Keya d'Rex

It seems odd to a number of travellers that several towns and cities along The Marches have small neighborhoods with the same name. Odder still is that most of these "neighborhoods" have very similar looks and shops. Some of them are called d'Rex, some Keya, some Keya d'Rex. It has a Kelchen ring to it, but it is not Kelchen that anyone knows, but there are not many Kelchen speakers in these parts...(see Kelchen - insert a foreign country that had holdings in this area a long time ago). They were awarded these far away and foreign lands via a peace treaty, but never did much with them. They attempted to civilize this frontier with little success. They have either lost the territory to someone else's conquest or traded the territory away for considerations with other countries.)

The name is Kelchen in origin. It comes from the phrase "The Royal Majesty's Most Beautiful Road". One of the few things the Kelchen did was to link all the various town and villages (now cities and towns) of their territory with one long road. In some areas, the road was little more than a trail, while in others it is actually paved between cities. It was always paved in the towns and villages. This road used to be the most important in the region, but new town centers and new needs have minimized its impact.

Each Keya d'Rex neighborhood there is a single long main street... an older business district. If not the "central section" of the city or town, it is normally not too far from it. There is usually buildings one block in either direction that are considered part of it. In each of these neighborhoods there is an inn/ tavern, a general store (or a building that used to be a general store), a theater (usually associated with the inn/ tavern), one or two small chapels/ temples, and a messenger's guild post. Depending on the size of the neighborhood, there will be a few other common businesses along the street. In the one block on either side of the street there will be older homes of a distinctive style (For those that care it is a neo-classical look that was extremely popular in Kelchen at the time mixed with the local styles).

These neighborhoods used to be the center of their respective places, but a hundred or so years of grown and development (as well as new countries owning the various regions of the Marches) has robbed them of that.

Some additional throughts...
The main things to take away from this post are two fold.

2) The details can very, but the basics remain. Insert anything you want into the history pieces. However, these roads will create "stopping points", which will develop into towns and cities over time. These stopping points will be old "city" centers that are normally superceeded by other roads and other needs of the population.