Owl Bears

You've been given the task of foraging for food for your companions as they set up camp.

Wandering the nearby woods in search of mushrooms or some game, if you're lucky, you come across some berry bushes.

As you pick, you hear some rustling behind you and turn to face a large, feathered animal.

Your first thought is of a bear, but the face is wrong, containing a sharp-looking beak rather than a snout.

As you slowly back away from the creature, it lets out a piercing screech and charges directly at you.

This is an owlbear, another iconic monster in Dungeons and Dragons that has stood the test of time for decades.

It's not a creature that's dense with lore like dragons or mind-flareers, but it's a memorable monster nonetheless,

appearing in countless modules and other media.

We'll be taking just a brief look at owl bears and their ecology.

Owl bears were first introduced in the Greyhawk Supplement for original D&D in 1975, created

by Gary Gygax.

Gygax said that he was inspired to create the owl bear based on a toy figurine he found

in a bag of figures from a dime store, labeled as prehistoric animals.

The toys were based off of various monsters from Japanese kaiju films, such as the Godzilla

franchise, and Gygax was also inspired by them to create a couple of other well-known creatures,

the boulet and the rust monster.

The Greyhawk supplement describes it as a horrid creature that hugs like a bear and

attacks with its beak.

The owlbear's popularity was set from that point, and it would go on to appear in every

basic monster manual for each edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

Dragon magazine No. 214 from February of 1995 featured an article titled The Ecology

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