Aresan Starmetal Mining Camp

The strange green metal known as Star Jade, Green Starmetal, or Starfall Ore is a mineral that resembles brilliant green jade, but with a metallic sheen. It is eagerly sought by some arcane spellcasters, who have discovered the secret of using it to extend life and gain additional arcane energies. It is all extra-terrestrial in origin, falling to earth in some meteorites. Properly refined, it can then be used in crafting powerful magic items or more directly by the spellcaster.
Mages who prepare and consume the mineral in a careful ritual find that their magical strength is enhanced, and their body gradually transforms into an immortal mobile living statue made of green metal. Their eyes are the first to reflect the change, as first the pupils and irises turn pure metallic green, then the whole eye changes into what looks like a green metal sculpture of an eye - although the wizard has exceptional vision. Eventually the whole body follows suit, transforming into a form of flexible living metal.
An enterprising wizard named Kammavar Aresan followed stories of a green star that fell from the heavens long ago and smashed into the desert. She eventually tracked down the location of the meteorite and discovered that sure enough, it did indeed contain a large percentage of star jade along with other useful metals and minerals. Such meteorites can often be refined from starmetal into a variety of exotic alloys and pure metals.
Summoning her family, Kammavar set up a permanent mining camp on the edge of the crater of melted glass and rock where the lump had smashed to earth. The group set up a small refinery, and started the process of mining and refining the fragments of the large meteorite scattered around the crater and within the surrounding sands.
The Aresan family had some success at first. They produced several small shipments of valuable metals, and a few consignments of star jade were sent to Mita Quelrem, owner of the Quelrem's Curiosities magic shop in Bralizzar. However, their luck soon took a turn for the worse. Mining tools started to break with increasing frequency. Family members started to wake from terrifying nightmares of being buried under crushing weights of sand. Eventually messages and shipments stopped coming from the encampment, and messengers sent there never returned.
Nobody knew that the Aresan family were not the only ones interested in the starfall ore. A Sandmen tribe had escaped from the Dao, the evil djinn on the elemental plane of Earth, who had enslaved them. The sandmen had hidden in The Desert of Desolation, and stumbled across the meteorite themselves. Realising that its magical properties could help them resist recapture by the Dao, they started to work on ways to use it. When the Aresan family moved in the sandmen tried to discourage them and drive them away, to no effect. What the sandmen did not realise was that the star jade was having a terrible deleterious effect on them, slowly driving them insane and turning them into twisted copies of themselves. Enough of them tipped over the edge into madness that they decided the best way to protect their starfall ore was to wipe out the Aresan and all who followed after them. This was done in one night, as the unsuspecting family slept.
The crater is several hundred feet across and the mining camp is set up on the edge. The crater itself and the surrounding sands are solid, fused blackish-green globs of melted sand and rock. The buildings are made of adobe and surround a central wellhouse. The well within still holds fresh, pure water - the first spell Kammavar wrought and anchored in the land was to ensure provisions for her family, and it is still working almost a decade later.
The buildings are all aged and the contents decrepit and crumbling from years of neglect. The people are all missing, leaving only rust-brown stains, but the foodstuffs have dried and mummified into iron-hard husks. One building contains a strange apparatus of rock-crushers, hoppers and chutes which all empty through a fine netlike mesh of gold wire. The mesh is stretched across an iron frame covered with engraved runes, and magic or metallic items held near the mesh tug toward it gently, almost as if it has some magnetic property which is not confined to mere iron. Empty buckets beside the apparatus still hold glittering fragments of metallic powder. Another apparatus to one side obviously filtered the powders into different types, feeding out of spigots into more buckets below.
Off to one side of the camp is a thick-walled building with a large chimney. Within is the long-cold smelter where the powders were refined into ingots of different types of starmetal. A vault attached to the building held the completed ingots until enough were ready for a shipment.
On the surface, all appears empty and deserted, ready for any who stumble across it to take shelter - or possibly start refining more starmetal, if they know what is here. There is no way to know that the insane sandmen still lurk under the crater and encampment, twisted into viewing all interlopers as possible servants of the Dao sent to spy on or recapture them.