Creature Feature: Feral Ghouls for ODWA

Feral Ghouls - Fallout 3

Feral Ghoul CR ½

XP 200

N Medium humanoid (ghoul)

Init +0; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +0

Defense

AC 14, touch 10, flat-footed 12  (+2 Dex, +2 natural)

hp 12 (2d8+3)

Fort +0, Ref +4, Will +0

DR 5/slashing; Immune mind-affecting effects, radiation; 

Offense

Speed 30 ft.

Melee 2 claws +4 (1d4+4)

Statistics

Str 17, Dex 14, Con 10, Int –, Wis 10, Cha 10

Base Atk +1; CMB +4; CMD 14

Feats Toughness

SQ radiation healing

Ecology

Environment any

Organization any

Treasure none

Special Abilities

Radiation Healing (Ex) When exposed to radiation, feral ghouls heal at an increased rate. When exposed to at least a Low level of radiation, their natural healing rate doubles. When exposed to at least a High level of radiation, they gain Fast Healing 1.

When a ghoul’s Wisdom score reaches 0 from exposure to high levels of radiation, they become feral, losing all ability to think or reason. Feral ghouls are extremely aggressive, leaping to attack any non-ghoul they see. However, feral ghouls will not attack their non-feral counterparts unless attacked first.

Feral ghouls are drawn to sources of radiation, be it from a melted-down nuclear reactor, a leaky barrel of radioactive waste, or some other source. When in the presence of such a source, they benefit from increased physical regeneration. Potent sources of radiation can often draw dozens or even hundreds of feral ghouls, causing dangerous infestations, and making scavenging such locations all but impossible.

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Look! Actual content! This first Creature Feature is originally brought to us by the Fallout video game series. In Fallout, as in ODWA, feral ghouls are mindless, zombie-like creatures whose brains have rotted away due to prolonged exposure to radiation, causing madness.

Ghouls, a player race in ODWA, are humans that were exposed to a cocktail of nuclear fallout and biological weapons, which caused their hair to fall out and their skin to slough off, leaving them looking like nothing so much as a rotting corpse. However, they become immune to all but the most potent radiation, and they cease to age, meaning that a significant number of ghouls in the wasteland were alive before the Last War.

However, when a ghoul is exposed to high enough levels of radiation, they start to lose their minds. Eventually, this results in the unfortunate ghoul is driven insane, becoming feral. Feral ghouls lash out at any non-ghoul they spot, and the fear of ghouls suddenly going feral in a populated area fuels prejudice and distrust in many wastelanders.

Statting feral ghouls for Pathfinder was pretty straightforward. I started with a standard Bestiary zombie, dropping their DR 5/slashing and the staggered condition, and switching their Type from undead to humanoid, as feral ghouls aren't technically dead, just insane. The type switch had a handful of effects on the stat block, but outside of losing their undead immunities, there was nothing ground-shaking. Then I bumped up their Dexterity a bit since, as anyone who's played Fallout 4 will tell you, feral ghouls are pretty damn difficult to hit when they're moving. Finally, I added their Radiation Healing ability and swapped their slam attack with a couple of claws.

The whole write-up took less than half an hour, which was a pleasant surprise, and overall I think I did the feral ghoul justice. If you think there's anything I missed, let me know in the comments.

Creature Features

This is the first of what I hope will be a long series featuring homebrewed critters from my games. Some of these will be entirely new creations I've put together for one of my settings, while others (like this one) will be stolen from inspired by someone else's stuff. The general f

Creature Features, like Setting Spots, will be a series of posts detailing one part or another of my settings - in this case, monsters or, if they're particularly weird, animals.

The general format will be the creature's bestiary entry - their stat block and setting information just like you'd see in a published monster manual/bestiary/folio - followed by my take on the creature and design notes to give you an idea of how I think they'll be used. The first one, ODWA's feral ghouls, is coming right up!

Setting Spots

Like Play Reports, Setting Spots will be another category of blog fodder posted at least semi-regularly about bits and pieces of my homebrew setting.

Doing Setting Spots has a couple of benefits:

#1: It's totally self-indulgent infodumping: effectively the GM equivalent of yammering about your 13th-level wizard.

#2: Setting Spots will be fairly modular, so they might be of use to people other than me.

Nowhere's Play Reports

One of the pieces of blog-fodder I have available is play reports. If you're not familiar with the concept, it's basically just when a gamemaster/referee/whatever-you-call-the-fucker-running-the-game gives a recap of their game sessions, with or without additional commentary.

I run a lot of games. Currently, between three and four live games a week, with an additional handful of play-by-post ones. That means a lot of games to write play reports about, which I'm hoping will keep me writing blog posts regularly enough to get into the habit.

Speaking of, my last two blog posts are dated from last December. While that's not great, they really weren't supposed to be published at all yet, since my plan was to get a bit of a backlog going before I started publishing, so that it at least looked like I was keeping a regular schedule.

Anyway, you can expect at least semi-regular play reports from me in the future, hopefully with enough crap you can steal for your own game.

On a Dead World Alone

The project commanding the most of my attention these days is a post-apocalyptic fantasy project called On a Dead World Alone (ODWA). The initial inspiration, as well as the name, comes from Nick Whelan's wonderful On a Red World Alone post-apocalyptic Mars setting/campaign, which you can find on his equally-fantastic blog, Papers & Pencils. I currently play ODWA using the Pathfinder RPG, but I've entertained using both Savage Worlds and Lamentations of the Flame Princess to run it at some point in the future.

ODWA was inspired by the wacky, sometimes gonzo post-apocalyptic fiction of the 1980s, particularly things like the Gamma World RPG, Thundarr the Barbarian, Gandahar, and the slightly-older movie Wizards.

Magic is alive and well in ODWA, and strange monsters, both magical and mutant, wander the wasteland. Powerful sorcerers and warrior priests battle robot armies and mutant abominations for control of the ruined cities of the ancients. Most people, player-characters included, are caught in the middle of the whole mess, and many are just trying to get by as best they can in a world that is at best a desolate, uncaring wasteland, and at worst is actively trying to kill them.

One of the things that separates ODWA from more "traditional" fantasy settings is its race list. While fantasy races are technically available, for the most part they are considered to be mutant humans rather than truly separate species. Most of these don't breed true, with each "race" simply representing a selection of mutations that an individual mutant has developed.

Like most of my settings, ODWA is what I like to call a "klepto-setting". I take bits and pieces of things from all over and meld them into a single, mostly-cohesive whole. For instance, ODWA features the ghouls of Fallout, heavily irradiated humans blessed with a sort of immortality and immunity to the ill effects of radiation, but cursed with horrible disfigurement and sloughing skin. It also features bits and pieces of a wide variety of other settings, post-apocalyptic and otherwise.

In the future, I plan to blog about particular aspects of the ODWA setting, from the cults and weirdness of the setting to how I deal with guns and other technology in Pathfinder.

Well Here We Go

First of all, welcome and thanks for taking the time to look at my blog. I've been playing tabletop games most of my life, a vast majority of which had me sitting in the GM's chair. I've played a lot, and I've read a lot, so I figured I might as well contribute some of my own stuff to the community.

As for me, I've played a little bit of everything, but for the most part I spend my time with d20 systems and Savage Worlds. I have absolutely zero interest in the various edition wars and other arguments about the One True Way of tabletop RPGs. I don't like story games, so if that's your thing you're probably going to be disappointed in my content, but I know there are plenty of people that absolutely love them out there, and that's totally cool with me.

These days, there's a lot going on in the tabletop gaming community with regards to harassment, assault, and all kinds of other unpleasantness. I probably won't spend a lot of time talking about that, for a couple reasons. For one, I'm not entrenched in the communities where a lot of that stuff is coming from, so for the most part I don't formulate a useful opinion on this stuff until it's mostly over. For another, this is a gaming blog, not a political blog, and I'm not going to prioritize non-gaming talk over gaming talk. That said, I'm not in the "CAN'T WE ALL JUST IGNORE THIS AND PLAY GAMES???" crowd, because that attitude is why a lot of victims in the community get swept under the rug.

Anyway, the real content will start with my next post, and I may end up coming back in here and expanding this post with further content should I realize I've missed something. Welcome to Nowhere Plans!