Slayer's Guide to Bugbears
The Slayer's Guides are a series of supplements by Mongoose Publishing that provides additional details for a variety of creatures in the d20 system rules. This guide details bugbears, the large but still stealthy cousins of goblins.
A First Look
The Slayer's Guide to Bugbears is a 32 page staple-bound softcover book available for $9.95 US. This is typical for the Slayer's Guides, expensive for the size in comparison to other d20 system products.
The cover of the book is by frequent Mongoose artist Anne Stokes, and depicts a bugbear with a flail bashing an armored human fighter.
The interior of the book is black and white. The inside front cover has a great anatomy illustration by artist Chris Quilliams. Other interior artists include David Griffith, Phil Renne, and Nathan Webb.
The interior uses a standard typeface, but there is a good amount of spacing between paragraphs and rather large font used in headers.
A Deeper Look
The Slayer's Guide to Bugbears is much in the vein of the later Slayer's Guides. There is a large amount of exposition and flavor text accompanied by some methancial tidbits.
Most of the book is consumed with notes of bugbear physiology, habitat, society, and warfare. The physiology section discusses the nature of bugbears physically, including such things as eating and growth. Continual hunger is pegged as being the one of the major motivators for bugbears, who unsurprisingly prefer meat. Greed is also another major motivator.
The habitat section states that bugbears typically lair near cities, so that they can practice the larceny that is a hallmark of their race.
The society section emphasizes a few aspects of bugbear society. Bugbear society has units called routs and cetes. Young aggressive bugbears often organize themselves into routs, which are basically small mobile gangs of sorts. Cetes are larger and somewhat more stationary groups of bugbears that only move on when local food supplies have been exhausted.
A new prestige class for bugbears is introduced in this section: the dark ranger. The dark ranger is very much like a ranger specialized in stealth, with sneak attack instead of a racial enemy. While appropriate for bugbears, it's not too far off what you could have done with the existing ranger and rogue classes.
Bugbear religion revolves around the twin gods Render and Stalker. Stalker is the deity who represents the use of cunning against other races. Render is the more popular deity of the two, who incites violence and cruelty.
The Methods of Warfare section discusses methods and objectives of bugbears in combat. Bugbears often use stolen weapons, and rely on rapid engagements and ambushes.
The Roleplaying with Bugbears section seems to be largely a reiteration of previous sections, including the role of different parts of bugbear society and greed and hunger as their central motivations.
The Scenario Hook and Ideas provides some adventure seeds involving bugbears, including a bugbear cleric kindapping human clerics for sacrifices, and a candy shop owner whose stock is being plundered by bugbear children.
A section entitled Luurg's Warren provides a short ready-to-use bugbear lair.
The last part of the book is a Bugbear Reference List, which provides stock statistics for various bugbear characters, as well as a pair of new spells.
There are also a few new items such as feats and mundane and magic items sprinkled throughout the book.
Conclusion
There seem to be few mechanical problems with the Slayer's Guide to Bugbears, though there appear to be some deliberate alterations such as providing weaker stats for female bugbears than males. The book could provides some useful ready-to-run material for bugbear related adventures of your own making, but I saw little exposition that was really exciting or inspiring.
-Alan D. Kohler
