I'm ignorant of general D&D lore but aren't goblins more or less just a bunch of savages? Kind of dumb, tendency for violent solutions not really all that diplomatic. You're definitely railroaded as the story currently is, but goblins don't exactly strike me as ever being much more than pawns for someone else. In which case killing their leadership (Tadpole crew) "saves" them since they'd probably calm down with the massive mobilization against the other locals. The Teiflings, they're straight up refugee stereotype so it'd be hard to see them as anything other than sympathetic. Regarding Kagha, the killing of the kid comes across more as a fuck up on her part. An aside, I don't really care about the kid dying in so far as it's inconvenient when dealing with the general grove issues. I mean even with the grove invasion I view it more as a pain to have to go around finding every Teifling to kill rather than the killing themselves being bad/evil. Back to Kagha, she wants to be tough and naturally takes it too far if you don't step in. This is also made more clear by her whole dealing with the shadow druids where they sold her a bit and she thought it was the right thing to do. Sealing off the grove is obviously an extreme measure but it's not absurd to believe someone would pursue it and probably hints that she's generally afraid (see real life). It's also not all that wild that you can talk her out of it as while she certainly is headstrong she also seems susceptible to charismatic people. After all to convince her to back off from the kid and abandoning the Shadows requires some good (lucky) charisma, if Halsin returns she also backs down really quickly.
