Bugbear

Huge, hunched, and covered in coarse fur, bugbears feed on fear the way other fey feed on nectar, and they harvest it by slipping into the dreams of sleeping creatures. This makes them the monster in every Faerie nursery tale.

It also makes them the gentlest goblins awake. A well-fed bugbear has no reason to frighten anyone. A starving one is the only kind most Faeries have ever met, and the Kingdom has built a whole folklore on the sample.

Appearance

The largest fey in either category — a bugbear standing upright is nearly twice a Faerie's height — with dense dark fur, small deep-set eyes, and a gait that reads as menacing mostly because of the size.

Attuned Magic

Nightmare. A nascent bugbear can sense fear at a distance and sharpen an existing bad dream. A powerful one can enter a sleeping mind, shape what it finds there, hold a conversation in it, and leave the sleeper with a memory they cannot distinguish from a real one. Bugbears consider the last of these a serious crime and punish it internally, a fact the Kingdom has never bothered to learn.

Society

Spread thin and organized around sleep. Bugbears claim territory by dream-range rather than by ground, so a bugbear's holdings are the minds that fall asleep within reach of them — which makes their borders unmappable, their politics incomprehensible to outsiders, and their census figures a matter of opinion. Ursk, the Dreamer Beneath, holds the largest range in the Nightwood.

The Nightwood is the only region in the world where the ruling power knows what its subjects are afraid of, in detail, every night.

Relations

Quietly good with the Spriggans across the unmarked border in the Twilight Forest — both peoples make their living in the dark, and both are used to being described as monsters by people who have never been there.