Ghoul [Lankhmar]

These ghouls are unlike the undead corpse-eaters of other lands or the bestial ghouls of the southern jungles. Their flesh is almost perfectly clear, so all that really shows is a pinkish skeleton. They wear no clothing and no armor beyond a bare harness for their weapons.

Since their vital spots are so hard to see, every attack against one suffers -2 to hit. In darkness they are fully invisible 80% of the time, raising the penalty to -4. This is simply how their bodies are, not magic, so true seeing and detect invisibility reveal nothing.

A ghoul with a shield improves to AC 9, and a high Dexterity can lower it further. Ghoul warriors can use any weapon but favor the two-handed axe. They ride clear-fleshed horses that are otherwise ordinary but impose the same -2 penalty (-4 in the dark) on anyone trying to hit them.

They barely fear death; one famed barbarian swordsman reckoned that, being nearly skeletons already, they had little distance left to go.

They dwell in a vast city on the coast of a monster-haunted sea and march out from time to time to wage war on human cities. Ghouls regard themselves as models of enlightenment and believe lesser peoples are best civilized by being eaten. They justify the practice as a mercy that turns muddy flesh into a superior crystal one, and they call humans "mud-men".

A rare ghoul tames its appetites enough to join human adventurers, though it may lord its refinement over its "barbaric" companions. Ghoul women have, rarely, taken human lovers. Ghouls have human statistics and can belong to normal character classes; the listed statistics describe a typical warrior.

Ghouls live on animal meat but prize humans and other intelligent beings as a delicacy. Eating another ghoul is considered bad manners at the very least.