these communities, and those who cannot afford the high prices – or who offend their overlords – risk being evicted.
There is no social safety net in the Upper City; those who cannot afford to live there have only one option other than trying to survive within the Lower City. Asharden Camp is a sort of refugee village on the edge of the Upper City. It is filled with hopefuls who want to earn a place in the Upper City – or find their way back in – as well as those struggling to avoid being consigned to the Lower City. Not surprisingly perhaps, it is a good recruiting ground for desperate people. There are plenty of desperadoes in the Lower City as well, of course, but those in the camp may still have something to lose, which can make them easier to control. They may also have skills not found in the rough-and-ready Lower City, as well as the ability to fit into the polite and (relatively) tranquil society of the Upper City. Assassins, spies and the like are often recruited here, on the promise of a better life in the skyscrapers above.
Within the Upper City there are various districts and zones. The most notorious of these is the Cliff District, where most of the mercenaries and arms traders are headquartered. It is commonly said in Blacksand that if you want to hire a bunch of thugs you can do so in any Lower City bar, but if you want trained mercenaries the Cliff District is the place to go. There are some highly skilled and reputable mercenaries for hire in the Cliff District, as well as various war criminals and professional psychopaths. The businesses located there will also source or manufacture weapons of various sorts, including weapons of mass destruction.
The Industrial Zone is an area around the base of several skyscrapers, where most of the world’s heavy industry is located. It is close to the downport, and also has offices for various manufacturing companies. Among these is Kallos Shipyards, which builds craft at the orbital highport but sells some components from its yards on-planet. Kallos serves as a clearing house for pirated ship components. As a rule, legitimate or hard-to-trace components are sold at the highport to anyone who comes through, whilst illegal parts (such as warship systems or parts of a ship that could be traced to pirate activity) are brought to the surface of Theev where investigation is far less likely.

Type

District