This great barren desert was once green and plentiful until the wars between the Humans and Scraban turned it into a waste land. Today the remnants of those fallen civilisations can be found by scavengers and looted.
That's not all they left behind. The dark magic they used to annihilate each other has left its mark. Creatures are mutated by it, walls between dimensions grow thin and things slip through from time to time. The wastes still contain small, poor settlements of human and scraban who refuse to live in the city with its laws and restrictions.