i'Ya'anga-Buckleton

i'Ya'anga-Buckleton, Called "the Y-B" or simply "Wybee" by locals, contains the original settlements of the entire Straumland Basin.

Wybee Ward has experienced a renaissance of sorts in the past ten years. The ward has become an avant garde destination for hipsters, restaurateurs, would-be druids, and the bardic community. With the concomitant gentrification, Wybee is experiencing dramatic house price increases and a decrease in housing affordability which has pushed out long time residents and paved the way for new industry. Since 1990, i'Ya'anga-Buckleton has evolved into a thriving hub of entrepreneurship, high technology startup firms, and of postmodern art and design.

History

According to oral traditions, the humans from the eastern deserts and halflings from the tropical climates of the distant south established a permanent settlement in what is now New Straum approximately 9,000 years ago. The village was named i'Ya'anga, or the place where water is and is not salted, likely referring to the brackishness of river waters south of the original settlements.

Lord Grafford Von Straum III, Captain of Arch Dutchess Agatha's ship, the Goldspire, first spied the deep-water harbor in 1512, and called the whole basin "Straumland," after himself. Though his expedition was fraught with tragedy, his records indicated a thriving community of over 10,000 native inhabitants in a dozen or more small villages.

By the time Elves arrived from Alcyon to settle the land in the 17th century A.D., though, there were less than 5,000 native humans and halflings living in small communities throughout the Straumland basin. Shortly after contact with Alcyens, the inhabitants of i'Ya'anga were pressed to provide manual labor and hand-made goods for the Alcyen races brought to settle the region by the Bucklelyn Company. Colonization devastated the native communities. Many residents were drawn to the nearby Basilica di Coronis, where acolytes imposed Alcyon culture on the natives seeking refuge there. The people who remained in i'Ya'anga lived under the increasingly dominant sway of the Bucklelyn Company, which slowly encroached on the village. Eventually, i'Ya'anga became little more than a day laborers' camp attached to the more prominent Alcyen village of Buckleton.

Until the official founding of New Straum city on September 9th, 1682, the land around the town was known simply as Buckleton by nearly everyone living there. When it became necessary to break the city into wards, though, the task of naming the sprawling Ward that would stretch from the city center out to the sea, fell to Victoria Von Straum. Victoria was Governess of the entire basin before the Tribunal ascendancy, and was a lover of the old stories and peoples of the world. In honor of the peoples Alcyen races had replaced, she used the ancient name given to the region by its first settlers.

In the centuries since its official founding, i'Ya'anga-Buckleton Ward has experienced a cycle of rapid population increases followed by devastating economic downturns. In recent decades the Ward has been one of the poorest in the city, rivaled only by the disastrous planned community of Bathory in the 1970's. Violent crime has been a fact of life in the area for years, as well as two instances of criminal necromancy threatening the entire city with an undead plague.

The late 80's, and now into the 90's, have been an upswing in Wybee's cultural and economic relevance, bringing new blood and new life to the area.

Architecture

Although peppered with high rises and prefab warehouses, i'Ya'anga-Buckleton mostly retains the stucco walls and tile roofs emblematic of 1700's colonial architecture. Punctuating the familiar, are more avant garde buildings, seeking to marry the traditional stylings of wybee with bleeding edge contemporary design.

Included Locations

• Otherwild Street Smidge Market
• The Hypnecromantia