But bears seem to resonate culturally for another reason: hibernation. The Bear Cult seems to focus on their ability to descend into the “underworld” of their cave and “die” in hibernation, and then stir and “return to the world of the living” in spring. We have plenty of anthropological evidence that ties them to medicine and healing, and there’s some evidence of bear worship in the past, including special bear burials in caves by prehistoric humans.
So, a bear is more than just a large omnivore: it’s a sacred space monster, a creature know for its size, ferocity, tenacity, and it’s ability to survive and to restore itself to life.
Space Bears in GURPS Space
Starting from the top, when it comes to Terrain, we’re assuming something with a pretty big temperature swing, as we want a hibernating creature; this assumes woodland, arctic or mountain. For Trophic Level, we’re looking at fairly impressive omnivores; they’re mostly herbivorous (likely a gathering herbivore, given its size, though pandas probably count as grazers), with bits of Pouncing, Hijacking and Scavenging to round out the carnivorous part of its diet. They are Walkers, but they have some facility with digging, climbing or swimming, sometimes, but I wouldn’t really treat any of these as major forms of locomotion.
When it comes to Size, they’re technically human scale at SM +1; no stat I’ve found, even for the Cave Bear, pushes them to SM +2. The default “600 lbs” of SM +1 in space gives them ST 17, or somewhere between a Black Bear and a Grizzly Bear.
When it comes to their Body Plan, bears are obviously bilateral, four limbs, no tail, no manipulators, with an internal skeleton. A bit interesting, in retrospect, that they don’t have manipulators, given their value to a gathering herbivore, and its tendency to climb trees. I suppose “bear with hands” starts to look more like a gorilla, but it’s still an interesting thought.
For Skin, bears presumably have Thick Fur, especially for their cold environment; though note that most bear stats have DR 2, implying thick fur over hide. The same “roll” on other skin types would give them thick hide (DR 4) with skin, scales to heavy scales with scales, feathers to thick feathers for feathering, and tough-to-heavy exoskeleton for an exoskeleton. For Temperature, we expect Warm-Blooded with sufficient metabolism control to handle hibernation.
Sexually, bears have two sexes, are live bearing, and have Moderate K strategy.
When it comes to Senses, real bears probably have Bad Vision (Near Sighted) but can see color; they probably have good hearing with Ultrahearing, and they probably have Discriminatory Smell. I know of no special senses, though perfect balance might not be a bad idea for “mountain bears” or woodland bears who often climb. Space largely concurs with these results.
When it comes to Alien Minds, bears would average IQ 1-3, but given that most mammals seem to end up with IQ 4, I expect bears would as well. Real life bear reproduction is all over the map, but I would guess somewhere between Mating Only and Temporary Pair Bond with a Solitary lifestyle.
This gives them a generic Psychological Profile of Chauvinism -1 (Broad-minded), Concentration +0, Curiosity +1 (Curiosity), Egoism +1 (Proud), Empathy -1 (Oblivious), Gregariousness -1 (Uncongenial), Imagination +1 (Versatile) and Suspicion +1 (Careful?).
Generic Alien Bear Stats
There are plenty of bear stats in GURPS. See B456, DF5 Allies, page 6, or Pizard’s stats on bears.
Variations
Giant Monster Bear
If the bear inspired the ogre, then it should be bigger, meaner and more terrifying. Such a creature might lean more heavily on its predatory side (though it would probably be a hijacker or opportunistic pouncer rather than a dedicated predator), have sharper claws and be massive. We could also make it tougher, if we wanted. If we increase from Thick Fur to Thick Fur Over Hide (DR 1 + Temp Tolerance), this becomes Blubber (DR 4) or Armor Shell (DR 5) for skin, Heavy Scales (DR 3) for scales, Thick Feathers (+2 Temp Tolerance) or Armor Shell (DR 5) for skin.
The big change, of course, is going from SM +1 to SM +2, from 600 lbs to 3000 lbs, and from ST ~17 to ST ~29. So, on average, we’re looking at +12 ST. We could bump this up to +15 if we wanted to make it extra scary.
Leaning towards predation and increasing its size would alter the psych profile to Chauvinism -1 (Broad-minded), Concentration +1 (Attentive), Curiosity +1 (Curiosity), Egoism +1 (Proud), Empathy -2 (Callous; this is as low as it will go; we could push it a level further arbitrarily), Gregariousness -2 (Loner), Imagination +1 (Versatile) and Suspicion -1 (Fearlessness 1).
Lens (Giant Monster Bear): Add 15 to ST; Increase Will by +1; Increase SM to +2; Increase DR to 5; Replace Claws (Blunt) with Claws (Sharp); add Bloodlust (12), and Loner (12).
Tunnel Bear
One recurring theme with Bears is their associations with caverns. What if bears were deeply associated with caverns, native to an extensive network to them? Their large size would run into some problems, as they would struggle to work through many of the tighter tunnels, and they would need a steady supply of nutrients that most cavern systems lack. If we assume a planet with an extensive ecosystem built around vents, they might support large omnivores like bears.
Such a creature would need the flexibility to squeeze through tunnels, and would need some way to navigate well in the darkness. If we treated them as diggers (they might have even more emphasis on the shovel-like nature of their claws), we might expect Blindness, Subsonic Hearing, Vibration Sense and Absolute direction. Psychologically, it would make them slightly more suspicious and less curious as well. To handle their large size, a hydrostatic skeleton would let them squeeze through small spaces (“Slug Bear”) but a more flexible design and a narrow skull, like a really large rat or mole, might work better.
Lens (Tunnel Bear): Add Absolute Direction, Acute Hearing 2, Blindness, Double Jointed and Vibration Sense (Ground)
Metabolic Bear
The bear, famously, hibernates. We should probably talk about what that means: hibernation means that the body slows its metabolic processes and, in warm-blooded animals, allow its body temperature to match ambient temperature. This isn’t entirely true for bears, who seem to only drop their body temperature slightly, but what we’re talking about amounts to a form of naturally occuring cryosleep in animals. That alone is an interesting concept to explore. But what matters here is that GURPS handles this with a specific limitation on Metabolism Control. GURPS Space doesn’t include that limitation: it assumes certain animals get total metabolism control, meaning they can hibernate on demand. What if we ramped this up to 11?
GURPS Biotech isn’t a bestiary, but it does give us some guidelines on what may or may not be biologically possible, and it pegs metabolism control as a glandular modification. The principle here seems to be that hibernation is a process of using hormones to signal the body to slow itself down, to conserve resources. Those resources could also be conserved for use during emergencies and released at will from the beast. It pushes some boundaries to make this gameable, but it might be possible!
We might imagine a bear that is able to, at will, reduce its metabolism. It might also rapidly increase it, boosting its reaction time and its strength. We might even use it as justification for rapid healing, where it draws upon its excess reserves to heal more quickly. We could reflect these with Boosted Reflexes and Explosive Strength, both from Bio-Tech, and Regeneration (Regular) that costs fatigue. This fatigue would, in principle, be powered by some form of biological energy reserve that can only be gained by excess food consumption. This concept makes for an interesting, “gluttonous” race in a space opera game, as it explores a neat biology and creates a resource management game, but it’s not the sort of bean counting a GM would want to do with a space critter. So, for simplicity, we could give the beast these traits, while I discuss the more accounting-intensive version here, in these notes.
Lens (Metabolic Bear): +5 ST; +1.0 Basic Speed; Regeneration (Regular)
Teddy Bear
My research suggests that bears give birth to between 1-4 cubs, which suggests more “moderate-K” than “Strong-K” but this surprised me, because mother bears are so ferocious we meme about “mother bears.” So, what about explicitly Strong-K bears as far as GURPS Space is concerned? We can go a step further and call the bears Pitiable, at least when they are young. This gives us a “cute” bear or, at least, a bear that emphasizes cuteness.
The biggest difference this makes is to the Bear’s mind and psychology. Omnivores already get a bonus to their intelligence; if we argue in favor of long-lifespans (reasonable with a creature that hibernates) and add Strong Key, then the average roll comes out to a 10, which is at the height of the “High Intelligence” result, and “Presapient” is extremely plausible. It also pushes their mating closer towards pairbonding, so we might even go with a Pair Bonded species: Daddy Bear might matter too! This, however, doesn’t really change much about any aspect of their template.
This change would give them a Psychological Profile of Chauvinism -1 (Broad-minded), Concentration +1 (Attentive), Curiosity +2 (Curiosity 12), Egoism +2 (Selfish), Empathy +0, Gregariousness -1 (Uncongenial), Imagination +2 (Versatile) and Suspicion +1 (Careful?). The result, to me, feels “more bearish than normal,” but in a cute way: they will often be more inquisitive and playful , and perhaps a bit more sensitive. A lot these will fall below the resolution of a racial template, but would justify all sorts of fun quirks.
If we’re going to make them more intelligent as a result of a stronger-K strategy, we might also make them more dextrous with their claws. DF 5 Allies already does this, and we might remove Horizontal to represent a species that can stay bipedal for longer.
Lens (Teddy Bear): Add Curiosity (12) and Emotion Sense to Discriminatory Smell; Replace No Fine Manipulators and Horizontal with Bad Grip 1 and Extra Legs (4; temporary limitation, no fine manipulators).
The Wheel Bear
Oh, this is the requisite alternate symmetry variation. Right, so what can we do here? Well, a consistent theme with bears is their mystical regeneration. How can we plausibly create a creature that simply regenerates its arm or, perhaps, regenerates any part of its body, including its head or its torso? Regeneration of a limb isn’t too hard, but total regeneration is a little stickier unless we argue that no part of its body is really distinct from any other part of its body. That concept works well enough for “simple” creatures with limited nerve clusters, but what about “higher” animals with complex brain structures? Well, you’d need distributed brains, which implies multiple heads, but that only adds a little resilience (and weirdness). What if all of its limbs were also its heads?
The closest I can come to for a plausible variation of this is, according to my very limited understanding of what looks like a creature that we all have a rather limited understanding of, sinophores, or colonial organisms. These are mobile colonies of a single creature that is made up of multiple, distinct sub-creatures, called zooids. I’m not sure what the distinction between a zooid and a specialized organ is, other than that a zooid seems to have the body plan of an independent creature and less specialization. Can they survive on their own? Let us say, for our example here, that it can.
This “bear” would consist of five “limb” zooids. Each limb would have its own mouth, its own support structure that would allow it to walk or grasp (likely just claw tips and strong structural support beyond the mouth) and sensory organs, perhaps some eye-spots or some “eyes” on small tendrils. Each of these limbs would also have a major neural cluster, and would “meet” at some central, shared point, which might be inside of some exoskeletal shell, similar to an anemone, or a series of coral polyps extending out of a central silica core. Within this central core, specialist zooids would exist that collect the neural data and nutrients and distributes it to the rest of the limb zooids. The limb zooids can live without the central core, but the central core cannot live without the limb zooids.
Reproduction could be handled by asexual budding. If a limb zooid is stripped of the rest, it can continue to drag itself around, consuming mass and budding off more specialized zooids until it rebuilds its core, and then the core can bud off new limb zooids over time. This justifies our regeneration. However, many colonial organisms reproduce sexually: this seems to involve the spawning of a new colonial organism, and sexual reproduction has a lot of advantages, so perhaps wheel-bears have the means by which to transfer DNA via their limb zooids.
This is effectively an entirely new creature with perhaps only the loosest inspirations on a bear, but it would presumably remain an SM+1 Omnivore from Woodlands. It plausibly has 5-sided radial symmetry, a combination exoskeleton (the central shell) and hydrostatic skeleton (the limb zooids), and likely has far weaker vision than a real bear has, and is probably less intelligent.
The proper stats for this would probably include the proper stats of its limbs as separate organisms, but I don’t have time for that! So we’ll just do this as a singular organism and if people are super excited about Wheel Bears, I may expand them out. Not sure where they’d fit in a setting like Psi-Wars, though.
ST: 17 |
Basic Speed: 5.0 |
SM: +1 |
DX: 12 |
Basic Move: 5 |
|
IQ: 2 |
Perception: 9 |
|
HT: 13 |
Will: 10 |
DR: 5 (Core); 2 (Limbs) |
Traits: 360 Vision; Blindness; Blunt Claws; Detect Light/Dark; Extra Arms (5, Extra Flexible; Foot Manipulators); Extra Legs (5); Extra Mouths (5); Injury Tolerance (No Brain, Head or Neck); Loner (12); No Fine Manipulators; Semi-Upright; Sharp Teeth; Regrowth; Wild Animal;
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