Thursday, October 9, 2014

Azurthite Bestiary: Bugbear Nightmare


In dark places where nightmares thicken and curdle, bugbears are born. They're gangling things with burning coal eyes that stare out of snarled fur, black and featureless as the night sky between the stars. They haunt abodes of fear and shadow: abandoned houses, ancient ruins, sunless forests; they even squeeze into the recesses of children's closets and the forgotten world glimpsed in the gaps between floorboards. Any dark corner is a door to a bugbear. They crawl out with great sacks clutched in their spider-fingered hands. Snickering, murmuring, they snatch up children and small folk in their sacks and kill those who try and stop them. They drag the children back to their damp, subterranean otherworld, and what happens there is best not discussed.

Besides (one presumes) their kidnapped victims, bugbears subsist on such inedible provender as glass shards, potash, and the heads of rabid bats. They consider certain venomous toads an utter delicacy.

Azurthite bugbears are statted like regular 5e bugbears with the following differences:

Skills Stealth +6

Special Abilities:
Plastic. Bugbears can squeeze through spaces as small as 1 inch.
Shadow Stealth. While in dim light or darkness, a bugbear can hide as a bonus action.
Sunlight Weakness. In bright sunight, bugbears have a disadvantage to attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wonderfully creepy.

I also imagine a group of evil spellcasters who have devised "bugbear seeds" that can be planted in the homes of their enemies and will slowly curdle shadows and feed on nightmares of the house in order to grow and emerge and hunt.

Legion said...

That's a great image!

The Happy Whisk said...

That is one ugly creature.