After reading the #DungeonWorld ghouls “gain the memories of their meal,” it made me want to have an adventure around a necromancer that uses hoards of ghouls to ransack towns and then uses rituals to extract the “harvested” knowledge from his satiated ghoul hoard to add to his library.
After reading the #DungeonWorld ghouls “gain the memories of their meal,” it made me want to have an adventure…
After reading the #DungeonWorld ghouls “gain the memories of their meal,” it made me want to have an adventure…
Now I’m imagining a diebrary of ghoul heads on shelves chattering about various topics.
This sounds like a good BBEG for a novel. I’m interested in where you take this.
Imagine having to capture an ancient ghoul that had eaten some secret memories of a powerful wizard in order to learn a special ritual. ^.^ I like it.
It would be a wonderful side quest for a Planescape campaign, IMHO.
The concept of Big Data in a fantasy setting… interesting!
… I am absolutely using this. My heroes are holed up in a small farmhouse for the night, in an area where families are dropping like flies to an unknown undead threat. This is perfect.
Scott McCafferty Fantastic. I am actually thinking about posting adventure hooks for many of the monsters in the DW handbook as they occur to me. This one went over well, and I love the other suggestions in the comments, so perhaps I will keep them up.
Side Wynder I like this take on what I put out there. I hadn’t thought of coming at it from that angle, but I like it a lot.
Mine just use it to parrot their victims for tragic or darkly comic effect. I love the idea of using ghouls as vile Intel gathering
I keep having this idea bounce around in my head. How about combining James Mendez Hodes’s idea with Side Wynder’s?
I imagine a hall lined with shelving of a sort. Each shelf has a walkway in front of it and the shelves themselves contain cages just big enough to hold ghouls immobilized with their heads locked forward. Their eyes are covered and there’s a muzzle over their mouth that allows them to speak and eat, but protects the servants that must feed them on their cycle.
There are dozens of these shelving walls lining the hall. And each shelf has three levels. Upon closer inspection, the means be which the shelves are stocked can by surmised. Each wall of shelving has a massive pulley system overhead with a waterfall of chains hanging down into the units and underneath each unit there is a hole that disappears to some dark place deep below this accursed library of the undead; this necromantic diebrary. Over any given period of time, a group of servants will work to disengage a particular cage from its housing and use the chains and pulleys to drop the cage into the void below or use those same chains to drag these abominations from the inky depths and place them into the library for safe keeping.
As one might expect from a library, there does appear to be an organizational system to the whole grotesquery. Smaller, and presumably younger, ghouls are housed towards the front of the hall and seem to get the least attention from the servants other than a disgusting biweekly feeding that seems to barely sustain them. Sometimes whole shelves of the smaller ghouls will be lowered below. When this happens, the noise of the excited ghouls is deafening. They are anticipating something dark and dangerous.
Larger ghouls are housed towards the back of the diebrary. Their feedings appear to occur more often and they leave the diebrary only rarely. There is a constant hum of servants that attend to this older collection. Often one servant appears to place a oddly shaped gem at the end of a what appears to be a rod or wand into a the housing that immobilizes each ghoul’s head. The ghouls appear to resist at first, but then slump within their constraints. It is then that another servant, seated at a small portable desk that has been brought in and arranged on the walkway in front of the ghoul’s encasement, seems to ask the captive questions and painstakingly transcribes the answers. It is a strange sight as there appears to be a dialog that ensues complete with clarifications, asides, tangents, and even, perversely, jokes and quips that have lost any timbre of humor as the nuance appears lost on the ghoul that now only houses their memory, but none of their timing.
It is easy to surmise that somewhere among these columns of undead lies the first ghoul that was pressed into this horrifying service. That ghoul must know the secrets of many dead civilizations.