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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Magister Ludorum" data-source="post: 8327375" data-attributes="member: 6862253">My kids were still teenagers when I ran a game for them that began with goblins raiding a local farming village. Their response was to talk to the goblins and find out why they were raiding. I already had a backstory, complete with no goblin children, in case they decided to hack and slash their way through the story. The goblins had fled because the evil temple in the caves had been taking their children to force the goblins to obedience. The goblins in question were the advance scouts and the rest of them (including most of the non-combatants) were still working their way down through the caves from the High Vale where they lived.The characters negotiated a peaceful coexistence between the goblins and the local halfling farmers (who also required some convincing), then waited for the pass to clear, went into the high vale and rescued the goblin children from the temple.This is what I did with the Caves of Chaos. The caves were spread out over a huge mountain vale and the prime evil was the temple of the Crawling Chaos that was hidden in one of the caves. Some of the non-humans were willing followers of the cult. Others were reluctant. Even within the caves of the willing followers, they were able to find dissenters and helped to free them and to help them to take over their communities.Based on the actions of the characters in that first story, I was able to turn a somewhat problematic module from the Basic D&D days into a story that ran all through the first tier (we take a long time to level so that was several complete stories and one game year). Not only that, it was a story that allowed to characters to fight evil, while supporting the non-evil elements within each community. The only pure evil they encountered was the temple itself and the illithid scouts who were spying on the area (which they defeated with the help of a friendly flumph who was anxious to end the illithid thread before it came to the attention of the "great flumphtilla" that was passing through space nearby with flumphs the size of castles). It culminated in an old dwarven mining community that had fallen under the control of the orcs over the last two centuries (a mash-up of Quasqueton and the Forge of Fury). Even as they killed many orcs (who were threatening to invade the low-lands once their rivals in the temple had been defeated), they were looking for a reasonable orc leader they could support who would lead their people back into the orc caves and out of the fortress so the dwarves could reoccupy it.You can have the same sorts of adventures in D&D without the colonialist narrative that you can with that narrative. Trust me. There was plenty of combat and treasure seeking to go along with the role-playing and negotiation.</blockquote>

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