On Bugbears

Bugbears have always kind of annoyed me. They share this place of honor with the dreaded Owlbear.











Bugbears are a sub-race of goblinoids, related to Goblins and Hobgoblins. The name Bugbear is my main issue. It doesn’t look like hardly a bug or a bear, much less a conglomeration of either. It seemed to me that Gygax just pulled the name out of a hat, but a look at the etymology gives me the answer. Like Hobgoblin, it’s just another medieval English word for “bad spirit”. In this case, kinda like a boogeyman. Don’t go into the forest, kiddies, or the bugbear will get you!

Still, bugbears have always seemed to me kind of tacked on. They’re just slightly tougher versions of hobgoblins or regular goblins. Why not just up their (The regular goblins) levels a bit, have them fight as 6th or 7th level creatures instead of 2-4?

Well, in the Hill Giants Bugbears were used as low-grade cannon fodder and jailers. There were quite a lot of them, a small army, in fact, on the lower levels. They were all well-equipped and, it seems to my memory, fairly well organized. The only problem was that they were really too low of a level to pose a threat. Just like Hobgoblins and regular goblins. These guys, though, actually posed a minuscule threat, mostly to the thieves and wizard's. But I still think that if Hobs and Gobs were given better statistics for this case then they could have worked just as well as "small of army of monsters serving the giants that don't pose a big threat unless you do something REALLY stupid"

I suppose I could just ask my DM instead of ranting here, but I won’t be seeing him for another two weeks.