Reles

Spintir’s capital city, Reles, is also the planet’s only city, other habitation being limited to small concentrations of a few hundred beings at most. However, the city’s inhabitants pride themselves in making up for the lack of sophistication elsewhere on the planet. Money earned in logging the planet’s forests or exporting local animal specimens to zoos and universities is almost invariably funneled into maintaining a lifestyle better suited to the Core Worlds than a minor Outer Rim outpost.
Those who can afford it dress in expensive imported materials, shunning native furs, and build up Reles with palatial dwellings and exquisite sculpture gardens. The most extravagant of these dwellings is the governor’s palace, formerly occupied by the planet’s corrupt Imperial representative, Caria Haal. Citizens without the means to participate in offworld trade make do by attaching themselves to those who can, acting as laborers or servants in exchange for whatever pay they can get. In the days of the Republic, a patronage system helped curtail the gap between rich and poor, requiring the wealthiest citizens to sponsor talented or struggling individuals so that they could better their lives with a new career.
The University of Reles was renowned for generous scholarships, and several prominent galactic academics came from humble beginnings not far from its doors. This system was centered around the trade of information and services in Reles’s open-air bazaar district, where rich and poor mingled freely. However, since the rise of the Empire, the patronage system has been dismantled, and the divide between the economic classes has grown ever wider. The city’s elite attend the bazaar with bodyguards or aboard closed landspeeders, while the less fortunate fearfully avoid them instead of hoping for aid. Mounting discontent has led the Empire to establish a small garrison in the heart of the city, as it fears Rebel influence could take root among the disenfranchised citizens.

Type

City