Looking ahead in the Cold Fens & Felltower's environs

Not that the PCs are done with the Cold Fens, far from it - they need to survive their current expedition.

But then what?

Let's look at some areas in play.

Cold Fens

At some point, the Cold Fens will be considered played out from an exploration perspective. In other words, there will still be hexes that haven't been explored, but a sufficient amount of them will have been that exploring others won't net any XP.

This is basically so the Cold Fens doesn't eventually become a default "We don't have a plan, so let's go explore 10 hexes and get 2 xp" session. Especially since the fens are more empty of encounters than rich in them, so it will be a procedural hexcrawl with hexes that largely contain hazards, obstacles, bugs, and wandering monsters that don't typically carry treasure.

Naturally this means after the dragon, right? No. After Sakatha, really, and not much after that if anything at all. There is a dragon, of course, but the PCs have a number of clues pointing in the direction the dragon's lair is, and have followed none of those clues. They're not as blazingly obvious as "go X miles south and Y miles west and turn right at the big tree," for sure, but the general hints points to areas the PCs have not attempted to go to. Again, I just don't want to spend sessions rolling random encounters while they move around hoping to luck into something.

Caves of Chaos

This area is low-threat and low-loot. It's not 100% explored, but it may as well be as it will take exploring known areas to find the handful of unknown ones. Unless some high-loot monsters moved in - and there is no indication of that - this area has been largely done over. It's not free of threats, but it's free of threats DF delvers will find worth going after.

Lost City of D'Abo

Like the Caves of Chaos, this is largely done. There are a few big things that were missed, but it would probably take some second looks at things and lawnmover exploration to find them . . . and I'm not sure they'd be found anyway.

Felltower

This basically leaves Felltower. Yeah, that's how it goes. A lot of time has been spent by the current group not going deeper in Felltower and not going into gates seen as risky. They've almost fully played out the "side quest" areas I have prepared and have interest in preparing. So Felltower is likely what waits after the Cold Fens. It's back to going down the exact same path to the second level, avoiding the orcs, coming back to Five Ooze Corner "on the way back," and the usual things of that sort. We'll see what actual occurs . . . but going deeper or going into a risky gate might be unavoidable for survivors of Sakatha's lair, if indeed there are any. If there are not, well, back to the drawing board I suppose, only with Quenton as the mighty veteran of the group!