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.