Ghoul

Foul cannibals, **Ghouls** are undead humanoids which prowl graveyards and other burial grounds, alone or in packs, in search of food. Although sapient, Ghouls are generally near-feral, if not outright feral, and driven solely by their foul and unending hunger for flesh.

## Description

Ghouls retain the basic frame and an extremely rough and crude facsimile of the appearance they had in life, although from all but the farthest distances it would be impossible to mistake a Ghoul for a living person. All Ghouls, despite their frequent feeding, appear emaciated and hungry, and their rotting skin takes on the hue of bruised and pallid flesh. Their faces twist, their teeth becoming sharpened fangs, and their visage taking on a desperate, hungry, and predatory appearance. Their hands also change, their nails elongating into deadly claws. Living creatures bitten or scratched by a Ghoul risk temporary paralysis.

One of the multiverse's ultimate expressions of hunger, Ghouls are endlessly hungry. No matter how much or how little they feed, their hunger is unending and all-consuming. It is only during the act of feeding that a Ghoul experiences any relief from its desperate hunger, and only flesh will do. Unlike a Vampire, however, a Ghoul suffers no ill-effects from a failure to feed; their need is wholly and entirely psychological. While Ghouls can and do eat living or dead flesh, they seem to have no real interest in the meat of other undead creatures.

While many Ghouls are solitary creatures who stalk graveyards and battlefields by themselves in search of food, Ghouls are also known to congregate together and to form packs and colonies. Some of these Ghoul colonies can grow to enormous size, with entire towns or even cities of Ghouls rumored to exist in the depths beneath the largest graveyards and necropoli. Given their feral nature, such large-scale colonies are typically organized not by the Ghouls themselves, but by some other powerful undead creature such as a Vampire.

The creation of a Ghoul can happen in a number of ways. Ghouls themselves can create new Ghouls, typically by infecting a victim with the foul disease known as ghoul fever. A second method involves a still-living creature consuming the flesh of a Ghoul, which quite obviously is something that almost never happens knowingly.

Like many undead creatures, Ghouls can also arise via 'natural' means. Humanoid creatures who engage in cannibalism are known to often rise in undeath as Ghouls, particularly if they committed such acts knowingly and willingly. More rarely, humanoids that starve to death in places tainted by evil or necromancy have also been known to rise again as Ghouls. Like nearly all undead creatures, Ghouls can also be created magically from corpses by necromancers, and due to their shared association with the concept of hunger, some Vampires of Beast-derived bloodlines have learned to create Ghouls from their victims instead of Vampire Spawn.

Finally, as expressions of hunger, the souls of mortals damned to the Abyss have been known, by design of powerful Demons or by whatever strange forces guide the workings of that place, to sometimes incarnate as fiendish Ghouls, bereft of the memories of their former lives, and driven only by all-consuming and terrible hunger.

### **Variant Ghouls**

While most creatures afflicted with ghoul fever or otherwise doomed to rise as Ghouls do so, some creatures instead, for varying reasons, rise not as typical Ghouls but as variant Ghouls possessed of strange powers.

* **Ghasts** are perhaps the most well known of variant Ghouls. Arising from creatures who were particularly powerful in life, Ghasts are not only more powerful than typical Ghouls, but also far more aggressive and active in their search for food.
* **Lacedons** are aquatic Ghouls who arise from either aquatic humanoids who would otherwise have become Ghouls, or from starving humanoids who died at sea.