Bugbear
Neither bugs nor bears, bugbears are the hulking cousins of goblins and hobgoblins. With roots in the Feywild, early bugbears resided in hidden places, in hard-to-reach and shadowed spaces. Long ago and from out of the corner of your eye, they came to the Material Plane, urged to spread throughout the multiverse by the conquering god Maglubiyet. Centuries later, they still bear a fey gift for lurking just out of sight, and many of them have sneaked away from that god’s influence.
They are long of limb and covered in coarse hair, with wedge-shaped ears and pointed teeth. Despite their formidable build, bugbears are quiet skulkers, thanks to a fey magic that allows them to hide in spaces seemingly too small for them.
Ability Score Increases: When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one score by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1. Follow this rule regardless of the method you use to determine the scores, such as rolling or Standard Array.
Languages: Your character can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. The Player’s Handbook offers a list of languages to choose from. The DM is free to modify that list for a campaign.
Suggested languages: Common and Goblin
Life Span: The typical life span of a player character in the D&D multiverse is about a century, assuming the character doesn’t meet a violent end on an adventure. Members of some races, such as dwarves and elves, can live for centuries. If typical members of a race can live longer than a century, that fact is mentioned in the race’s description.
Height and Weight: Player characters, regardless of race, typically fall into the same ranges of height and weight that humans have in our world. If you’d like to determine your character’s height or weight randomly, consult the Random Height and Weight table in the Player’s Handbook, and choose the row in the table that best represents the build you imagine for your character.
Bugbear Traits - As a bugbear, you have the following racial traits.
Creature Type: You are a Humanoid. You are also considered a goblinoid for any prerequisite or effect that requires you to be a goblinoid.
Size: Your size is Medium.
Speed: Your walking speed is 30 feet.
Darkvision: You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light and in darkness as if it were dim light. You discern colors in that darkness only as shades of gray.
Fey Ancestry: You have advantage on saving throws you make to avoid or end the charmed condition on yourself.
Long-Limbed: When you make a melee attack on your turn, your reach for it is 5 feet greater than normal.
Powerful Build: You count as one size larger when determining your carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift.
Sneaky: You are proficient in the Stealth skill. In addition, without squeezing, you can move through and stop in a space large enough for a Small creature.
Surprise Attack: If you hit a creature with an attack roll, the creature takes an extra 2d6 damage if it hasn’t taken a turn yet in the current combat.
Bugears were originally presented as a playable race in Volo's Guide to Monsters* but were revised in Monsters of the Multiverse*. Chronala uses the revised version.
*Monsters of the Multiverse (released 16 May 2022) replaces and updates the information in both Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and also includes Playable Races from some other sources as well.
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