We had our second Kingmaker session on Sunday, and so happens again encountered a classic RPG monster. The first session we encountered some kobolds and that made me write the Kobold-post. This time around we had a random encounter with an owlbear. It actually was rather hilarious as we earlier in the session had joked that “at least it’s not an owlbear” when told a long forgotten temple we were told to keep a look out for was said to be guarded by a bear. To then encounter an actually owlbear a couple of days later was fun (at least for us players, not so much for the characters), but what is an owlbear?
The Owlbear
Owlbear has no mythological background, but was a Gary Gygax creation during the 70’s. The early D&D was largely based on the Chainmail miniature war game, most of the monsters encountered where represented by rather random miniatures from different sources. The story goes that it was a small plastic model that was the inspiration for the owlbear. It was included in a plastic toy set from Hong Kong of miniatures modeled vaguely on dinosaurs or knocking-off more famous Ultraman monsters*. From the same set of plastic models we also find the basis for equally well-known Bulette and Rust monster.
Of course, combining different animals into a new creature is very well-known from all form of mythology, think of things like the griffon, harpy and mermaid so it’s not difficult to understand that the mind wanders to these weird animal combinations when looking at these small plastic toys.
*Ultraman was popular Japanese tokusatsu-show started in the 60’s which featured a Monster-of-the-week formula.
The Concept
As the name suggest, the owlbear is what you get, a mix between a bear and an owl. The original version had the special attack “hug”, obviously akin to the powerful bear-hug. The origins of the beast hasn’t really been described in the D&D world, but in later edition it got the magical beast-type, hinting that their basically the results of wizard’s experiments.
The Pathfinder version
The Pathfinder version is based on the 3.5 edition variant. Pathfinder actually took the concept and embraced the sheer silliness of the monster with a wide range of even weirder versions in their Behind the Monster series. We now have variants like the Arctic Owlbear, the Screaming Owlbear, the huge Siege Owlbear, the Slime Owlbear and the Spectral Owlbear.
We luckily just encountered a regular owlbear. In Pathfinder they’re a CR 4 monster, a large magical beast with 5HD, three attacks (2 claws and 1 bite) that can grab you. While perhaps nothing overly exciting stat wise, the encounter was very dangerous as we were just 4 1st lvl heroes. Our overly confident swashbuckler got knocked down, but we managed to take the monster out an save the unfortunate hero from bleeding out.
As mentioned, we had our second session and my party role is still to write up our adventures. It probably will come as blog-post later this week, but I haven’t decided on what form it will take. The first session was written up as two letters (one formal, one to friends) but as we’re still stuck in the wilderness and not exactly knowing where we plan to travel next I’m thinking of doing it as a short series of diary entries.
Tabletop Cave 