Crypt Ghouls

Crypt Ghouls were once men and women, before hunger and madness drove them to feed upon the dead and the feeding changed them into something else. Generations of eating corpse-flesh in the plague-pits and lonely graveyards of the Old World have twisted them below humanity, hunched, grey-skinned, and feral, their nails grown to filthy claws and their jaws to fangs, all human speech long since rotted into gibbering and shrieks. They are not raised by necromancy but drawn to it, gathering around the vampire courts like jackals around a lion, for where the dead walk there is always flesh, and the vampires suffer their presence as a huntsman suffers his hounds. In battle they attack in ravenous, capering packs, swarming over shield-walls and pulling men down to be torn apart where they fall, heedless of wounds in their frenzy to feed. They fight for no cause and follow no banner. They come because the smell of the living carries on the wind, and because to a ghoul, a battlefield is only a feast that has not yet begun to scream.