Simply Ghouls (plus d50 human bones)

Reading Arnold K's post about undead scraps, I realised that this blog contains far too little of the undead, which I hold so dear because I find the blurring of the line between life and death a quintessential aspect of dark fantasy. It has a kind of Wunderkammer charm. I like skeletons, wights, mummies...you know, the undead. Ghouls.

In classical D&D bestiaries, ghouls are characterised by their paralytic claws. But like Arnold says, paralysis is in itself a bad design, at least in tabletop games, because it makes players have to not play the game, while the whole point of them being there is that they want to play the game. So ghouls should have a different kind of ability. If you want some mechanical alternatives that are more of a better kind of paralysis, then go back to Arnold. If you want some more divergent, narrative stuff, stay. And try the filet. And the soup, and the toast. They're delicious.

Art by Felix Vallotton

Ghouls are usually not feral monsters digging up freshly interred cadavers to eat. They're quite human, if somewhat gaunt-looking. To become ghouls they have traversed an ascent, or descent, a wandering through the culinary garden to find the most rare, the most deep and aged taste. Nothing but aged blue cheese, pungent and bitter sprouts and fermented, yeasted fruits. 

From a diet of only these inaccessible, to many nauseating, delicacies, their internal physiology has changed, a metamorphosis catalysed by the eating of human flesh. Ghouls are gourmets, with taste excessively refined and excessively dulled for all but the most outrageous and strong flavours. 

There are many molds and bacteria that descend upon a cadaver, and among them are those that when digested during cannibalism, transform the squalid hamlet of the human gut microbiome into a dark temple of the forbidden tastes, which in turn slowly alters its host. New chambers bud in the stomach, sancta and senates for the yeasts and microbes which crave the profane tastes, the impossible delights. As long as a ghoul stays alive and keeps eating things like the pineal gland filet of the ancient Pharaoh Ut-heppi in a vinegar dressing, their gastrointestinal system keeps mutating into more and more labyrinthine and surreal forms.

A lot of their tissue is technically dead, but replaced and invaded by the hyphae of the molds growing inside them. Gradually, more and more of a ghoul dies and decays, only their gastric organs always remain alive. They become an Escher-esque physics-transcending intestinal tract contained in a papery, mummified shell.

Art by Mike Mignola

This ghoul is...

1	Heavily perfumed to mask the stench of their innards.
2	Unnaturally broad-chested to accommodate new glands and stomach chambers.
3	Lipless and many teeth are replaced with ivory or metal substitutes. They wear a facemask to cover this, insisting on an ugly scar.
4	Slathered in oils and fatty substance to mask their decaying skin. Will melt off when close to heat.
5	No longer blinking and functionally blind, but able perceive their surroundings by smell, wearing an odd nose piece to accommodate this.
6	Always accompanied by at least one pudgy servant and constantly taking snacks from the supply the servant carries.
7	In a wheelchair, carrying seat, or using crutches to compensate for their decayed legs.
8	Only able to sparingly speak in hoarse whispers, or not at all, due to a rotted throat.
9	Unnaturally wide-mouthed, or displays a rather peculiar kind of dental structure.
10	In a late state of decay and in a chair or bed with curtains somewhere, Helena Markos style.

Art by Arash Radkia

Because of their supernatural guts, Ghouls are gifted with special powers that pertain to eating the dead. Foremost is one that all ghouls have to some extent: to obtain some memories of the dead by consuming their remains. However, more evolved ghouls may gain the ability to...

1	Commune with the spirit of the dead.
2	Know the fate of the dead's descendants.
3	Restore their own body by eating the dead.
4	Speak the languages the dead spoke, briefly or permanently.
5	Tranform their face into that of the dead.
6	Know the wherabouts of the rest of the dead's remains.

Ghoul innards are, for this reason, much sought after by alchemists. Besides being an exceptional catalyst for the process of nigredo or putrification, from the colonies of eldritch yeasts and bacteria in their intestines it is possible to create something called the Elixir Zeboim, which allows for the distillation of memories from the bodies of the dead.

Art by Francisco Goya

Ghouls want exotic and forbidden foods, this will always be their end goal. Desires like social power or wealth or knowledge will only ever serve to allow them to obtain more delicacies. They have no interest in politics, only ever entertaining them when necessary, but tend to be fervent scholars, especially of history. Every delicacy has an aged, rich backdrop and the more rare and difficult to obtain, of course, the more novel the ingredient.

They don't eat things raw either, or at least, they don't eat things without preparation. A bone makes a broth, an organ makes a paté, muscle makes a filet or a brochette, can be cured or smoked, roasted, marinated, can be boiled in dumplings, can be diced in a (rotting, yeasting and moldy) salad, and so on. Ghouls don't always have butlers or errand boys/girls, but they always have a kitchen staff, and a personal chef (if they aren't the chef themselves).

Ghouls indulge not only in cannibalism, but also in petty feuds with other ghouls.

If you enough connections to the shadowy world of the occult and the perverse to take a job from a ghoul, it might be that...

1	The ghoul is constantly under threat of assassination by agents of their jealous peer ghouls (said peers no doubt feel the same way). You are sent to hunt down these assassins, and of course, bring back the game.
2	An old friend of the ghoul has died, the papers say. They wish to pay them the final honour, as the ghoul is sure they would have wished.
3	The ghoul’s acquaintance has promised an extravagant delicacy at their upcoming ghoul party. The ghoul wants you to steal it, so that their rival will lose face and your employer will have it all for themselves.
4	The ghoul requires fungal samples from different locations, to enrich their corpse-rotting ‘vineyard’: a cellar with many fungal cultures and coffins with soil to, ahem, age the wine.
5	The ghoul will be hosting a party for its peers, which has to be perfect since all ghouls are very picky, but it requires intel on the latest culinary fashions of the other ghouls.
6	A very old and much disliked ghoul has died, and the ghoul you work for is adamant to obtain their corpse before the other ghouls do. The race is on!

Then how do ghouls become those filthy, feral beasts we know to stalk the cemeteries? Well, ghouls live on the edge of serious moral decay, and most of their body decays in the physical sense. Which means if they do not make sure to stay refined, they'll fall prey to the ORKUS.

As a final part of this already long post, here are some stock ghouls you might use:

The Rose Lady is a painter draped in her characteristic salmon pink, and married to some enigmatic mister Plongé, a banker of whom there is so little evidence that some doubt he exists at all. They would be right, since her fabricated husband's income is how the Lady masks the true source of her luxury: trade in exotic black market goods. Behind her atelier rooms are hidden chambers full of occult paraphernalia, secret auction rooms, and a dining hall decorated with great seashells, whale vertebrae, and set with cutlery made from the bones of the Santa Cristina's crew, who killed and ate one another when stranded in the middle of the ocean. She is its sole survivor.

Dr. Cornelio Fumoso alledgedly has an awful skin disease that ages him prematurely, and it makes him look quite mummified. His legs can no longer carry him so he walks with crutches, and benefits from much help and compassion from his colleagues. The old and nearly cripple anthropology professor, however, is legendary among ghouls for having consumed a black temple in the desert sands brick by brick. Only a ghoul of great age and power could defy physics so much as to contain an entire temple complex in the warped space of their intestines. Curating a private collection of mummies himself, the professor has no short supply of 'cured meats' to enjoy.

Gao Yue (高月), styled Mengyin 孟阴, is a mysterious real estate owner, who never comes to collect his rents himself, but always sends a chatty servant to do the job who is an expert at avoiding the topic of mister Gao himself, making him a complete unknown to the people that live in his buildings save for his name. Gao is a hermit and doesn't leave his well hidden quarters, suffering great agoraphobia but possessing an excellent organisatory mind. One of the buildings he owns has been empty for years, and is claimed to be haunted, but in truth its cellars are used to store and ferment the 'ingredients' for mister Gao's meals. His given name (Yue) is only known by his cook, since mister Gao is paranoid about its incriminating double meaning*.

Photographer uncertain, possibly Anders Beer Wilsen

Boneus Table: d50 human bones

Skull		Arms and Hands		Pelvis		Ear
1	Parietal	15	Humerus	29	Hip bone	42	Malleus
2	Occipital	16	Scapula	30	Sacrum	43	Incus
3	Temporal	17	Clavicle	31	Coccyx	44	Stapes
4	Frontal	18	Ulna	Legs and Feet		Vertebrae
5	Sphenoid	19	Radius	32	Femur	45	Cervical
6	Ethmoid	20	Scaphoid	33	Patella	46	Thoraccic
7	Nasal	21	Lunate	34	Tibia	47	Lumbar
8	Lachrymal	22	Triquetral	35	Fibula	Chest
9	Maxilla	23	Pisiform	36	Calcaneus	48	Sternum
10	Zygomatic	24	Trapezium	37	Talus	49	Ribs
11	Palatine	25	Capitate	38	Navicular	50	Hyoid
12	Nasal concha	26	Hamate	39	Cuneiforms
13	Vomer	27	Metacarpals	40	Cuboid
14	Mandible	28	Phalanges	41	Metatarsals

*月 is the radical for moon, but the one for "flesh" or "meat" is very similar, so for a ghoul, this name is a pun of sorts.

Shot Through the HEART_ (REVANESCENCE_'s health mechanic)

REVANESCENCE_ is a word made of a simple idea. 

Evanescence: fleeting, it's there and then it's gone. But it's RE: that passing, briefly existing thing, it happens over and over and over again. Always repeating. Looping. 

The health system in RVNS_ (That's REVANESCENCE_'s abbreviation) is based on that principle. Your body has something called a HEART_. That's linked to a COFFIN_, which is a container holding a tank full of biomass, computer and a battery. The HEART_ keeps a picture-perfect scan of you. An image, like you take of a computer. A back-up save of your entire biochemical makeup plus your neural activity. Thoughts. Feelings. Memories. The whole noodle shop.

When you're killed, the HEART_ recycles what's left of you that it can access and uses BIO_ (a measure of biomass and electricity) from your COFFIN_ to reconstruct you from the last image it took, right before your death. Basically, it retroactively clones you. Your health in this system does not reflect how hardy your body is, or any of that vague shit. Every succesful hit kills you. Your health is how much BIO_ you've got left to be remade. You live, you die, you live again. That's REVANESCENCE_, baby. At least, as long as you've got BIO_, and your HEART_ is intact.

Art by Jan Buragay

You don't get BIO_ from nowhere. You gotta buy it, of course. But you can steal the money you do it with. Corporate'll take anything. Money's BIO_. BIO_ is your life. Put two and two together, why don'tcha.

When your BIO_ runs out you're nothing but a HEART_ stuck in a corpse. People'll just rip you out of your last body and use you as an extra core in a cracked junk computer somwehere.

Sure, there's people with no HEART_s. But they don't last long. Not in this economy. When you can only die once, you're gonna need a real good head on your shoulders for it to stay that way in the strata. The things are crooked too. BIO_ Doesn't feed you. Doesn't heal you. Probably could. They say the technology ain't been developed, but they can bring you back from the dead. Truth is why would they? When you're alive, you buy. You consume. You worship. So they just need you alive. BIO_ only gets transferred when you croak.

Could you hack your HEART_ to do that anyway? Maybe, probably. But hacking HEARTS_ is illegal - yeah, one of the few things that still is - and corporate isn't forgiving about it. Someone who hacks hearts as a job is called a Heartbreaker, or a Casanova.

Art by Jakub Rebelka

You don't control your COFFIN_. It's in a big bank somewhere, a CRYPT_. Could say it's like cloud data, except it's your life. There's crazy people who build their own tanks of bio, with their own mass transmitter, and switch the link from their corporate one to theirs like they're Indiana Jones. Most of the times it doesn't work. They turn into goop when the ego scan doesn't come through. Maybe the computer gets glitchy and reads the scanfile from a year ago, they lose a year's worth of their existence, maybe ten. Maybe the transmitter's a bust, maybe it just fills them up with undifferentiated BIO_ like a water balloon. Pop.

Art by Jan Buragay

But there's some who manage. Those are really far out. When the system works, having the BIO_ feed you, heal you, is a sinch. Those people become what big corporate refers to as "null assets": people who don't eat, don't drink, don't watch BUYBUYBUY, don't have the impulses that the market assumes you have. They hide deep in the strata, because the Zodiac doesn't want people to have that option. They're hidden gurus, impossible to find, for corpos, for anyone. But they're the best non-corporate techies out there. By a long shot.

Oh, and a last note: When you're out of BIO_, dead, and you're in your HEART_, the pearly gates sure look a lot like adverts for BIO_ loans. "STRAIGHT TO BANK ACCOUNT - NO BULLSHIT" "GET BACK YOUR LIFE - DOWNLOAD EXTRA BIO" Don't expect any good to come of it when you take one. People living on a loan are called ZOMBIES_. Undead. Desperate for money to pay back their necromancer.

Setting/game concept: REVANESCENCE_

I've been keeping this in my head for too long, so instead of putting it in a kickstarter or zine rollercoaster seat which never departs, I'm going to put the basis of it on this blog. If there turns out to be a crowd for it, who knows, maybe it does have a future as a bigger project.

This thing is called REVANESCENCE_. It's, if you will, esoteric cyberpunk, a brainchild of my love for Ghost in the Shell, RUINER, Transistor, Blade Runner, Neuromancer, all those classics and then some. The Earth is a Kowloonesque megacity. It doesn't even resemble a proper planet anymore. Everyone worships the Lucky Golden Zodiac, a fivefold of modern demons that embody the pillars of boundless hypercapitalism. The bones of the planet have all broken under the weight of the mass of greasy blubber that is humanity. You've got as many lives as you can buy. Let's go.

Movie poster for ALIEN (1979, Poland)

You'll die over and over again. Your HEART_, a gizmo in your body, builds you back again and again, ready to go another round. It builds you with BIO_, biomass plus energy that's kept in your COFFIN_, your outsourced bank account of extra lives. but BIO_ ain't cheap to buy, or cheap to steal. When you run outta BIO_, you're nothing but a cute little computer gadget trapped in a corpse. Lots of scrap-built hardware uses the HEARTS_ of poor fools as processing power, if they can crack them (people who do that for a living are called Heartbreakers). Makes them haunted, full of traces of people. Lost memory scraps someone couldn't burn out. Glitchy relicts of people everywhere. Maybe you think that's fucked up. Maybe you just wanna play pong over some dead gal's trauma.

The Zodiac's on every street corner, on every tacky new year poster in Chinese or Russian or English or whatever, on every happy takeout menu, wherever you like it. It's rat, tiger, pig, crab, monkey.

Art by waneella

First one's real name is RAT_KING_, demon of hierarchy, dominance, ambition, backstabbing, will to power. Then there's VIDEOMANCER_, demon of fake images, fake beauty, fake emotion, fake love, big industry porno, monetised intimacy, exploited and manufactured body ideals. THE_HOLLOW_, who's never got enough. Consumption. Resource exploitation. Neocolonialism. Mining, overfishing. Gorging. Hogging. IMMORTAL_P_, demon of plastics, synthetics, nuclear waste, all that shit that humans keep making that'll outlive em a millionfold. He's pollution and he's carcinogens. And then there's APEMIND_. The corporate data-mining of human behaviour, human tendencies, human psy- and sociology. Tying the species' evolutionary roots to its fingers and using them as puppet strings.

Ghost in the Shell, 1995

Maybe you're not made of meat, maybe you ain't got no HEART_. Then you're AI, android, computer. Programmed to be something. If you're a pop star, a celeb, then you're as fake as can be. Your codelines got nothing but smiles in them. And the brand of course. Gotta sell the brand. You're a happy shiny sociopath, your mind eating up whatever the audience preference algorithm shits out, telling all those love-starved fans to BUYBUYBUY. You're a slave to love, and you're a love slaver. You're the ultimate soulless idol of a maxed-out pop industry. There's no people in those quirky sparkly clips no more.

Art by Sachin Teng

Everything except the top layers (of society, of the ladder, of the planet), no actual human being from corporate actually deals with anymore. They just let the algorithms run on autopilot, let the programmed androids do their job. The stuff does a well enough job maintaining itself just enough for the cash flows not to stop coming. Mobs and gangs and Zodiac cults run it all- there's at least two that call themselves the police. Corporate doesn't mind. Even gangsters need to BUYBUYBUY. They don't care where the money comes from, so long as it comes. There's rebels too, but they ain't got no power. It's all just pirate radios and angry graffiti. And violence, 'cause all that anti-corpo hatred that can't reach up to the shiny white of the top layers has to go somewhere. Everything under the polished top is strata of rust, shit, and smiling sunny billboards.


The Zodiac's cults in the strata are a lot different than the ones topside. Down they're supplicants, up they're profiteers. The strata ones are cargo cults hoping for money and power and beauty and all that shit, so long as they worship, and sacrifice, and idolate. The topside ones are like masonry lodges and illuminati entwined with corporate hierarchies and bureaus, serving the Zodiac because they actually DO gain from it. Because it DOES give them power. All the shit the strata ones do and give up and serve and BUYBUYBUY, that doesn't give THEM power, it gives the topside ones power.

Why are Wizards Wizards?

Because wizards know.

Wizards know.

That's what defines them. An incredible information asymmetry.

Trying to understand the occult is like skimming the top of a miles-deep cold pool with your hand. As good as all of it you'll never come into contact with unless you jump into the pool. But once you get in you invariably sink all the way down. And then you're a wizard.

The occult mystery relates to a deep part of you, one that no acquaintance or friend can ever reach. It's so complex and stimulating to explore but you can't do it with anyone by your side. Conversation, friendship, it's all nice but it feels like talking about the weather and about what brand of cereal you like to eat. It's skin-deep. It fails to even approach to address this core element that's come to define you, this cosmic adventure you are immersed in but have to undertake solo.

You're quite terribly alone in the matter, and relating to anyone else becomes awfully difficult. You can only let yourself be absorbed by the intricacies of the mystery to keep the terrible loneliness at bay.

That's the Sadness

You can think of understanding magic as being in on the world's greatest and most complicated conspiracy theory. And knowing that it's true. But talking to anyone about it majorly weirds them out. And they keep asking why you are wearing all that funny stuff, and what you need that industrial shipment of plastic Garfield alarm clocks for. You know of course. But there's simply no way of just telling them. For that, they have to immediately be filled in on the whole thing to get it. And that would take years, not to mention they'd also have to become a wizard. You see the world differently. Everything has a different meaning, defined reasons and utilities and purposes are all turned on their head. It's everywhere, in everything. It's a new dimension to the three you were used to seeing. Most of everything you do, your habits, your dress sense, seems harebrained to other people. No matter how much they observe you there just doesn't seem to be a discernable method to your antics. Not to mention you'll do the most bizarre and affronting and horrifying things, and you know that's what you have to do of course, but nobody else does.

That's the Madness

It gives you a kind of power. With the right means you can do things that are, to normal people, simply incomprehensible. But everything you say and do is incomprehensible to normal people.

That's the Magic

When a wizard meets another wizard, their behaviour towards each other is hard to understand. Sometimes they'll become soul mates. Sometimes strictly business partners. Sometimes mortal enemies. The criteria for this are undoubtedly to be found somewhere in the vast byzantine facets of the arcane mystery. Somewhere. Probably.

"Magic. Madness. Sadness. MMS runs through all magic users." -Betty Grof

Topographical Anomaly: Empty_Map

Spaces that should be empty get a bit stuffy and quite uncomfortable when they're suddenly full of people. They lose their charm. Usually to the eighth plague of Egypt, rain of tourists, who are a lot harder to clean up than frogs since they are 50% plastic and clothing fibers.

People have an energy. The presence of people is a distinctly loud energy. When it disappears there is a void which is filled through osmosis by a quiet energy. The energy of emptiness. It's like the low buzz of an electric wire. When it is present in a normally crowded place we are put on edge by that energy. It has invaded a space that doesn't belong to it. The energy of emptiness is a lot more alien to us than the energy of people.

Art by Arthur Chaumay

"Empty_Map" is the classification label of a bizarre phenomenon that could occur in post-apocalyptic settings, modern settings, but really in any kind of setting. It's a large cityscape that is in tip-top condition, as if under permanent maintenance and impervious to erosion. In Empty_Map, it is always sunny but not warm, there is never any wind, and there is always the sound of cicadas. It is also completely and utterly devoid of any animals or humans. You can hear those cicadas, but you'll never see them.

Empty_Map does not look as if it has been recently used or left behind in a hurry. There's no signs of a sudden immaterialisation of the populace, like car crashes or clothing piles or anything like that. It's perfectly orderly, dollhouse-organised. Clothing is all folded and in drawers, sorted by colour. Cars are all perfectly parked. If you find a basketball court, the ball is sitting still exactly in the middle of the court.

Empty_Map has a kind of homeostasis mechanism. If you change something, like move the ball, leave a door open, something like that, it will seemingly have reset when you come back to it. When you alter something from its original configuration, it'll return to it once you are either far enough away, asleep, or otherwise not observing it for a prolonged period of time. If you take something from Empty_Map outside of it, the same rules apply, but the unobserved time it needs to disappear is a lot shorter. Any dead bodies in Empty_Map disappear as soon as you take your eyes off them, but bloodstains will require standard ignoring time to vanish.

Art by Arthur Chaumay

When you create a serious imbalance in Empty_Map, either by causing mass disorder or staying there for too long, it'll try to remove you actively.

Chambermaids are called this because they are kind of Empty_Map's maintenance crew. They don't speak, but they have to look at each other to communicate it seems. They'll show up randomly outside of your immediate field of observation. They have guns. They will shoot you with their guns. Then you'll vanish as stated above. If you kill them, they die and bleed like normal humans. But they'll vanish too. They wear white raincoats and hazard masks. Touching them, alive or dead, will give you a severe electric shock.

Art by Yun Ling

Empty_Map can come into existence spontaneously in a place where it shouldn't be, like in a desert. Or maybe, an area could have been converted into an Empty_Map version of itself: you could be walking through a derelict post-apocalyptic ruin, and suddenly stand at the border of a perfect and pristine Empty_Map.

What is Empty_Map? A reality glitch? An experiment of some kind, either being conducted on it, in it, or by it? A sort of weapon? The fallout zone of something? An alien lifeform? 

Hard to tell. There's just nothing to go on, really. It's just there. Any instance of Empty_Map seems to have been there forever according to locals, and has never been and is still not there according to any official documents or testimonies.

Miracularium Two: Demons are Divine Revolutionaries

I'm not quite mad enough, yet, to make something called Miracularium Two, without having first made something called Miracularium One. You'll need that to make sense of this. Find it here.

First of all a small addendum to the previous post. Someone asked me what exactly the metaphysical aspect of a God was, given that I meantioned it as a metaphysical being while mainly talking about ethics. Well, the end product of the process to create a god is not so much the resulting physical device, but rather, the metaphysical entity that results from it. That's the God's self, the sequence of code grafted onto universal ontology which defines the God as a being. When it is born, a God is nigh impossible to destroy (though some try very hard and sometimes succeed, see later) because its metaphysical self is independent. The destruction of its physical aspects matters little because its metaphysical aspect is still there: it must exist, so in some form or another it will simply regenerate.

Another example is a God's ultimate weapon for when it decides you're simply incorrigible: its ability to inflict EGODEATH, which means that it overwrites your metaphysical self, with its metaphysical self. You cease to be an individual being and lose everything that makes you different from the God. There is no more distinction between you, and it. Your free will is destroyed. You are enslaved to the morality, like it is, and you also cease to be human in the categorical sense. You've been turned into a Godhead.

A God's name is absolute. It is synonymous with its metaphysical self. When you speak its name you cannot lie about it, cannot describe or imagine it in any way that is inaccurate from it. When you hear its name, you immediately know exactly what it is and therefore (because it is perfectly moral) exactly what it expects of you. You also immediately know the appearances of all its Godheads, because they are it.

Art by René Magritte, 1937

Okay, that's out of the way. Now then, it's time for demons.

If you remember my post about the Orkus, you'll know that incredibly powerful beings can arise as avatars or embodiments of thinking creatures' sentiments. In the Orkus' case, that's the terror risen from the fear of decay, creating an apocalyptic formless boogey man of rot and filth.

The case of demons is somewhat similar, only instead of one entity they are manifold due to the more divided nature of what lies at the heart of their progenitive element. Demons are produced by the sentiment of rebellion and revolution. They are the want and the need for the establishment's destruction, the beheading of the king, the death of God, the burning of Olympus. They are the Rage Against the Machine.

Demons are not like Gods. They have a free will, and a personality. They are effectively a race of  highly divergent individuals self-malleable in both mind and body, which is after all appropriate since they embody the angry desire for freedom, specifically from the Gods. However, this also means that they possess the core trait inherent to all anarchists and revolutionary philosophers: that while there's one basic idea to which they all subscribe, they don't agree on anything else. The why, the how, the what happens when we have actually done it.

Art by Jean-Francois Millet, 1874

Demons are, essentially, made of synphysical soul fire. In the higher spheres, this flame can exist as a form in and of itself. In the physical world it must fill a receptacle, so it forms a carapace of flesh and chitin and many other materials, according to what accords to its sense of self. They are natural shapeshifters, being able to change their carapace as they wish, but most of them find the need for self-expression to be stronger than what benefits a covert or mimic form can offer them. Some however are notorious masqueraders. The flame's identity cannot be concealed, only the physical carapace's.

There are demonic "factions," which amount to a handful of demons (it is never more than this) happening to agree enough on their worldview that they decide to act in an organised way. However, these factions constantly form, fall apart and reform at a higher speed than rock and roll bands. It should come as no surprise that demons do a great deal of infighting. 

There are definitely demons who act in tricky and puppeteering ways with regards to their peers, but this can't really reach further than a few individuals. Demons are so wildly divergent in thought that there isn't really much of a common denominator to manipulate them en masse with. Manipulating a demon requires careful individual attention to the way they think. This is why being a daemoniac or demon summoner is such a difficult branch of wizardry: aside from great technical understanding of the thaumaturgy, you must be a cunning socialite as well.

Art by Annis Naeem

Demons can be killed, by destroying their flame. Damage to it, since it is also their soul, may alter their personality altogether and warp their identity, much like brain damage would do to a human. Destroying their physical vessel means that they lose their ability to exist physically, until they get a new one. The new carapace may be forged in magma, may be virgin-birthed from some devout priestess, may be grown from a lonely date tree in a desert, may explode out of a random noble's head, as long as there's some way to form the new body.

A new demon soul is not created, like a God, and is also not born like a human by a reasonably understandable biological process. There is a something, which is the thing that originally arose from the collective sentiment of human rebellion, a mysterious and unknowable entity with a status like a demonic Kaaba. Once every demonic year (their year count is based on this cycle), a new demon emerges from it, with great intelligence, but a blank slate in terms of ideas and opinions.

The way this situation is handled is that around the something, a gigantic colosseum has been built (perhaps the only recorded instance of large-scale demonic collaboration) to which each demonic school of thought sends one or multiple emmissaries when a new demon is about to be born (given how divergent demon thinking is this means that usually as good as the entire species is present). Once it emerges, something much like a bidding on an auction starts, where each speaker tries to outline its ideas in the hope the new demon will choose to join them. This takes a big long while and usually there are some fights between the speakers, and sometimes even with the new demon.

The result is practically always that the new demon doesn't fully agree with anybody, and goes its own way which leaves everybody stumped and sort of angry. This is right and good according to the freedom-obsessed demons, but well, it never hurts to try.