Kazakhstan

The largest land-locked nation in the world and the biggest of the “Five Stans” of Central Asia, Kazakhstan is a land of broad, sweeping steppes. Its people are widely scattered and wildly different, ranging from the descendants of Mongols who rode through the plains as part of the Golden Horde, to displaced and disenfranchised populations from all over Eastern Europe. People are generally honest, but insular, and have not yet learned to trust strangers after decades of fear and paranoia.
Kazakhstan was also the favored site for Soviet superscience too experimental or dangerous to conduct in Russia itself (a fact which, considering the sorts of things that happened in Russia, is more than a little terrifying). The arid grasslands and deserts are peppered with the remains of these projects: abandoned laboratories, villages of third-generation mutants, and blackened craters where buildings and labs once stood.
Slicksand is one artifact of Soviet experimentation in the region: patches of desert sand that swirl greasily and eagerly pull under any unfortunate who steps into a patch of it. Those devoured usually perish, but if one emerges alive, he or she almost always acquires some sort of super power or special ability. These are almost never worth more than a few power points, but over the decades countless youths and desperate adults have risked their lives to acquire this small advantage—even though many die and others come out deformed or otherwise changed. In such an inhospitable land, even the smallest power or enhanced ability could make a big difference for a family or individual looking for an edge.