Stepping back a second to the hungry ghost stuff: They usually rise when the spirit feels like it's been wrongly/dishonorably treated in death, right? But it also needs a body to inhabit during daytime, right? So if I have a player who has taken to looting and then burning his opponent's corpses in a kind of flippant manner, I kind of feel like that's grounds for some yidak-ness, but with the corpse burnt I'm not entirely sure. I mean, there's gotta be a reason mass cremations aren't the go-to response for battles and the like, right? A reason for the contagion's plague-dead to be entombed rather than incinerated?
Grave Embers
Yidak
Dead by Violence
A man dies on the battlefield. The killer thinks to be clever and laughs as he tosses the corpse on the fire after looting it. But he finds finds ashen footprints around his camp fire when he wakes. He makes it to the safety of a waystation, and trusts in solid doors and locks to keep him safe. There is a fire in the night, and his body is never found.
Grave embers only rise when a man slain by violence is shown no respect by a killer who plunders the body and then burns it. The hungry ghost lurks in the heart of the fire, hiding among the bone ash and inside the blackened bones. When it rises, it is a creature of ash and embers and soot, compacted into the vague shape of a man. When it moves, it sheds soot and ash, and this can be seen even by mortals. During the day it hides in cold campfires and forges and in soil that has tasted both fire and blood.
Compared to many hungry ghosts, grave embers have a simmering, cruel rage that leads them to stalk their prey for days or even weeks. When their bodies were consigned to the flames they lost their forms and so they cannot inhabit corpses or truly materialise - instead, they snatch up fire from unwatched hearths and wear it as their funereal garb, or animate puppet bodies from ash that blow away in the morning sun. Fire is all they know, and it is their revenge; such yidak fan the flames of neglected stoves and knock over candles onto bedsheets. When they kill, they feast on the blackened bones of their victims, breaking them open with rocks to consume the burned marrow.
The students of the dark arts call on grave embers as stalkers and trackers. Offered a bit of the clothing of an intended victim, they set it on fire and lick up the ashes - and from that day forth they will hunt that prey nightly, their bestial minds consumed by hatred. When forcefully bound within a corpse to animate it, the body burns from the inside out - but until it becomes useless to the spirit, the blackened revenant moves with the inexorability of a forest fire, flames spewing from its gaping, too-wide mouth.
