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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Futurity" data-source="post: 9761063" data-attributes="member: 10738">I think what you are indicating is the inherent beauty and conundrum of this module. Keep on the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos were open to inrepretation....true sandbox in design, with some stuff for players and DMs to interpret as they desire. As it happened, I was really, really into Lord of the Rings and Conan at age 10 when I got this module, figured out how to run D&D, and found some players. We went into it with the additional media of the day informing out expectations, and I was using DM tools in the Basic book and the DMG that I had found a copy of (reaction table comes to mind) with the notion that orcs, being a well known vile monster in service to Sauron, would most likely be up to no good. The modest amount of exposition in the module sort of fed in to that. I bet a lot of people probably just filled in the blanks from what they knew of other fiction and said expectation. In 1981 no one and nobody I knew conceived of orcs as good guys or even potential good guys.....and I deliberately put a good (lawful) orc into the mix as one of my earliest experiments at trying to defeat genre expectations.I don't have the module handy, but for some reason I remember there being child and women orcs in the module, too. I vaguely recall that the PCs (my sister and a couple of her friends) were all about killing all the orcs, and I was sort of like "But....children and women...."</blockquote>

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