Story Arc 4: Into the dungeon of Guldur

The players told me they enjoyed the last story arc but they wanted something less political for the next one, so we agreed to do an old fashioned dungeon crawl.   They picked up a a coded letter with vague references to a treasure filled dungeon north of Fumaya in Story Arc 1.   Neshik, Aranil, and Svetlana journeyed north to try to find the dungeon, they took a long pit stop in the Duchy of Zimoz to visit their friend and check on him, and also make a bunch of potions.   They navigated the wilderness with only one random encounter of sorts, they (mostly Svetlana) found some orc built hunting traps which they decided to sabotage. This ultimately alerted an orc adventuring party that something was amiss.   The dungeon was a "small" tower built by dragons and giants during the the First Age that was now fallen over and largely covered in thousands of years of sediment. So the tower went diagonally down sloping underground while the floor was one of the old walls mixed in with dirt, ice and snow.   The entrance of the fallen tower resembled a natural cave, and it had a wendigo lair acting as a sort of dungeon guard. Guilder tolerated the wendigo because it was a useful guard and didn't threaten him.   The PCs fought the Wendigo and killed it which quickly decayed leaving an icy heart. They kept the heart with them as a trophy until the heart started growing fur so they melted it with fire.   The PCs found a connection between the fallen tower and a natural cavern which explored until they ran across a huge underground lake blocking their path.   The PCs navigated deeper down the collapsed tower dealing with the traps eventually figuring out that the trap builder had OCD and set his traps with recognizable patterns.   The PC's encountered an animated skeleton that seemed to exist solely to sweep up messes which they let alone.   Because of Guldur the lich and the wendigo there were not many living creatures in the dungeon larger than rats (and rats were few). The PCs had a tough fight with three medium sized salt elementals that spawned near Guldur's lab.   They chose to set up camp to rest but they were close to Guilder's lab and he was aware of them so he sent his minions to attack eventually following up himself.   Guldur could have killed them all if he just focused on energy drain attacks but he was OCD about maintaining his buff spells and the PCs were able to exploit this, but it was still a tough fight. The first fight where Neshik an out of mana and everyone was pretty beat up and willpower deprived.   After Guldur was destroyed, they looted his workshop and small library but there were a lot of goods they couldn't carry with them. At least a ton of coal and nonprecious metals, mostly iron.   After they left the dungeon they were greeted by a Khemra aligned sun spirit who Neshik and his companions for their services to Khemra by breaking up a crime syndicate in King's Lake and destroying a powerful undead in the wilderness. She bestowed Neshik with a fire gem that acted as a bonus store of mana. She gave Aranil a fire gem and attached it to his sword giving the sword a 3/day fire power and put a gem on Svetlana's battle axe to give it a 3/day fire power. She also healed Neshik's aggravated damage.   The trio went south but they were accosted by an orc adventuring party from the Dirty Crows (they were investigating who messed up their game traps). They bluffed that they had a lot less treasure than they actually had and paid them a small tribute. Then I reminded Neshik's player that he had a dot of Plant magic and could magically obscure their tracks, so they did that the rest of the way to their buddy Zimoz's castle.