I'm working my way through the caves of chaos but I evidently cannot find some of the caves that should be there according to the walkthrough. I have not found any bugbears or the minotaur cave. Unless I've missed a secret door somewhere the only other place I can think they'd be is in the higher up area but the ladder / stairs icon tells me that the rockface is too unstable to climb and using a rope near this area does not appear to work. There were a few caves I entered that did not seem to have anything in them so I'm hoping I haven't encountered a bug.
Yeah, I forget why I did that... just to stop the players accidently starting with the Bugbears or Gnolls and getting flogged, I guess. To get the ladder to work (as it were) you neeed to have the mark from the Goblins and Kobolds. So you need to have either convinced the Chief of the tribe to give you the Mark, or just kill him and take it. EDIT: The empty caverns are by design, those are for the Orc tribes. They're done for the next update, such as it is.