Ghoul

A ghoul was an undead creature born from a cannibal. Ravenous and mindless with hunger, they roamed in packs through graveyards and battlefields, always searching for their next meal.

Description

Ghouls resembled grotesque parodies of their humanoid forms. Their bodies were gaunt and emaciated, their skin ashen gray. All their features – their skulls, their limbs, their fingers, even their tongues and teeth – were elongated. As deadly as their gnashing bites were, most feared their claws, capable of paralyzing anything other than an elf or an undead at the merest touch. Their dead flesh never decayed and they could persist in a tomb or a crypt for untold ages without feeding.
A humanoid that consumed the flesh of another humanoid was doomed to rise as a ghoul upon their death. While ghouls could be created intentionally – particularly in Thanatos –most were reluctantly turned, people forced into dire circumstances to survive. By contrast, a ghast – a more powerful form of ghoul known for its rotting meat smell – was the animated corpse of a proud cannibal, someone all too happy to eat sentient flesh.

Behavior

Like maggots or carrion beetles, ghouls thrived in places rank with death and decay. They haunted places where they could gorge on rotten flesh. When it couldn't feed on the dead, it pursued living creatures and attempted to make corpses of them. Though they gained no nourishment from the corpses they devoured, ghouls were drive by an unending hunger that compelled them to consume.
In Thanatos, ghouls were often as guards and shock troops, meant to terrify their living opponents. To become a ghoul, human subjects would agree to consume the human flesh necessary to transform them upon their death. Once consumed, they were rewarded with luxurious lives, full of food and drink and companionship, until such time as they perished. In death, however, they suffered endless agonies of perpetual hunger.

Campaigns

The Menagerie

• Vhakizla: When raiding the slaver den on Drahir Canal, the Commander's Tent of the Menagerie brought a pack of leashed ghouls to help them clear the slavheads. (Chapter 6)

Ghoul

Creature Type: Undead
Size: Medium
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Challenge Rating: 1 (ghoul), 2 (ghast)
Features: paralytic touch, stench, turn resistance (ghast)