Bugbears – I have always loved the name bugbear, ever since one of them pretended to be friendly to my trusting 9yr old D&D player self and under the guise of offering me some kebab shoved a red hot skewer into my 2^nd level fighter's face. This was my first real experience with betrayal (and they say D&D doesn't teach kids anything). Much fun was had in the Cave of Chaos that day – my only regrets at the time were that the crazy fighter in the basement turned evils, and that I there weren't any baby bugbears to slay! Still, it's amazing, my initial impression of bugbear as potentially friendly cute creatures - something like a cheerful Chewbacca with a bee head - was destroyed almost as soon as it was formed.

The point of that touching tale, is that I have never known what a bugbear might look like (well as noted below there's that proto-soviet revolutionary kind I learned about in undergrad....) but the name was just so evocative! I think the image used in the 1^st Monster Manual is excellent (look it up), is pretty good, it also appears to have been cribbed from a revolutionary Russian zine of the 1905 – 1914 era. There's history in the monster, excellent history. Yet, despite it's storied nature, all I know about the damn things is as follows: Bugbears are betraying murderous bastards, bugbears have a lot of hp, bugbears are what goblins use to collect gambling debts, bugbear are hairy and likely smell, bugbears are dumb but make up for it in evil cunning, and Bugbears are fond of polearms.

The Bugbear, magazine mascot - Ivan Biliban, 1905

 Of course around Denethix the idea of a hairy giant goblin is not adequately bizarre. Plus I've always thought that a 'bugbear' should be at least one of those things – bug or bear. For a giant hairy goblin, it's possible that the hive minds have been breeding Sasquatches with their root servitor stock (are goblins purebred hive-mind stock, or are they the 'hiveminder' equivilent of Morlocks?), but I don't like that for bugbear. A bugbear is what a hivesquatch is not. I see a hivesquatch as having 6-10hd, AC 4 and being 12' tall – like a goblin hill giant. A terror that can't be made outside a lab and needs a whole sasquatch tribe's worth of pineal glads to grow in it's tube. Hivesquatches are what the oldest hive minds, backed by steam-powered reconstructed alien tech, pull out when they descend on human lands and need something to smash a few steel leviathans – hivesquatches may also be immune to magic and certainly only show up with 1d6 hundred goblins in support.

Bugbears though – this is a bugbear....