Avatar: The Ghoul (Mordiggan)

The Ghoul is the inhabitant of the graveyard, the eater of the dead, companion of maggots and the keeper of the secrets of the grave. Avatars of Mordiggan seek dead flesh, dead knowledge, and secrets best left buried. They drag skeletons from their closets and crack their bones for the marrow of their lives. They dress in funeral weeds and fashions decades old which smell of rot and mildew. At low levels, they resemble the dead upon which they feed. As they advance, their teeth grow sharp and doglike to rip and tear the corpses of men, and their nails grow into hard claws with which to desecrate graves and disturb the rest of those within. Their Bite and Dig skills must be at least equal to their Avatar rating to remain in Mordiggan's favour.

At least one human corpse must be consumed for every advance in the Avatar: The Ghoul rating. The Avatar rating is also the percentage chance that anyone encountering the Ghoul will perceive them truly as an undead monster rather than mistake them for a fellow human.

Ghouls gain access to a unique language at a skill equal to their Avatar rating, which sounds like gibbering and meeping sounds to the uninitiated. No non-Ghoul can learn this language by mundane means; eating the dead causes specific changes in the linguistic centres of the brain, by a process akin to Kuru. It might be possible to learn it magickally.

As long as the Ghoul continues their unnatural diet, their aging is slowed by a fraction equivalent to their Avatar: The Ghoul skill. An Avatar with a rating of 90% would age at 1/10th the normal speed.

Mordiggan is not a jealous God, for all people and things die, are buried and come to him as food. Even the Archetypes are thrown down to become meat for the maggots when the fleeting beliefs of humans shift. A ghoul may preserve (but not advance in) a single other Avatar skill of 50% or below from the times when they still walked among the living, provided that it does not exceed their Avatar: the Ghoul skill.

Taboos: expressing preference for the present or the future over the past (eg: preferring the living to the dead; Eating fresh food rather than rotten; preferring current rather than former fashions, manners of speech, etc). Killing other than in self-defence - Ghouls should wait patiently for the gift of Mordiggan. Consuming the dead is a sacred trust, not a wanton indulgence to be hastened with violence.

Possible Avatars in History: H.P. Lovecraft
Masks: The works of Clark Ashton Smith; "Principles and Parameters" by Meredith L. Patterson.

1-50%: Walking Corpse: The Avatar increasingly resembles a corpse, and gains some of the unnatural resistance of the walking dead. On a successful Avatar: The Ghoul roll, the damage done by firearms (and other weapons relying on sudden system shock rather than massive trauma) is reduced by a percentage equal to the Avatar score. Vulnerability to heat and cold is also reduced.

51-70%: Instruct the Worm that Gnaws: By consuming a moderately intact brain of a dead body and making a successful Avatar: The Ghoul skill, the Ghoul may access the memories of the dead. On a critical success, the memories are retained permanently. Otherwise, they fade within 24 hours. To find a specific piece of information, make another Avatar: The Ghoul roll. A critical failure results in the Ghoul being possessed by the person whose memories they are attempting to consume.

A special exception is made for the learning of dead languages, for this is an activity Mordiggan looks upon with great favour. A dead language is always retained permanently by the ghoul, and can be learned from even the tiniest scrap of brain tissue. For a language to be dead, it must once have been a first language of a group of people (so artificial languages don't count) and there must be no living person (ghouls and other undead excepted) who speaks it with conversational fluency or better (so Latin and Greek, still spoken by many scholars, are out). Being the first ghoul to learn a dead language causes rapid advancement in the path of the Avatar, and so many ghouls will seek out long dead corpses from forgotten civilisations, or the last members of almost extinct ethnic groups, and wait patiently for them to die, like vultures or, well, ghouls. Teaching a dead language to a living person breaks taboo. Performing a specific translation might not, depending upon the purposes of the translation (Publication is right out - Secrets are to be learned, but then kept).

Digging into the Grave and into the Brain is also digging into the Unconscious. On a successful Avatar roll, the Ghoul can find the places deep within their warrens that lead to the caverns of the Dreamlands, and enter therein.

71-90%: Dead Man Walking. On a successful Avatar: The Ghoul roll, the Ghoul can take on the seemingly living form of any dead person whose body they have consumed (more than 50% of the body must have been eaten). A fresh roll must be made every 24 hours to maintain the illusion. To successfully fool someone who knew the living person requires a second roll. This does not affect security cameras, etc, but does affect the person viewing the footage. A security guard watching over a CCTV would be fooled, but an automated/computerised facial recognition system would not be.

91-99%: Skeleton in the Closet. Everyone has secrets we wish to keep dead and buried, but Mordiggan is the lord of all dead and buried things. By simply touching someone (living or dead) and making an Avatar: The Ghoul roll, the Ghoul knows one secret that the person wishes to keep. The most deeply buried and personal secret will be learned FIRST.

At 91-99%, the Avatar becomes a Greater Ghoul, growing huge, apelike and maggot-fat on corpses. It is impossible to mistake them for a human without use of the Dead Man Walking power or similar Magick.

The current Godwalker of Mordiggan is believed to live beneath the great cemeteries of Paris and to have gained the post during the Black Death. It is rumoured that he/it can command the dead to rise and form an unstoppable zombie army, bringing joy to the hearts of Romano fans and fear to everyone else.