In the early 1970s, Gary Gygax was undoubtedly wearing some bell bottom polyester trousers with an open wide-collar disco shirt, as he watched some ChiPS on his 4 channel black and white TV. He was also playing with toys, looking for what might be new monsters to populate the dungeons of the new game he had just created–Dungeons and Dragons.
He came across a bag of plastic toys from Hong Kong that were labeled “prehistoric animals.” It was a set modeled after monsters from Japanese “Kaiju” films such as Ultraman, Mothra, and the Godzilla franchise. One of these plastic toys was odd enough to catch his eye and make him look away from Ponch and John.
It was a tiny plastic toy that looked like a bear and an owl had a baby.
The result was the Owlbear, now an iconic D&D monster that has appeared in every single edition of the game.
An owlbear is described as a ten foot tall cross between a bear and an owl. Owlbears are carnivorous creatures who live as mated pairs in caves. Famed for their aggression and ferocity, Owlbears hunt any creature bigger than a mouse. They use their beak and a “hug” to attack.
They are categorized as “magical beasts”, which makes sense, as their origin indicates that they are probably the product of a wizard’s experiments. ‘A wizard did it’ makes sense, as the trope of a “madman tinkering with bizarre mutations” is a big part of our Sci-Fi/Fantasy fiction mythology.
But who cares about the Owlbear origin story, we want to know what sound they make! Well, the answer to that is not so simple. Let’s go through the Owlbear edition by edition.
1 1st Edition
Does an owlbear hoot? Does it roar? Unfortunately, Gary Gygax didn’t speak of the sound of an owl bear in D&D 1e, nor did he give an extensive ecology. Here’s the original description:
A horrid creature which “hugs” like a bear, and deals damage with its beak.
Staying in Character: Character Builds for D&D 5e, Pathfinder 2E, and Starfinder from Popular Culture