Deconstructed: Fowlbear
You got a problem with these gooses, you got a problem with Darrington, and I suggest you let that one marinate!
THERE MUST HAVE been some long nights at Darrington Press spent thinking up Adversaries to grace the pages of Hope & Fear. I’d hate to think of the trauma that produced the terrifying beast that is the Fowlbear. [Ed: not all of us think the Fowlbear is terrifying. Read to the bottom, and listen!]
If I were to see one of these things, my first reaction would be similar to that of Starke's emotional rollercoaster trying to figure out armor in the game (screaming, crying, bargaining).
The Fowlbear is a honker-chonker of a Bruiser. A goose-beaked grizzly capable of frightening its prey and attacking often. Woe be it to those who wander too close to their ponds (bring bread or be dead)!
There are two things that you should probably note in the Fowlbear’s Motives and Tactics. The first is that they want to drive their prey into an ambush. The second is that they hunt in pairs and when they pick their prey, they succeed or die trying.
The Fowlbear has a middle of the road Difficulty and very high Thresholds, only beaten by a knight in dragonplate armor. So we can assume that one is a tough customer, but two of them, well, that’s a dreadful sight.
You might not realize this, but in the core rules, there was not a single Bruiser that had Relentless. In Hope & Fear, we see three. The other two are in Tier 4, which gives me the impression they wanted the Fowlbear to stand out among its peers as an extremely dangerous foe.
Along with two spotlights, it also has a new, (albeit fairly common in the new book) feature called Double Strike (Or Swipe, or Claw) that allows you to make two attacks and combine damage if they are on the same target. This feature feels like a win more button if used on a single target, but with a standard attack that is at Very Close range, it could easily spread the damage out doing 4 Major to Severe attacks before you hand the spotlight back to your party.
When employing this Adversary, we should assume a beast like this is searching for food. It has a partner in this effort because adventurers are tough, but also delicious. These ill-tempered amalgamations surround the party, one near a pond, the other hidden on the edge of the woods hoping to ambush their prey and drive them toward the other. How do they do this? The demons from the Circles Below that spawned this foul fowl decided to give it a tremendous and terrible honk. The reverberating exclamation sends those who cannot stomach its dread honk running away in fear.
So start out by choosing one of the Fowlbears to lead the ambush and start of with a honk. Make sure you get the honk right. Get a bike horn if you need one. Let the PCs who succeed make a choice before the big reveal. Do they stay and fight the threat or retreat with their party? If they opt to stay, ask them what part of the Fowlbear’s unnatural visage frightens them the most and have them mark a Stress. For those that failed or retreated, they discover that they have been tricked, bamboozled, and otherwise hookwinked! The Dread Honk has herded them into the tomia-filled jaws of another Fowlbear in hiding, but now, they’re Vulnerable.
I wouldn’t use the Dread Honk more than once per Fowlbear, and I would rule that damage from any Fowlbear ends the Vulnerable condition for a PC, not just the one that caused the condition. Other than that, these bruisers are a pretty straight-forward beat down.
👋 Henry here. While Chris and I admire how Rob Hebert designed a refreshing new Adversary simply by adding a consonant in front of Owlbear, we diverged in our estimation of the creature. Where Chris saw adversary, I saw ally. Where he wrote about how to deploy a dreadful duo for the party to fight, I begged him to consider recruiting the beast to fight for the party.
So excited was I by the premise of an armour-clad Fowlbear shattering the wrists of my enemies with their rock-hard beaks—or adventuring on behalf of the creature, who has been driven to near extinction because the King believes their spleen, once processed, is a mighty aphrodisiac—that we not only designed stat blocks to tame and recruit them, but finally hopped on mic for our first "Daggerheart Discussed."
Chris: The GM NPC rules can be found on page 166 of the Core rules, and love for the Fowlbear can be found in your heart!
Daggerheart Deconstructed is written by Chris Davidson, author of RightKnight's Guide to Making Custom Adversaries, one of the authors of Incredible Creatures, and Additional Writer for the ENNIE-award winning Daggerheart Core Rule Book.
