The desert at night (Click on pic for full image)
The Desert of Rust:
The area that is now the Desert of Rust was once occupied by a spaceport, and a great city. Once the Earth became a forgotten galactic backwater, the disused spaceport gradually fell into ruin, and, over the course of the following millennia, the city was abandoned. Some say that a great earthquake broke open the city’s power plants, resulting in the spread of harmful radiation which forced the residents to flee. Others say it was a war, or a strange emanations from a alien starship that made the city unlivable. Grumpy old folks maintain that people just got tired of cleaning the place and left. Eventually, however, for what ever reasons, the city was both abandoned and shunned.
The great spires of glass and metal and the massive machines of the city were forgotten and left to rot. Furthermore, the nations of Xurk (the northern continent) and the peoples of the Archipelago of Nom commenced to using the region as a dumping ground for waste- hazardous and otherwise. Despite this, the place gradually became reinhabited, criminals and and renegade autonms found refuge in the collapsing ruin of the place, and fierce strains of animal and plant life evolved there as well.
Time crawled on.
Over the ages, the machines have rusted and decayed, until a thick layer of fine, silty rust lies across the entire landscape. The once great city has all but vanished beneath the red dust. In some places, seas of unbroken red dunes rise and fall from horison to horizon; in others , the remnants of machines and structures great and small thrust up through the dust, like jagged fingers clutching at the uncaring, blood-colored sky.
Deranged mechs, nomadic bands of depraved autonms and mutants wander this wasteland, dwelling in subterranean remnants of the lost city and and even in the open desert, living off dying batteries, dwindling hydraulic fluid and harvesting what metal they can. Huge mechanical worms move beneath the surface; strange beasts of unknown origin and aspect lurk in the red shadows, hungry for whatever sustenance they can find, be it ferrous or fleshy.