Bugbears

Bugbears are goblin-kin, cousins to the hobgoblins, and the branch of that family the Mól made large. They stand tall and much broader than a hobgoblin, long in the arm, with powerful legs that carry them at a crouch. They are rare, fully sapient, and reckoned secretive and slow to trust anybody. They speak G’lin, the same tongue as their cousins, which is most of what first tied them to the Empire in anyone’s reckoning.

Made, Not Grown

By the oldest account of the goblin-kin, one ancient stock of the region spent more than a thousand years being bred and alchemically refined by its own hand. Halfway through, the tribe split. One half was shaped toward the animals running wild in the country around it and grew in height and girth into the muscular, fur-covered bugbears; the process for turning out a beast that large and that hard to notice was held to have been perfected. The other half went red-skinned and near hairless and became the hobgoblins. The fur is the bugbears’ own, and the hobgoblins’ hair is a patch on each forearm and shin.

Four primary subgroups came out of that program in the end: hobgoblins, bugbears, a goblin kind, and a fourth that was never named plainly. Plain goblins were the stock the work was done on, and the same craft turned on the Empire’s slaves produced the Peren. How anyone came to know this was never written down.

The Clans

Two of the nine great clans that ran the Empire were bugbear by blood, and neither of them was a minor one.

Säv were the regents and administrators: the stewards who ruled in the Emperor’s absence, kept the imperial machinery turning, and bred the finest horses in Idir. It is said of them that they truly ran the place, and that they did it with access rather than with swords. Their last regent went mad after the fall, and it ended in a killing inside the clan.

Barzûl were the army. They came up out of the gladiatorial pits and ended in supreme command of the imperial legions, expert in siegecraft and shock assault and, later, in breaking an enemy’s will before the lines met. The training regimes that made soldiers into weapons were theirs.

A bugbear’s proportions are still in the Empire’s ironmongery. The khopesh, the weapon lineage that produced the modern bastard sword, began as a bugbear broadsword, and the arms that turn up in Mól caches are cut long in the arm and broad across the shoulder because that is who they were made for.

Campaign Updates

The first the company knew of them was a chest of their arms. Set into a mountainside above the Valley of Doom, behind a crevice a storm had shaken open, sat a Mól cache whose contents were all cut to the wrong shape: a rusted long sword, a spear head, an oversized curved flaying dagger. Mikhail read the proportions and named the people they belonged to, which is the first anyone in the party had heard of them. Under the chest lay seven Mól silver coins and a ring engraved inside in G’lin, sized for a bugbear’s finger and a good fit on Koa’s thumb. Koa now carries a restored Mól bastard sword built to the same scale.

The first living one dropped out of a tree. Daric, who answers to Dar, ran both of the mercenary crews hired to hunt the company down the Haudh-Gwenn road. He came at Koa’s flank out of the canopy, Aldo shouted the warning, and Koa turned and put him down in a single swing. Mikhail stabilized him rather than let him bleed out. In the cell the next morning he was stoic, slow, and stronger than he let on: Aldo shoved his ribs, and he took hold of Aldo one-handed and clamped down until Koa looked at him. He answered in Taal. His creed is that he gets the job done and leaves the killing to other people, which he offered as though it settled something, and which his own page records the limits of. No other bugbear anywhere has a full name attached to them. He is kept at The Crack now, where nobody uses the full name either: there he is D, or Buggy, and he keeps the other recruits in order.

One caution about the word. The company’s oldest acquaintance called Bugbear is Bhir of the Free Folk, and he is a hobgoblin. The byname is about how he fights, out of ambush and with a morning star, and it sticks because he is long-armed and stands taller than most hobgoblins do. It says nothing whatever about his blood.