01/16/2026
Happy [Day], and welcome back to Tabletop Thoughts!
One of the smartest old-school adventures ever written is B2: The Keep on the Borderlands, and specifically the Caves of Chaos. But here’s the thing — you don’t actually need to run the Caves of Chaos as written to get a ton of value out of it.
In fact, one of the best modern DM tricks is to tear it apart completely.
Instead of a single ravine packed with monster caves, treat each cave as a stand-alone lair, a roaming threat, or even a mystery the players might never discover. Suddenly, one classic location becomes fuel for an entire campaign.
One Dungeon, Many Lairs
Each cave in the Caves of Chaos already does most of the hard work for you. Every one has a clear theme, a faction with goals, defensible terrain, and treasure that makes sense for the occupants.
So why keep them all crammed into one ravine?
Pull them apart and scatter them across your map. The goblin caves become a forest ravine hideout. The hobgoblins take over an abandoned watchtower. The cult relocates to a forgotten roadside shrine. The bugbears lair in a collapsed mine.
Same layouts. Same encounter logic. Completely different context.
Your players will never know they’re walking through a 40-year-old dungeon.
Reusable Lairs Are a DM Superpower
Once you start treating these caves as modular pieces instead of a fixed dungeon, a few really nice things happen.
You can drop them in whenever the pacing needs a jolt. They work as rumored locations instead of required content. And you don’t need to decide when they’ll be used.
That last part is important.
You’re not prepping plot — you’re prepping possibility.
The Caves as Schrödinger’s Scenarios
This is where old-school thinking really shines.
Until the players actually interact with one of these lairs, you don’t know where it is, who occupies it, or how it ends. That goblin cave exists in a state of quantum uncertainty.
It might be the hideout behind recent caravan raids. It might become the source of a missing child rumor. It might never appear at all.
Once the players choose a direction, the cave collapses into reality.
That’s a Schrödinger’s Scenario — prepped, but undefined until observed.
Why This Works So Well
Old-school adventures assumed the world doesn’t care about the party, not everything gets used, and player choice determines relevance.
Modern campaigns sometimes struggle because everything feels like it’s on a critical path. By breaking the Caves of Chaos into loose parts, you reduce wasted prep, increase player agency, and let the world feel larger than the story.
This is the same philosophy often talked about in OSR circles: the referee sets the stage, not the script.
How to Steal This for Your Own Game
You don’t need Keep on the Borderlands specifically to do this, but it’s a great place to start.
Take a classic dungeon. Isolate each faction or section. Rename it. Re-theme the surroundings. Don’t place it on the map yet.
Let your players tell you where it belongs by the choices they make.
Final Thought
The Caves of Chaos don’t need to be a place. They can be a toolbox.
And once you start treating adventures like that — as parts instead of plots — your prep gets lighter, your worlds feel deeper, and your players start driving the story without even realizing it.
Keep on gaming!
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