A Bugbear (Author: BreaktheBar)

Course, brown fur juts from your jowls in a rough beard, and more covers most of your head. You use some of the water to slick back your hair so that it doesn't stand on end, and your fingers brush over the strange scar that mars your hairline, forehead and left eye. It is jagged, but forms an eldritch rune of some sort. Your left eye is milky white compared to the black of the right, but you can still see from it.

You are a bugbear, the most ferocious of the goblinoids. Taller than a human, naturally muscled and covered in course brown fur. Bugbears command tribes of lesser goblinoids, and when they gather under a warlord they rival any orc army.

Unfortunately, the scar and your eye also mark you as an Exile. You have a taint of magic in your blood, and are weaker than your brethren because of it.

You don't have a tribe of hobgoblins or goblins serving your whims. You can't raid a caravan, or ambush a group of adventurers on the road, let alone march to war. You are alone, banished from the foothills and forests. You have been alone a long time, living up in this damn cave.

The loneliness settles in again. What are you going to do? Should you try to do something different this time?

You sigh, still struggling against the murkiness of update reset, and wonder what you're capable of.

Magic in my blood, you think. What magic? That would be on... your Character Sheet.

Level 5 Bugbear Exile
Monster, Bugbear, Explicit
Experience to level up – 500
Attributes
| Strength 20 | Dexterity 25 | Endurance 20 |
| Charisma 32 | Manipulation 32 | Appearance 32 |
| Perception 30 | Intelligence 27 | Wits 28 |
Skills
Brawling 15
Athleticism 15
Presence 25
Lore 25
Occult 30
Stealth 13
Dodge 13
Crafting (Stoneworking) 5
Crafting (Carpentry) 5
Feats
Arcane Blood – Can access magic as a Tier I Sorcerer. Spellcasting statistic is Occult.
Bugbear Dominance – Lesser goblinoids lose ability to resist your commands equal to your Presence, unless they serve a Bugbear or other non-goblinoid creature with a higher presence than you.
Monstrous Appearance – when attempting to use Appearance in a positive way on creatures without the Monster subtype, count it at 20 points lower until the target gets used to you.
Sorcerer Tier I – May cast two spells per day from the following options:

• Fixate: Charm one target creature, which becomes fixated by you for Occult seconds. It slowly approaches you, ignoring all outside influences, and may not otherwise act until the spell ends.
• * Purify Food and Drink: Up to 1 cubic foot of food and drink is purified, removing any poisons and disease. Eating purified food and drink restores hit points.
• * Thunderclap: All creatures in an Occult feet cone suffer Sonic damage and are pushed half Occult feet directly away.
  Wisdom of the Ages – gain a constant, passive buff to your intelligence based on the time since your last .

Some elements of your Character Sheet, which hovers in front of you with scrolling text, had changed. The update notes had added building skills to the game, and you seemed to have the basic skills for both. Useful, you assume, since as you look around your cave it seems the small changes you usually made had once again been wiped away. Your bed of furs was gone, as was the fire pit you had dug near the entrance.

What hadn't changed were your spells. Purify Food and Drink was nice on the few occasions that you survived an encounter with adventurers. Most of the fights you did win were usually with other monsters of lesser level who thought they could push you around – usually the occasional kobolds coming down from the upper slopes of the mountain, or forest creatures if you went wandering down into the foothills. Thunderclap was good too – it scared the shit out of those lesser monsters, the problem was adventurers didn't get scared, they just came right back at you.

Fixate was the worst though. It wasn't useful against a single enemy because if you hit them it broke the spell, and it wasn't useful against a group of kobolds or pixies or whatever because it only targeted one of them. The best you had ever come up with was using it to stop a single enemy, and then trying to run away. It had worked once, but you were pretty sure that was because the adventurer had been high enough level he didn't care to chase you down.

You wave away the Character Screen and sigh, looking at your meager cave. Another update, another reset. You knelt down and sucked up another mouthful of water from the spring pool and then stood, walking to the entrance of the cave. Sunrise was coming on, red and blue painting the sky as light clouds swirled overhead.

The entrance to your home was about two thirds of the way up a massive, craggy cliff on the south side of the mountain. The route up was wide enough for a large creature, but because of the contours of the cliff it was hidden from most angles, including above. The entrance however itself was little more than a big, gaping hole that anyone could tell was a cave and not a shadow if they looked longer than a few seconds. Adventurers 'exploring' was one of the most common ways they stumbled on your home and murdered you in their variety of creative ways.

Fuck those guys.

From the mouth of your cave you look out over the foothills of the mountain and the dense forests that cover them. All sorts of creatures were out there, the darker and thicker the trees the more dangerous the beasts. The goblins were the closest, but inevitably some other creature quickly took control of them after an update since it took a couple of hours for you to climb down the mountain. The one time you got to them first, a manticore had come out of the deeper woods looking for the little buggers and killed you.

Enough reminiscing about your previous deaths. There were too many to count, what was the point? This was a new update, with new rules. The players that were left in the game were busy downloading the update, which gave you a chance to get a foot ahead of them.

You needed food, and you needed some creature comforts. Mainly a replacement for your bed and fire pit. You had two options – the first was heading down into the forest, where meaty creatures were more plentiful but you were also more likely to run into other sentient creatures and adventurers. Or you could head up the mountain and try and track down a couple of goats. They were tough to kill with only your quarterstaff, the single item in your inventory, but you also didn't need to walk for hours to get to them.

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