An Owlbear for Every Occaision

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.