Sandy petersens cthulhu mythos (1) 27

resulted in a shameful, often violent flight from home.

or township under cover of deep night, the ghoul

Many nascent ghouls live the first several years of their

parents seek out a child in the village who looks similar

lives after becoming a ghoul in a self-inflicted solitude,

to their own, then swap the children in the hope that

and may in fact have no concept of the existence of

the changeling will be raised in comfort and luxury.

others of their kind. When such ghouls do encounter

The fate of the baby who was swapped depends on the

others of their kind, the newcomers are often timid

mercy of the ghouls in question: the lucky ones are

and nervous or even frightened. For this reason, ghoul

themselves adopted into the necrophagic society and

societies are almost always quick to welcome new

raised among ghouls as ghouls.

brothers or sisters.
While most ghouls eventually learn to appreciate

sorts of “switched-at-birth” situations develop into

these foster siblings as true kin, many never recover

nascent ghouls: the changeling itself as a result of

from the shock of losing their biological families. Such

her ghoulish bloodline, and the abductee as a result

ghouls, who live much longer than most mortal races,

of growing up knowing nothing more than using

often return to their homes decades later to watch or

tombstones as platters and graveyards under moonlight

stalk previous relations. Such returns only occasionally

as playgrounds. In this way, ghouls can be created as

result in violence. A more common outcome is a dark

surely as they can be born.

kind of patience: when a ghoul learns that a family
member has passed away, grave robbery is often quick
to follow. Feeding on the decayed flesh of a parent,
sibling, or child can bring a ghoul a grisly form of
closure, as they can experience shadows and fragments
of their previous life by digesting the memories of their
prior relations. Ghouls who seek this closure often keep
a memento of the event as a keepsake—usually a skull,
but less frequently some sort of heirloom, such as a
weapon, piece of jewelry, or other item.
Ghouls can have children of their own, but when
a new ghoul is birthed, the baby appears as a normal
child of a humanoid race linked to the ghoul’s own
bloodline. Ghoul parents often can’t resist the urge to
seek out a family to raise their child in the hope of
giving their baby a chance at something approaching
a normal life. Ghouls leave children as orphans or
foundlings on church stoops or in areas where they
suspect and hope that an unexpected baby will be
cared for. In other cases, desperate or callous ghouls
will take more sinister measures. Stealing into a village

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In an ironic twist of fate, both children in these

Life Cycle
For most living creatures, the long road to death begins
with birth. This is not necessarily the case for the
ghoul.

Ghouls who are born to ghoul parents and display
their bestial features (hooves, fangs, and claws) from the
first day mature quickly, growing to adulthood in about
10 years. Ghouls are protective of their children and
shelter them in the deepest corners of their graveyard
warrens. As a result, they are only rarely encountered
by non-ghouls, giving rise to the false suppositions that
there are no such things as ghoul children, and that
ghouls only come to be when they magically transform
victims into their own kind.
Certainly, curses and magical infections can cause
ghouls to manifest as well. Ghouls cannot “infect”
their victims with some form of disease the way undead
ghouls spread ghoul fever among the living. Most who
become cursed or otherwise transformed into ghouls
meet their fate not through interaction with ghouls,
but through powerful magic or curses in old tombs,