Like most places, at one point or another, San Angelo was under water. On the edge of the Edwards Plateau, the waves once lapped up against the very stones still in the city.
Then came the ice. The world was blanketed in it, and it allowed strange creatures like Mammoths, Llamas, and Man come to San Angelo.
Some time later, there was the Concho River Valley, on the edge of the Edwards Plateau. This tiny, verdant stretch contrasted starkly with the desert all around. And so, it did not take long for the Native Americans who migrated there to settle down.
It passed from tribe to tribe, eventually landing in the hands of the Comanche. The Shadowlands around San Angelo were filled with the respected dead of ancient ancestors.
Then things begin to shift in the skinlands. European settlers began to put up fences, and claim land for their livestock, interrupting the buffalo's migration into Mexico. Needless to say, the Comanche weren't pleased, and they began to violently exact revenge on the settlers.
At the time, the US Government was waging a "war" against the various Native American tribes of the West. The Comanche attacks did not go unnoticed, and a line of forts was built to help protect the settlers. They were stocked with the usual rag-tag bunch of soldiers, many who had fought in the Civil War only a few years back. One fort, Fort Concho, had an additional regiment of the newly formed "Buffalo Soldiers," freed black slaves who had joined the army.
Like many military establishments, Fort Concho was the reason a small town sprung up not too far away. It was little more than a collection of saloons and whorehouses, but in time this town, Santa Angela, would become San Angelo.
When the fort closed in the 1890's it looked like the end for the small town. Business dried up with only the rag-tag group of settlers to keep business going. Then something amazing happened. A few hundred miles away, near Beaumont, a man struck oil. Lots of oil.
People began to pour into the state. Farmers who had barely scraped a living before found themselves sitting atop millions of dollars worth of petroleum.
This boom lasted for decades, carrying San Angelo into the forties. Even during the Depression San Angelo did rather well. It was during this time that most of the buildings in downtown were built, and most of the wealthy families in the area made their money.
In the twenties, San Angelo College (later, in 1965 renamed Angelo State University) was established. Today, ASU has several thousand students, and boasts the tallest buildings in the area, ASU Highrise Dorms.
During the forties, San Angelo once again became a military town. On August 17, 1940, the San Angelo Air Corps Basic Flying School was established. A little over a year later, it was renamed Goodfellow, after a local hero from the Great War (who was quite honored when word reached him in the Shadowlands of France). Today, despite several attempt to close the base, Goodfellow is going strong with several thousand soldiers, making it one of the most important factors in the local economy.
Goodfellow is also an intelligence base, meaning that per capita, San Angelo has one of the highest populations of spies (active and retired), in the world. Not your James Bond spies, but the camera operators and U2 pilots. The vapor trails overhead never cease.
Moving on, not much happened to San Angelo over the next few decades. In the fifties San Angelo was one of the first cities in the nation to integrate its' schools. Oil boomed and busted several times. People left and came back to retire.
San Angelo had been a nominal member of the Hierarchy since the 1920's. It was led under tyrannical rule of one Mayor Samuel Lynch. That all changed when the sixth great maelstrom came.
At first, local wraiths were in the dark. The winds were still blowing, as usual, the Midnight express had missed a few stops, but due to the isolation of San Angelo, no wraith had any idea that Stygia had fallen.
Then, it started to rain Oboli. Truly it was a mixture of Oboli and soulsteel trinkets, most likely blown from a Stygian forge, but all those wraiths who were there remember are the oboli. Literally hundreds of coins started to fall and wraiths rushed out into the street with smiles on their faces and joy in their voices.
They ran around, catching them in their hands or in their tattered clothes, until they started to fall a little more frequently. A stray obolus would bounce off a wraiths head, and she'd laugh it off and continue collecting.
The downpour was swift and sudden. Millions of oboli all falling at once, smothering and blanketing those who had rushed out into the streets. The lucky ones made it to shelter or went into harrowing in the first few minutes, for a few short moments after the downpour, the winds picked up. Maelstrom winds the likes of which no one except the old Comanche ghosts had seen after the flaying.
They whirled and spiraled in giant funnels of air of soulsteel, ripping to shreds all in their path or those unlucky enough to be swept away. When the winds died down, and the remaining wraiths crawled out of their hiding places, they found a Necropolis practically flattened. The small local forge was gone, the barghests had gotten lose and were hunting wraiths in wild packs, and Nihils that cars could drive into were common.
Anarchy prevailed.
What finally brought about a kind of order was a wraith by the name of Anton Korn. He had been an architect in life, and was responsible for many of the buildings built during San Angelo's golden age.
He rallied together as many influential wraiths as he could find, and set up a new government, and began slowly working out details of how rebuilding of San Angelo's Necropolis would progress.
So far he's been rather successful, collecting those random bits of soulsteel and oboli left and asking the Artificers (now officially a part of the new government) to put them to good use.
San Angelo is currently a Necropolis under extreme and radical changes. New buildings and maelstrom shelters go up every other week. Political affiliations are quickly forged and just as quickly broken. Some have compared this to The Old West of movies and comics books, but still more see it as the kind of boom enjoyed after the first oil rush.
San Angelo is a city of about 88,000 people. Industry is based heavily on agriculture and ranching, both cattle and sheep (at one time San Angelo was labeled "the wool and mohair capital of the world").
The climate is unbearably hot in the summer, often times reaching into the 100's and even 110's F. Summer in San Angelo lasts for about eight months, March through October.
In the winter, it's cold, but not as cold as some places, with lows bottoming out just below freezing. Winter usually lasts from November to February.
Where are Spring and Fall, you ask? Locals like to joke that they last about a week in between the other seasons.
The climate, like the rest of West Texas, is desert. About the only trees you'll find are mesquite (whose roots go so deep, "they've long since sucked all the water out of hell"), and everything else is scrub or cactus. It is terribly difficult to clear land unless you pave it; Mesquite can grow back from the roots, and prickly-pear cactus leaves can grow into entirely new plants.
The dry climate leads to large dust storms in the summer. The soil is very arid and rich in iron, giving it a red tone. Sometimes, a thunderstorm and dust storm will coincide, and it will literally rain mud.
In the Shadowlands, the maelstrom is still raging, but things rarely fall from the sky. Just like the Skinlands, precipitation is scarce. What does bother the local Wraiths are winds. They blow through town raging at sometimes-impossible speeds and locations. One rather common experience is to be walking down a windy street and the next block will be calm, the next block will be windy, and so on.
The wraith population, as it stands, is around 7,400 individuals, not counting spectres or plasmics. New arrivals generally blow in on the winds from nearby towns, or are tossed around locally until being caught by government sponsored reapers. These reapers use nets made from a sort of soulsteel wire being produced by the Artificers in their temporary low-heat forges.
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