Editing Bugbear (section)

=Society=
On their own, bugbears tend to brutality to the point of bestiality. They band together in semi-nomadic gangs of hunter-gatherers; who frequently pillage, raid and plunder their surroundings, both for precious stones and metals and for captives. They are natural bullies and thugs, due to their aggression and territorial natures, being kept in line by the strongest and most aggressive of their kind. That's... about all what D&D has to say on bugbear society. So how are they different from any other 1970s-D&D humanoid?

The late-1970s [[Drow series]] mooted a halfhearted answer, posing the Depths' bugbears as slavers and slave-traders, serving the drow. [[Races of Ansalon]], the [[Dragonlance]] splatbook that gives the most information on bugbears as a potential PC race, just goes back to thuggery. Here they rarely practice slavery, preferring to eat what they catch instead.

Despite this, bugbears actually aren't idiots. They readily integrate into more structured societies (although how well, and to which masters, depends somewhat on edition), and often take over [[goblin]] tribes to make them do the work for them. Bugbears are known to be part of the civilized [[goblinoid]] societies in [[Eberron]], and the [[Nentir Vale]] even has an urban-dwelling bugbear tribe that has quite successfully remade itself into a crime syndicate.

AD&D lore claims that females are strictly inferior in bugbear society, which became a contrast with [[gnoll]]s when the latter went full hyena. In 2e many bugbear [[adventurer]]s are women looking for a better life outside of their repressive culture. This lore has been dropped in subsequent editions.