An Owlbear for Every Occaision

/ jstater
My last post involved a mama owlbear and her cubs. When you write as many encounters as I do, you have to provide some descriptive text to make one monster encounter feel different from another. In the case of the owlbear, I described it as a “great horned owlbear”, meaning it has the head and face of a great horned owl on a bear’s body. With that in mind, I present this little table to roll up a random owlbear. Just roll d12 for a body and d12 for a head. If you want to know what a sun bear or elf owl look like, use Google or Wikipedia.
 
Roll
Head
Body
1
Barn Owl (M)
Black Bear (S)
2
Boreal Owl (S)
Blue Bear (M)
3
Eagle Owl (L)
Brown Bear (M)
4
Elf Owl (S)
Cave Bear (L)
5
Fearful Owl (M)
Grizzly Bear (L)
6
Great Horned Owl (L)
Moon Bear (M)
7
Laughing Owl (M)
Panda Bear (M)
8
Pygmy Owl (S)
Polar Bear (L)
9
Screech Owl (S)
Shortfaced Bear (L)
10
Snow Owl (L)
Sloth Bear (S)
11
Spectacled Owl (M)
Spectacled Bear (S)
12
Stygian Owl (M)
Sun Bear (S)
 

The S, M and L refer to the size of the animal. For every “L” in an owlbear, it gains +1 hit dice and +1 to damage. For every “S” in an owlbear, it loses 1 hit dice and +1 to Armor Class.

And since owlbears are supposed to be magical hybrids, feel free to throw some weird special abilities in. Maybe a stygian owl-headed owlbear has some demonic powers, or a sun bear-bodied owlbear can radiate intense light. Surprise your players – they love that kind of thing. Really.

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Image is by Claudio Pozas for the Owlbear challenge run by the ArtOrder blog.

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