I’m excited today, because I get to kick off the post series about a second sample character, who (by popular demand) will be a ghoul skinchanger: this is a combination that I’ve always thought was great from a lore perspective, and yet I’ve never actually built one or seen one played. So, let’s get started:
This time around I’m not re-building an established character like Ragnvald, so I’m going to be making up this character’s background on the fly as I pick each part of his heritage.
Ancestry: Ghoul
The ghoul ancestry is going to take some explaining. Dwarves are a familiar enough part of many fantasy settings, and Aetrimonde’s are traditional enough that I didn’t see much need to explain them, but ghouls are one of the odder parts of Aetrimonde. So for starters, here’s what the rulebook has to say about them:
Ghouls are thought to be humans altered by exposure to the shadowy power of the Underworld. They superficially resemble humans, but have several key differences which can be used to identify them. The most easily spotted is their teeth, which resemble the teeth of a shark, adapted for eating meat. Ghouls also tend to be lean and wiry by human standards, with pallid complexions and dark hair. Ghouls nominally mature at the same rate as humans but (because they often have difficulty gaining acceptance in mainstream society) are often forced to grow up quickly.
Although they can live on more or less the same diet as humans, ghouls are obligate carnivores: they must have at least some meat in their diet, or suffer from malnutrition. However, a healthy ghoul is extremely difficult to kill: ghouls can survive blows that would kill or mortally wound other creatures, and can recover from almost any injury as long as they have time and a supply of meat. Ghouls have the psychology and instincts of scavengers: they tend to be pragmatic to a flaw, especially where their food is concerned, and they are often blunt-spoken and dismissive of etiquette and social customs.
So to summarize: ghouls look human until you see their sharp teeth, but they don’t think like humans, they’re incredibly hard to kill, and they have to eat flesh and they don’t often care where it comes from. They’re intended to be among the creepier ancestries of Aetrimonde, and I’ll illustrate that in more detail with a Bestiary post at some point.
I’m going to lean into the creepiness of ghouls, but not to the extent of making this character an outright villain (after all, I want him to remain a usable character for the starter kit). My general concept so far is that this will be a well-intentioned but poorly-socialized ghoul, who happily does some unsettling things because they don’t bother him and he doesn’t see why they should bother anyone else, either.
With that in mind, here’s how the ghoul ancestry supports this lore:
Basics
Ghouls are much like humans: they have the same height, only a slightly lower weight (because of the tendency to wiry builds) and the same speed. They also have Constitution as a preferred ability, reflecting their inhuman toughness, although this is actually the smallest of the factors contributing to it.
Carnivorous Bite
Ghouls get a much better unarmed attack than other ancestries. A default unarmed attack has +0 precision and 1d4 damage die, so this is a vast improvement.
Ghoulish Regeneration
This is the first of the two ghoul features making them unnaturally hard to kill. Normally, when a character is reduced to 0 or fewer hit points, they are incapacitated and start dying: this means they make a survival roll (a Core roll, very rarely with any modifiers) and get closer to death if they roll 10 or less. Rolling 11 or higher is a success, but that just means they don’t get any worse.
Ghouls, however, can actually regain hit points on a survival roll success. This occurs at the start of their turn, and means that they can possibly get up and get back in the fighting the very turn after they were downed. If they don’t want to do that (which they might not, if they’re currently surrounded by enemies and prefer to play dead), they instead stabilize, meaning they no longer make survival rolls.
Low-Light Vision
We’ve seen this feature before, and the ghoul’s version works just like the dwarf version.
Ghoulish Tenacity
This is the second feature making ghouls hard to kill. This is a free action allowing a ghoul to survive an attack that would otherwise bring them down and stay on their feet. Like dwarves, ghouls have a way to recover the use of their ancestry power: they just need to avoid being hit and damaged again until the start of their turn.
Culture: Der Eisenwald
For culture, I’m going to lean into the creepiness of ghouls, and pick out a suitably creepy culture: Der Eisenwald. As the description to the right hints, Der Eisenwald is inspired by the Transylvania of old Hammer Horror films, filled with mad scientists, vampires, werewolves, and everyday citizens who are equal parts angry mob and loyal lab assistants. Other inspirations that went into Der Eisenwald include Uberwald, of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and the Europa of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius comic.
How will this affect the character? Ghouls are predators, and Der Eisenwald contains a lot of things that it is socially acceptable for a ghoul to prey on. This character will be a hunter of things that go bump in the night…even though he arguably is one himself.
Stratum: Outlaw
This character concept is starting to come together now: he’ll be an outcast, someone who hunts dangerous things and protects the innocent, despite horrifying them almost as much as the creatures he kills. For a stratum, I want something that makes this character an outcast…or even an outlaw.
At the risk of doubling down on Constitution as a preferred ability, I’m going to choose Outlaw as a stratum, and lean into this character being a do-gooder who has run into trouble because of his horrifying methods.
Bringing it All Together
So: we have a ghoul from a region haunted by monsters, who hunts horrifying things in part because of his predatory instincts (and appetite for flesh) and is an outlaw. Let’s tie this together into a name and a backstory:
Valdo the Bat-Eater is a hunter of monsters from Der Eisenwald. As an infant, he was the sole survivor of a nest of feral ghouls that had devoured half the inhabitants of a remote village; the monster hunter who exterminated the nest took pity on the child and did her best to raise him as a human.
It didn’t take.
Faced with a child whose prey drive made him unsettlingly good at hide-and-seek, the huntress gave in and trained Valdo in her family trade: killing the horrifying creatures in the dark forests of Der Eisenwald. Valdo proved a natural at it, although as he grew older and more capable he abandoned the traditional sword and crossbow of the Eisenwaldean hunter in favor of fang and claw, as the spirits of the dark forests’ apex predators found him a receptive channeler.
One might even say that Valdo grew too good at his trade, for he eventually moved on from hunting feral ghouls and escaped laboratory experiments. Seeing no difference between these mindless creatures and the vampires who likewise preyed on the people of Der Eisenwald, he earned his soubriquet by methodically hunting down and devouring an entire coven’s worth of vampire spawn. This, however, attracted the attentions of Der Eisenwald’s elder vampires, and Valdo was forced to flee. He now makes a living as an adventurer, though he still considers himself a hunter of monsters above all else.
Up Next
So that’s Valdo: a decisively darker character than Ragnvald, but still a hero at heart even if he doesn’t entirely understand why seeing him messily devour a horrifying monster makes people turn green and flee. In the next post, I’ll cover the skinchanger class, which (as hinted above) allows Valdo to transform into shapes with even more fangs than his natural state.
Aetrimonde 
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