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 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 20 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,