Every month, I invite my Patreon supporters – the ones who participate in my Discord chat room – to choose a topic for a Random Bulls$&% article. I call that my Fanservice BS. And, every month, I’m further convinced that this practice is a stupid idea. And every month I start the Fanservice BS article off with a complaint about how terrible my Patrons are at picking topics and how I have to veto topics for a variety of reasons and cull out the flood of joke suggestions. And while my Patrons do vote on topic suggestions, I have to cull through those to root out the bad topics and joke votes as well.

I’m done.

That isn’t to say I’m done with the Fanservice BS. No. Fanservice BS is extremely useful for a number of reasons I won’t go into because some of them are actually quite Machiavellian. Let’s just say that, if my Discord chat server existed in the Fallout universe, I’d be the company that designed it to perform social experiments on a group of hapless innocents who think I’m actually just trying to keep them safe, happy, and healthy.

What I am done with is worrying at all about the topic. I’m just going to take all of the topics that I can find with a quick scan, whatever they are, eliminate the ones that can’t be used for Fanservice BS, and then roll randomly to determine what topic I have to write about. I’ll spew about 3,000 words about that topic, whatever it is, and then pass the whole thing to Hasse the Heretic for proofreading. I figure either she’ll eventually have an aneurism from reading this crap or I’ll have an aneurism from writing it. And I’m fine with that either way.

So, let me grab some dice and roll on the list of topics.

*clatter*

And we have a winner:

Hannibal ad Portas: Why Dwarven Bear Cavalry should be a thing in every setting.

F%&$ me. Well, maybe this will teach you all a lesson about joke topics.

Bear Cavalry? Really?

I honestly don’t know where this thing started. I was going to research it, but that runs counter to the whole Fanservice BS thing. And, to a larger extent, the Random Bulls$&% category. The idea of Random Bulls$&% was to allow me to sit back and think through interesting questions that really don’t fit anywhere else on the site. Stuff that doesn’t really constitute advice or game mechanics or whatever. The reason for the Fanservice BS thing was partly to engage my Patrons and partly because I sometimes have trouble coming up with interesting ideas to ponder. But, thinking through issues and ideas in an unfocused and low-pressure way is an important mental process. So, I’m not researching this. I’m just going to say what I know.

What I know about bear cavalry is that it seems to be one of those nerdy internet jokey memey things that I absolutely can’t stand. I mean, the first cause – the patient zero – that was probably entertaining. It was probably pretty funny or clever in whatever context it originated in. It’s got the right mix of awesome and absurd to make it funny. Once. But like everything awesome and clever and absurd, nerds have run it into the ground. Nerds do to ideas what radio stations used to do to popular hit singles: overplay the s$&% out of them until most people hate them. The problem is nerds are also so socially and humorologically stunted that they don’t recognize when a joke has had all enjoyment beaten out of it. Nor do they realize that merely repeating a joke does not a joke make.

And so, I first encountered bear cavalry in an expansion to the clever, absurd, and awesome Smash Up game. A game that basically took the basic nerd humor formula of “combine two awesome things into one thing for instant absurd awesome” as its core mechanic. And it was also clever and funny. For a little while. But bear cavalry was pushing it. See, in the basic game, you chose two factions from a grab bag of popular geeky things – aliens, dinosaurs, ninjas, pirates, robots, wizards, zombies – and you combined them together. So, you’d play Ninja Pirates or Robot Dinosaurs or whatever. That’s pretty cool, right? The things, in and of themselves, weren’t really crazy. It was the combination that made them crazy. But then, the game went the Munchkin route of releasing thousands of expansions that referenced every geeky thing they could think of with no thought other than “how can we make people buy more games from us without actually having to design new games?” And, while most of their ideas weren’t terrible, per se. A lot were reaching, but okay. But not bear cavalry. Bear cavalry is a single faction. You combine it with ninjas or dinosaurs or whatever to get Ninja Bear Cavalry or Dinosaur Bear Cavalry. And that’s just dumb. It’s missing the point. The point is to take two mostly sensible – or at least simple tropey – things and combine them into something that becomes silly. Ninjas aren’t silly. Pirates aren’t silly. Aliens aren’t silly. But Alien Ninjas are crazy and fun. Bear Cavalry is already silly. The same is true of the faction cyborg apes, by the way.

I know bear cavalry appears in other s$&% too. I know League of Legends has a bear cavalry unit or hero or character or whatever in it. And I know teams and groups and organizations in various nerdy pursuits like online games use bear cavalry in their names. It would not surprise me to learn that there is a Quidditch team out there – because there really are a bunch of nerds who play Quidditch by running around in a field throwing balls at each other with toy brooms between their legs – I would not be surprised to learn that some Russian Quidditch team is called the Bolkhov Bear Cavalry.

I hate this s$&%.

I do need to warn you that there are also a lot of joke sites out there claiming to tell the true story of real, historical, bear cavalry units. These are not true. Please do not link me to any. I know they exist. They aren’t true. Neither are sites about the drop bears of Australia. Nor are sites about yowies or snipes or any other bulls$&%.

Why Dwarven Bear Cavalry is Stupid

Here’s the problem I have with Hannibal’s topic: dwarven bear cavalry is stupid. It’s a stupid f$&%ing idea. It doesn’t belong in any game. And I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone. So, I’m going to have to take some liberties with the topic and ask whether it really belongs in ANY setting.

First, let’s look at bears. Bears have not, generally speaking, been domesticated by any major culture on Earth. Yes, there have been individual trained bears. Circus bears. Show bears. And even a few bear pets here and there. But those have been the rare exception and not the rule. And we know they haven’t been the rule because we know what domesticated animals look like. Think about dogs, cats, pigs, horses, everything we’ve ever domesticated. Through the long, long process of selective breeding, the animals become differentiated from their wild counterparts. That’s true even of animals that are barely domesticated, like cats. We breed for the qualities we want, breed out or weed out the qualities we don’t want, and in the end, we end up with very different animals from what we started. Basically, you get subspecies. Lots of them. Based on regional variations and based on the uses for the animal. Draft horse breeds, for example, like Clydesdales, are very different from racehorse breeds like Thoroughbreds. Yes, that’s a breed, not a term for purebred, though the two terms are often confused. All breeds of dogs are different from the wolves that they came from. Bears have not been domesticated on any sort of large scale. Otherwise, we’d have war bears and riding bears and draft bears. We’d have Shetland bears and Corgi bears and St. Bernard bears and Guernsey bears.

And we don’t.

“But wait,” I hear you screaming, “just because it hasn’t been done in real life doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be done in some alternate history or fantasy world.” And isn’t it just so cute how naïve you are. Let me explain something to you about domestication. You just can’t domesticate everything. It’s a fact of life. And we know. We’ve tried. Domestication of animals is actually one of the key drivers of technological advancement in the very earliest stages of civilization. Many historians have conjectured that one of the key drivers of the technological differences between the Americas and Europe and Asia in the early days of civilization is the fact that the Americas were severely lacking in domesticable animals compared to Europe and Asia.

Now, a lot has been written on the subject of what makes one species domesticable over another species. And the general consensus seems to come down to six basic criteria. The single most important factor is that the animal must be willing to breed in captivity. Many animals don’t. And if you can’t get the animal to breed once it’s in your care, you don’t have replacement animals and you can’t selectively breed the animal for qualities you want. Next, the animal must develop fairly quickly once it’s born. If the animal doesn’t mature quickly, you lose a lot of time caring for the animal before it’s useful. Or else, its parents have to care for it. The animal must also have a reasonably efficient diet. That is, it can’t take too much to feed the damned thing. Herbivores are preferable here. Carnivores require other animals to be raised to feed them. And raising their food means you have to expend more resources to keep your domesticated animal alive. The animal also needs to have a generally calm disposition. If the animal is temperamental, territorial, or vicious, it will be dangerous to keep the animal around other humans. And the animal also can’t be prone to panic. They can’t fly into a rage or flee from any perceived threat or else they are hard to control. That’s why we domesticate horses but not zebras. Even horses do get panicky, but they are nothing compared to zebras. Zebras freak the f$&% out and run. And finally, the animal must be a social animal. It must live in groups and accept a basic dominance hierarchy. Otherwise, they can’t work cooperatively with other creatures and they won’t accept being dominated by other creatures.

The thing is, bears pretty much fail at all of those things. Bears are omnivorous. They need both meat and plants to be healthy. And they need a lot of food. They eat anywhere from ten to twenty percent of their body weight a day. That’s the equivalent of an adult male human eating between 20 and 40 pounds of food a day. They don’t breed in captivity easily and their cubs take five years or more to mature. They are temperamental, panicky, and solitary creatures. You can train a particularly docile bear to do tricks for food in a controlled environment, but even those bears are dangerous to be around.

The thing is, you can domesticate an animal that is on the margin with some of those six qualities. As noted, horses tend to be panicky. And Hannibal’s – the Carthaginian, not the Patron who proposed this dumb idea – Hannibal’s elephants were really pushing the envelope, but they are docile herbivores who live in hierarchical herds and breed in captivity. So they aren’t as tough to domesticate as you might think. But bears pretty much fail every criteria. And THAT is why we don’t have a bunch of different bear breeds.

Now, let’s look at the idea of cavalry – at mounted troops. Cavalry units are important in armies because they are mobile. They are fast. They can run circles around infantry units. That’s pretty much the definition of cavalry. Now, bears can run pretty fast at short bursts. And that’s assuming you can get them to keep rank and move in a coordinated group. But they can’t move as fast as a horse. And they can’t sustain their best speed for more than a really short sprint. Bears just aren’t that mobile.

Are you thinking about war elephants again? Well, let me tell you something. They weren’t cavalry. They were used for shock value. And they broke infantry lines well. And they were hard to take down. But I will grant you that a bear is probably a pretty shocking thing to have charging your front line. So, I’ll accept that maybe bears COULD be cavalry in the loose, war elephant definition. But the question isn’t whether bears would be suitable for cavalry units. The question is whether dwarves have cavalry.

I don’t know if you know this, but dwarves live underground. Or, at the very least, they live at the tops of tall, treacherous mountains. That’s true of Germanic dwarves, true of Tolkien’s dwarves, and it’s true of D&D dwarves. And they most commonly fight goblinoids that live under the mountains and giants who live in the mountains. When it comes to fighting in caves, mountain paths, and narrow passes, flanking maneuvers and mobility just ain’t that useful. You can’t outflank someone in a tunnel. And tunnels can be pretty small and cramped. That’s probably why dwarves are short and stocky. That gives them a nice, low center of gravity and keeps them stable and it also keeps them from bonking their heads on ceilings. And the underground can get very dark. That’s why dwarves can see in the dark. Like goblinoids.

Honestly, there’s a reason why dwarves tend to be less focused on formation fighting and complex maneuvers and more focused on individual skirmish tactics. And that reason is the same reason that would pretty much preclude riding around on a huge bear. Which, frankly, wouldn’t have much shock value against a mountain giant or a horde of orcs compared to, say, some giant, low slung, armored cave lizard.

So, what, though. It’s fantasy, right? If we can imagine wizards casting fireball spells and orcs living in caves, why can’t we imagine that bears could be domesticated and trained to fight in military units? And then we can assume dwarves would ride them when they were fighting other races in the valleys and foothills and other outdoor areas, right? Well, then why use bears? I mean, if it’s goddamned fantasy and we can imagine anything we want, why would we imagine something demonstrably stupid instead of something better. Why wouldn’t mountain dwarves domesticate armored cave lizards or some sort of weird underdark predator cat or whatever? If you’re willing to use your imagination, why stop the wheel on something stupid instead of imagining something that wouldn’t fall apart the moment the first person started thinking about it?

The thing is, wizards and magic make sense in the world. The world has magic. And therefore, there are people who can use that magic. And that magic can do certain things. And orcs exist because the gods exist and the gods made several fantasy races and here’s a list of them. Also, normal animals exist and behave like normal animals. Horses are horses. Wolves are wolves. Snakes are snakes. But, for some reason, bears are just different. That doesn’t seem weirdly arbitrary to you? Oh yeah, all the other normal animals work exactly like you expect. But not bears. Bears are different. Weird, huh?

My imagination is better than that. And yours should be too. You can have things that are cool that also make sense in the world. Why stop at cool when you can do better.

And that’s why dwarven bear cavalry is stupid. But then, that’s not a surprise. After all, the whole attraction to bear cavalry is that it’s over-the-top absurd. Why would you expect it to make any lick of sense?

Dwarven Bear Cavalry in Every Setting? F$&% No!

But Hannibal’s topic wasn’t about dwarven bear cavalry being a good idea in general. It wasn’t even about dwarven bear cavalry fitting into a specific setting. It was about sticking dwarven bear cavalry into EVERY f$&%ing setting. Now, obviously, that’s a terrible idea. Dwarven bear cavalry doesn’t fit into any setting. Because it’s stupid. So, it definitely won’t fit into every setting. But let’s pretend it isn’t stupid. Let’s pretend that dwarven bear cavalry is a perfectly reasonable, rational idea. Let’s pretend it’s even a GOOD idea. Let’s pretend it’s AWESOME. Fortunately, I have a very good imagination and a lot of vodka in the apartment. So, I can get myself into a mental state wherein I can actually think dwarven bear cavalry is just about the best thing ever.

Does the hypothetically awesome idea of dwarven bear cavalry belong in every setting?

Now, I’m not going to be a nitpicky a$&hole here. I’m going to play fair. I’m going to assume that he means settings that already include both dwarves and bears and are at a technological level whereat soldiers mounted on trained animals are actually still a thing. I’m not going to say “really, so you think that dwarven bear cavalry should exist in modern spy thriller campaigns?” Or “wouldn’t the bears suffocate before they could get close to the Starship Enterprise?”

Assuming dwarven bear cavalry is a hypothetically awesome idea and everyone agrees that it is, does it belong in every setting in which dwarves and bears and cavalry can be reasonably expected to exist?

Of course not. That’s just stupid. No matter how awesome something is, it doesn’t belong in every setting into which any excuse could be made to shove it in. Who would think that?

Lots of people think exactly that. Lots of GMs think exactly that. Just remove dwarven bear cavalry and replace it with something else. You know how some GMs cram Cthulhu elements into every goddamned thing they run? Especially heroic fantasy? Even though it totally doesn’t work in heroic fantasy unless your understanding of Cthulhu begins and ends with “ancient tentacle monsters that make you crazy.” You know those people who have some favorite mechanic like Fate aspects or Dungeon World bonds or fronts or whatever and shove them into every game they run regardless of the structural foundations and core themes of the game? Those people might as well just shove dwarven bear cavalry into everything.

But you don’t do that, do you? Of course, you don’t. You don’t have some weird default list of things you shove into every setting you run games in do you? You know that you should think about things like theme, tone, and core mechanics before you go cramming anything and everything into your game, right? Really? When’s the last time you ran a D&D game without elves? Or without dwarves? Or without wizards? More importantly, when is the last time you went through the entire list of options for your game on an opt-in instead of an opt-out basis.

What do I mean? Well, look, most GMs who have hung around on this site long enough know enough to run through the list of game options – races, classes, spells, backgrounds, monsters, gods, everything – and pluck out the things that DON’T FIT. But that means the default assumption is that everything that’s in the rules – say, the core rules – belongs IN THE GAME unless you can make a case for taking it out. When is the last time you started from the assumption that NOTHING belongs in the game unless you can make a case for including it?

You never did that? Then you can’t say you don’t have a weird list of default things you just cram into every setting you run.

Is that different from dwarven bear cavalry? Well, maybe it is if you accept that dwarven bear cavalry is a stupid idea, but if you imagine dwarven bear cavalry is something awesome and everyone wants it to be a thing, is it really so different? Is that so different from always including elves and dwarves because they “belong” to the setting or because people “like them?” Sorry, it ain’t.

The thing is, I take a lot of flack from people because I don’t allow all of the options from the Player’s Handbook into every one of my campaigns. People are always asking me why I banned this or that or the other thing. As if banning things is something that needs a reason. Let me tell you something. In my latest campaign, there are no wood elves or mountain dwarves. None. They exist in the world. But they aren’t a part of the game. And sorcerers – wild magic sorcerers – are in the campaign. And man, did that confuse the f$&% out of people. I’m on record as hating wild magic sorcerers and banning them in almost all of my games. People want to know why I suddenly changed my mind. I didn’t. My mind is the same as it has always been. Wild magic sorcerers fit THIS game, THIS setting, so they got in. Wood elves and mountain dwarves didn’t fit. They couldn’t make a good case for their existence. They got kicked out.

And that’s because whenever I start a new campaign, I make everything OPT IN. I ask each race, class, and background if it has a place in my game this time around. And if it can’t give me a good answer, out it goes. And that’s why I can’t give a good answer every time some Internet moron, apoplectic with rage, demands to know my reason for BANNING their favorite thing from my game. There’s only one answer: “everything is banned unless it isn’t. F$&%wit.”

I have to add that last part so that people will continue to respect me.

I want to note, as an aside, that there is one group of people that has never complained about my irrational banning or opting in or whatever you want to call what I do to allow or disallow character options. That group is MY F$&%ING PLAYERS. Yeah, they don’t care. Never have. And I’ve been doing this a long time for a lot of people. The only time I’ve ever heard any s$&% about what I choose to disallow or allow is when I started talking to the Internet. So, if you have an opinion about what I allow in my games, you can kindly f$&% right off.

And, meanwhile, if you’re not making game elements opt into your game, you might as well just let the dwarven bear cavalry into every game. You’re already most of the way there.

Stupid f$&%ing bear cavalry.