Ghouls - They Hunger!
Man should not eat man, nor woman eat woman. This is one law of Creation acknowledged by almost every culture there is. Even in the cases where ritual cannibalism is practiced, it is usually in a limited and specific way, where only part of the body is devoured and it is carried out in a ceremonial manner on bodies that have been purified for consumption. There are sound reasons for this. A dead human is diseased and spiritually corrupt. The po that rests within it taints the flesh with the stuff of the Dead. To eat such impurity is to take such impurity into one's self, where it nourishes the flesh and is absorbed by the soul. To break from these laws is usually a mark of desperation - or depravity.
And so, invariably, it happens. When famine strikes a land, when a travelling party runs out of supplies, when someone is cast out of their village and forced to live only on scraps, people eat their fallen. Sometimes, they are safe. Their flirtation with forbidden practices comes with no long term price. Sunlight and the simple natural practices of life serve to cleanse them of the taint they absorb.
But sometimes their souls welcome the corruption of the corpse-eater. Their teeth lengthen. Their nails grow sharp. A hunger gnaws in their gut for the forbidden taste of human flesh. Sometimes they force it down and repress it for the rest of their natural life, and their soul forgets the forbidden knowledge as long as they indulge no more. But many do not, and the more they feast the more their souls learn and their flesh changes. Those who spend time in a shadowland are particularly prone to this, because the world around them is already half-dead. That such soil is prone to failed harvests only makes the risk of ghouldom more frequent.
And if those poor creatures who eat the flesh of their own kind out of desperation are pathetic, the ones who do it out of choice are loathsome. Decadent aristocrats treat their servants as literal cattle and consume them in depraved feasts, only to find their monstrous deeds made evident in their bodies. Wicked warlocks devour human flesh to channel the energies of death, or to steal life from those they kill, or even to assume the form of a yidak for a night. Such magics always have their price, though the practitioner may consider it worth paying.
In some shadowlands or in remote castles, there have been generations of ghouls. The twistings of the form sometimes breed true, and a child will be born pallid, with a full set of sharp teeth. Such a babe must be weaned on blood. When a traveller comes across an isolated village where ghouls dwell, often their tales will call out a Wyld Hunt against such abominations - if they make it out of the hamlet alive.
Ghoul Mechanics
(
The following uses @Revlid's mutations system.)
The mutations a ghoul has from their flesh-eating will, unless deliberately magically induced, sum out to 0 points or fewer. There is always a price.
All ghouls have the Creature of Darkness (-4) mutation. They are damned by the spiritual corruption of death they have devoured. In addition, all ghouls require some amount of meat in their diet. This is treated as Picky(0) as it is not a stringent enough requirement to qualify for Picky (-1), but leads them to fall ill if they try to maintain a vegetarian diet showing similar symptoms to sailors who spend extended periods at sea.
The following mutation packages represent various ghouls that can exist within your Creation. As can be seen, the extent of the changes that afflict them can be radically different in scale.
The Old Survivor
When he was a young man, he went on an ill-fated caravan trip. Trapped in the wastes, he did some things that he isn't proud of. He tries to forget, but sometimes he wakes in the night after a nightmare, mouth watering.
This is typical of the kind of ghoul who may not even realise he is one. He ascribes his low appetite to just being naturally lucky there, and his slight sensitivity to sunlight as just something that happens.
Positive: Slender (1)
Negative: Creature of Darkness (-4), Picky (0)
Wolfskin
It wasn't her fault... was it? She can't remember. Not really. She just runs, naked on all fours, her muzzle and teeth ready to find prey in the cold wastes of the North. She still hunts the ground around the old ruined caravan, even though the snow has long since filled in the dug-up graves. The rest of the time, she lives in a nearby village and knows nothing of what she does - even if normal food is like mud in her mouth.
Many ghouls take on animalistic features, coming to resemble a twisted version of the local dominant predators as they degenerate into a bestial form. In the snowy expanses of the North, this often means they take on the shape of a wolf or a sabre-tooth, while in the West they become shark-like mermaids and in the South big cats or even vultures. Such degeneration often produces split personalities and alternate forms. The following is a wolf-like ghoul.
Positive: Slender (4), Cosmetic (slightly canine features) (0)
Negative: Creature of Darkness (-4), Picky (Carnivore) (-1), Split Personality (Human mind/wolf-like ghoul mind) (-4)
Alternate Form (Involuntary Transformation) (linked to Split Personality) (Triggered by Hunger) 0
Alternate Form Positive: Skulker (Snow-like fur) (3), Swift (2), Natural Weapon (Oversized Fangs) (4), Deadly (said fangs) (2), Native (Northern Ice Wastes) (2)
Alternate Form Negative: Mute (-2), No Thumbs (-6)
Inbred Lord
"Of course I eat them. You eat cattle, don't you?"
In some shadowlands, the lords long ago fell to the practice of eating human flesh. They treat their human servants like animals, and consider themselves a different form of being. Some of them are growing to regret this, as at least one Abyssal has taken it upon themselves to... reeducate such men and women.
Positive: Deadly (Claws) (2), Tough (Leathery Skin) (1), Glider (Bat-like membranes of skin) (4)
Negative: Creature of Darkness (-4), Picky (Carnivore) (-1), Sensitivity (Sunlight) (-2),
The Eelman of Nexus
"Slurp slurp slurp, wriggly wriggly,
the eelman comes, higgly piggly.
He doesn't want soup, he doesn't want bread,
all he wants is your little head!"
An urban legend among the street rats of Nexus, the Eelman is said to be a pale man with a mouth like a leech. He doesn't have bones so he can crawl through the smallest gap and he can wriggle along the walls. He - so the children say - loves the taste of little boys and girls and he kills them and leaves them in the canals until they've gone all gooey so he can drink them up. He'll come for you in the night, or in dark places like the old sewers, and the only way to keep yourself safe from him is to throw salt in his face.
They're basically right.
Positive: Wall Crawler (6), Creeper (4), Deadly (Leech Mouth) (2), Natural Weapon (Leech Mouth) (1), Cosmetic (Pale and fishy) (0)
Negative: Creature of Darkness (-4), Allergy (Salt) (-4), Sensitivity (Sunlight) (-2), Picky (Can only drink stagnant water, can only eat the rotten flesh of children) (-3)
Ghoul Lords
Most ghouls are only mortal. Some, however, have feasted so heavily and become so laden with corruption and necrotic filth that they have already joined the ranks of the Dead. When a ghoul feasts too deeply, his hunger grows to a level that his two souls look at each other and lick their lips. His tainted souls attack each other while he is afflicted with terrible visions of the underworld, and in the end one of them is victorious. Either his hun devours his po, or his po devours his hun - and the latter is more common, for the seat of power is stronger than the seat of knowledge.
When the po wins, the ghoul lord becomes a bestial monster. The full power of the po expands within the body, twisting it to its own image. Such monsters often become morbidly obese and grows in size, as the power of the human po within them expands into immensity. Lesser ghouls are driven to obey it out of fear, because they know that only by sating its hunger can they avoid its potency.
When the hun wins, it's worse. The hun absorbs the hunger and desires of the po, but retains a human intellect to become a true monster. Such ghoul kings often dive into the depths of the Underworld seeking the greatest meal of them all - and hopefully there they meet their end.
Either way, mechanically a ghoul lord is a Dead creature anchored to its own body. It possesses appropriate spirit charms for its own themes (which will invariably be linked to hunger and consumption of human flesh). Ghoul kings cannot be truly banished without the destruction of their body, because they are still anchored to their flesh. Use of a banishing spell on a ghoul king instead forces it to flee the presence of the sorcerer, if successful.
Some things people call "ghoul kings" are not strictly speaking ghouls - they're merely powerful Dead creatures inhabiting human corpses with a fondness for human flesh who rule over packs of ghouls. However, in practice the difference is largely academic, especially to an exorcist who finds one of these monsters profaning a graveyard and angering the ancestor spirits.
